Intro: [00:00:00] From Silicon Valley, the heart of startup land, it's Getting2Alpha, the show about creating innovative, compelling experiences that people love. And now here's your host, game designer, entrepreneur, and startup coach, Amy Jo Kim.
Amy: Gina Bianchini is a visionary entrepreneur with deep experience in social software and online communities.
Gina co-founded the pioneering social platform, Ning. And is taking what she learned from that experience into her current project, Mighty Networks, a place for deep interest communities to flourish. Gina's passion and brilliance shines through everything she does. I'm always excited to hear her take on the evolution and purpose of online communities.
Gina: I don't believe in social media. I believe in social networks, and I believe in network effects businesses that bring people together around deep [00:01:00] interests, the interests that are most important to them, whether that's a professional, you know, a professional identity, whether that is a medical condition that somebody might be navigating, whether that is a true passion for a particular career hobby.
Whatever these things are, it's incredibly important to me that we realize the promise of the internet to instantly connect you to the people that you want to meet and the people that you are most likely to benefit from meeting as it relates to your deepest interests, your deepest and most important values and things that you want to really define who you are as a person.
Amy: Listen in and learn from Gina's decades of experience, bringing innovative ideas to life.
Welcome [00:02:00] Gina to the Getting2Alpha podcast.
Gina: Thank you for having me.
Amy: I'm so thrilled to get to hang out with you. It's always a good day when I get to hang out with you.
Gina: The feeling is mutual. Well, thank you.
Amy: You are the founder and CEO of Mighty Networks. We're going to be talking a lot more about Mighty Networks, but give us just a little glimpse into your daily life.
What's a day like? The tasks there, what kind of decisions are you making?
Gina: My day tends to start pretty early. I wake up with my mind racing with new ideas, or I actually really pay attention to what's the first thing that I wake up thinking about, because that typically is the most important thing that I should be dealing with throughout the day.
You know, one of the things, having done this for a while, is that I'm very keyed into those first few minutes and that first half hour in the morning, because I have found that that [00:03:00] is typically my internal system of saying, you know, danger, Will Robinson. Or this is actually a really exciting area to like move forward and think about.
So about a couple of years ago, one of the things I started to do was to make sure I really protected about 30 minutes to an hour every morning to sit down with literally a blank piece of paper and a cup of coffee. And before I get on my computer or my iPhone or my email or, you know, any of the things that can distract me and put me in a reactive mode, I sit down and I spend those 30 minutes to an hour just writing down everything that I woke up thinking about.
And then from there, I use that as a means of organizing, you know, my day, the priorities of my day, you know, starting with ensuring that by the time I get into the office, which is typically between seven and eight, that I have done everything I need to do to ensure that my [00:04:00] team has the right priorities for the day and are empowered and enabled.
Like I'm not a blocker on anything that they need. And then I do. Some meetings, and I really spend a day on projects that, that I have. And then I'm kind of spent by 7, 8 at night. So I don't tend to jam until like 2 a. m. because what I have found is that when I do that, I'm worthless three or four days later.
Amy: Less is more.
Gina: I believe so. And I believe in working smart, not hard. I mean, I work hard. It's about how do I work hard and smarter as a means of focusing in on the most important things. You know, it's also my job to make tough decisions. And so, you know, if you're making tough decisions from a place of a grounded, focused, Taking it from the top every day as a, as a habit and a morning ritual, it actually gets a lot [00:05:00] easier to make tough decisions and not be sort of moving from one thing to an, to the next.
Amy: Proactive rather than reactive.
Gina: That is certainly my goal. I don't know that I always achieve it, but it is my goal.
Amy: You've got a storied career in tech, and for those who may not know you, Give us a whirlwind tour of your background. How did you first get started and involved in the world of startups?
Gina: So I started my career, I came out of Stanford and I was a political science major who thought that I was going to go into, uh, business.
Government, and then realized that I did not want to stand outside the white house, holding a sign. And so decided that I was going to get into this whole thing called business. And I had no idea what it was, but it seemed to me. And one of the nice things in terms of opportunities that I had was to go into investment banking right out of college.
And I was hired [00:06:00] into the high technology group for Goldman Sachs, which at the time was. a small outpost of three people in San Francisco that worked on very small IPOs, you know, only 25 million. And so that just happened to be at the exact time that the internet happened and went public. And so it became sort of this, this whirlwind.
And I found myself sort of at the, you know, with a seat on a rocket ship, which was incredibly fortunate for me. And, you know, one of those things that you, you recognize and appreciate, especially the older I get of just the power of being in the right place at the right time through, you know, no genius on my part.
Then I went and I ran corporate development for a company that I worked on the IPO for called CKS group, which ultimately became, you know, The creative team at Apple computer when Steve jobs returned to [00:07:00] Apple in the late nineties, early two thousands. At that point, I had moved on. I went and got my MBA at Stanford.
My background is hopefully sounds more boring than I actually am. I had the opportunity in my second year of business school. This is during the height of the. com boom to start a company and specifically start a company with my former boss from this CKS group. And he was now a partner at Sequoia capital.
So I incubated a company out of Sequoia Capital and that started my entrepreneurial journey. It was a crazy time to start a company because I basically spent three and a half years running something during the depths of despair in the dot com bust. And then what was really cool, and this is what I, you know, love about Silicon Valley and, and why I remain committed to, you know, You know, the promise and the potential is that during those years of depths of despair was really when a group of friends of mine, you know, started a [00:08:00] number of the large social networks that you use every day from LinkedIn to Facebook, to Twitter, to others.
So that's how I got into this world. My personal kind of angle on all of this has been how do we take advantage of social networks. I don't believe in social media. I believe in social networks, and I believe in network affects businesses that bring people together around deep interests, the interests that are most important to them, whether that's a professional, you know, a professional identity, whether that is a medical condition that somebody might be navigating, whether that is a true passion for a particular Hobby, whatever these things are, it's incredibly important to me that we realize the promise of the internet to instantly connect you to the people that you want to meet and the [00:09:00] people that you are most likely to benefit from meeting as it relates to your deepest interests, your deepest and most important values and things that you want to really define who you are as a person.
Amy: Why is that so important to you? And why do you think it's so important for us?
Gina: Because I think that our deep interests are the things that make us human. Um, I think that when, you know, you look back on your life, it's the people that you meet and the relationships that you build around your meaning, around your purpose, around a mission, around your values, around the things that bring you joy and the things that bring you comfort.
And that to me is the human condition. And I think that we have never lived in. At a moment where the, the intersection of creativity and scale has ever [00:10:00] been or ever had more potential than it has today. And I believe that the next decade of social networking, social media will be the decade of deep interests as opposed to continuing to keep up with, you know, the people that you know, or the people that you know by reputation.
And, you know, In a feed that's whizzing by and I just believe in the power of focus and the power of going deep and the power of being a member of a community of a thousand true believers as opposed to one of 10 million views that are, you know, happening in milliseconds.
Amy: Was that the same fundamental idea and urge that Ning was founded on?
Gina: Not originally. We stumbled into it.
Amy: Oh, that's interesting.
Gina: Yeah. So, you know, we, we started Ning with the goal of creating a programmable platform for social applications. So the idea was that if, if you [00:11:00] use the, the analogy of the early online services of AOL CompuServe and Prodigy, what the web actually represented was You know, taking three narrow and fixed view systems, walled gardens of what people could do.
And you, you know, the web enabled millions of flowers, uh, in the form of websites to bloom. And our thesis at Ning was that if we enabled a developer platform, that Allowed people and developers specifically to essentially create and host their own social applications. And by the way, this was 2004, 2005, then that would actually be something that would be incredibly powerful.
What became very clear was that it was less of a opportunity for developers and much more of an opportunity to support and unlock the creative potential [00:12:00] of normal people. That was a key insight that we discovered and That is what caused it to grow exponentially with just incredibly interesting networks that came out of it.
When I left Ning in 2010, we had 3 million Ning networks created, 300,000 active on a monthly basis. 46 million registered users, 90 million uniques by IP address and growing very rapidly and we are adding a million new members every 14 days.
Amy: What were the big lessons you took from Ning that you're now bringing into your work?
Gina: I think that the number one thing is to create a business model that your customers love, like absolutely love and makes your, your customers wildly successful. And so, you know, the interesting thing about Ning is we went and we saw, [00:13:00] you know, some fantastic early success and it was growing and yay for us.
And we went and raised a pretty significant amount of money with the promise of introducing an advertising business model, because in 2007, that's like what you did if you had a social platform that people were using. And especially in our case, which, you know, Ning was. A platform for creating, you know, your own social network for a specific interest.
And when you do that, there should be some incredible advertising opportunities. So we were going to build advertising like modules and things like that. Well, it turned out that we had Incredibly passionate customers that were much more effectively served by a SAS model. So we actually enable them to make money as opposed to, Hey guys, we're, if you're on a free Ning network, we're going to run ads against [00:14:00] it.
You know, there was a disconnect at that point. So we had all these people paying us money, but we were charging them 36 a month, and that was like the most you could pay us. And the lesson that I've taken into mighty networks and the way we approach our customers and lessons learned is, you know, it's also, by the way, 10 years later, SAS models are a lot more obvious, especially when you kind of.
are serving, you know, small and medium sized digital entrepreneurs who are building incredibly valuable community powered brands and community powered network effects businesses. For example, if you have a male chimp email list, you should have a mighty network. If you have For example, today, a Squarespace website, but your customers are motivated to talk and build relationships with each other because they're excited to learn from each other, you should have a mighty network.
If you have [00:15:00] emergent fans and followers who are trying to organize themselves across 50 different Facebook groups by location and interest and the lawyers here and the lawyers there, and, you know, the creative designers in Chicago, All kind of under, you know, this brand that you've created and you're trying to sort of manage, you should have a mighty network because a mighty network allows you to have your own social network for a deep interest that instantly connects those passionate fans and followers to each other and allows you to have events or topics that people then can organize conversations within or groups.
So you can actually have all your groups in one place. It's fast, it's easy, it's free to get started. And so, you know, the days of building everything out over months in an MVP, I believe are actually dead because You can't learn fast enough when you're trying to do that yourself on a, on a couple hundred thousand dollars of seed money.[00:16:00]
So for us, we really see, and again, I took this lesson from Ning and certainly learned it, you know, tenfold in the context of mighty networks, our customers are bootstrapping entrepreneurs that might be a. You know, one man or one woman media company that sees the power and potential to harness their most passionate fans and followers into a network and into a network effects business so that they can actually invest more heavily and build a much more valuable asset that then reflects beautifully on their brand.
Amy: Let's talk about what a network effects business is.
Gina: So a network effects business gets more valuable. With every new member who joins a network effects business has a level of sustainability to it and engagement to it that does not require you as the host or the creator or the [00:17:00] entrepreneur to every single day multiple times a day. Try to post into a feed that is whizzing by and get somebody's attention that otherwise would be spent on like posts from relatives or posts from friends or, you know, outrage over what is happening in the news.
So when you actually create a network effects business, it is self sustaining and self organizing and most importantly, it will also grow with you as the entrepreneur having to do all of the work. So you get more brand value by building relationships between your most passionate fans and followers as opposed to constantly trying to send them, you know, one way messages.
Amy: There's a theme here, which is making your customers successful. You also talked about community powered brands. So what's a community powered brand? And can you give us some examples of some of the [00:18:00] ones that are really taking off and what that magic sauce is to make them take off?
Gina: Yes. So I'll give you one very simple example.
So there is a two year old startup, not for profit called beyond type one. It is. A brand that is for people with type one diabetes and those impacted by type one diabetes that has sought to actually create a lifestyle brand for people with type one diabetes because when you have it And when the people that you love have type one diabetes, it is a lifestyle.
It may not be one that you've chosen, but it is a lifestyle. They're coming up on their two year anniversary. They spent the first year building out beyond type one in terms of, you know, social presence on Facebook, social presence on Instagram, social presence on their own website and a [00:19:00] YouTube channel and in their second year.
What they did is they launched a beyond type one community that is a mighty network. So they have our pro plan, which has the option to have your own native mobile apps that, you know, you can go into the app store and choose beyond type one. And you download a beyond type one app as well as the networks on the web as well.
One of the things we find is that people join on the web, but they stay because of the native app. In a year, they have created a completely self organizing support community that has added gasoline to the beyond type one brand. And my favorite thing about the beyond type one brand, other than the fact that they are, you know, just an incredible success story on mighty networks, is that 114 people.
They have 18,000 members of their, um, [00:20:00] beyond type one mighty network. They have 36,000, uh, Instagram followers and they're in the hundreds of thousands of Facebook fans. 114 people have gotten tattoos of the brand of beyond type one. They have found their tribe. They can post into the beyond type one mighty network in the middle of the night, and there is someone there who's there to say, We're here. I care. I hear you.
So when people are actually feeling alone or isolated, there's this incredible support encouragement. And most importantly, they're learning from each other because they can see who's online right now. It's all basically mobile apps and mobile notifications. So it's all intimately right there with them, but they're able to meet members who are near them.
They're able to meet members who are like them. So the caretakers can meet other caretakers. And the teenagers can talk to other teenagers and the [00:21:00] young adults can talk to other young adults and the mothers, the brand new moms who have type one diabetes, but they're having children, you know, they can actually talk to other moms who have type one diabetes.
And that is the level of passion that beyond type one has, or any of our other, you know, community powered brands. It just doesn't happen if you don't have the community piece.
Amy: So how do they sustain it? Do they, how do they monetize those communities or do they, how does that work with these examples?
Gina: Yeah. So it's in the case of beyond type one, it's one community. It's,
Amy: Is it free?
Gina: Yeah, it's free. Okay. They're not for profit.
Amy: Okay.
Gina: So, you know, you can actually, we have other examples of Mighty Networks that are running member subscriptions. We have other examples of Mighty Networks that have native sponsorships or they have a Shopify store that they are.
You know, sharing members are sharing in the mighty [00:22:00] network, how they're using the art projects and the art, you know, the art boxes that they're getting every month. So the business model associated with having a mighty network, it's built in. And we will continue to build more and more revenue generating features because our customers, the hosts or creators of these networks, you know, we want to make them wildly successful.
And, you know, their alternative today is to have truly a Frankenstein monster of different services that are requiring their members to sign into about 17 different services, or what feels like 17 different services on any given day.
Amy: Right. You know, you're talking about a really high level of service that this organization is providing to people.
Gina: Oh, no, no, no, no, no. Here's what gets lost between social media and social media management and having your own community powered brand with your own deep interest network. [00:23:00] Social media is designed to make you do a ton of work because you have to continue to post. Into a feed that is moving faster and faster and faster to try to keep people's attention.
A community powered brand that is, whose underlying infrastructure is a deep interest network, is self organizing. As you bring more people in, and bringing more people in, maybe 10, it might be 20, it might be 30 people, you know, when you're starting off, but because you actually Are introducing people to each other and driving conversations with each other.
It actually takes on a self organizing dynamic very quickly. So you do less work and you have more value.
Amy: It's really interesting to hear you describe now. Who you're focused on because, you know, as we talked about earlier, knowing your customers so important and knowing what delights them. [00:24:00] And as you said, having a business model that delights them.
So how did you iterate toward this focus that's now taking off on the kind of entrepreneurs that you're focused on? Because one of the hardest things is who do you listen to? And who do you ignore? And you clearly have other voices, right? With other needs. But now you're focused on these entrepreneurs.
They've bubbled to the surface as your core, hot core users, right? How did they surfaces that?
Gina: They've always really been our focus. The only things that we have found is when we find other types of customers, whether that's a brand or whether that's a, you know, a large marketer in those cases, when they have the same qualities and characteristics of the people that we ultimately want to serve, we will work with them.
But fundamentally, you know, the thing that's really [00:25:00] cool about community powered brands Is that the needs of a, you know, one woman media company and a large company, they're actually in the management of those people, not in the core dynamics of a self organizing deep interest network. And so while our customer and making our customer successful is very clear to us.
From our perspective, we are in service of creating the dynamic between enabling a creator of a deep interest network of a community powered brand to just be wildly successful. And the good news for us is that appeals and applies to more people than smaller and medium sized business owners. But those are the ones we have the most fun servicing and working with.
Amy: As you look at the landscape, you're in a unique position because you're seeing all this data, right, coming in about what's taking off and, you know, where the hotspots are. So where are the areas where you're just seeing interesting [00:26:00] hotspots? You mentioned diabetes support. Which is a, such a great example because it's so high need.
The value of connecting those people to each other is super great. Where else are you seeing it? Where are the pioneering people within the Mighty Networks community?
Gina: Yeah, it's really obvious professional networks. So, bringing craft hairdressers together, or marketing professionals together, or small business owners together, or digital entrepreneurs together, or beauty professionals together, stylists together, and health and wellness.
Those are the two areas that we have had, you know, by far the most success, and will continue to have the most success.
Amy: That's really interesting. So what's the need that beauty professionals have to connect with each other? What are they doing in there?
Gina: Support, encouragement, and learning from each other.
They're getting smarter and better and making better decisions. In their careers or with their conditions. So, [00:27:00] you know, that's the power of a deep interest network. You're not alone You're getting smarter, you know, you're having more fun Navigating your choices and your values and the impact that you want to have in the world That is the power of the deep interest network that is distinct and unique from All of the ways that we've defined social media Uh, in other places.
Outro: Thanks for listening to Getting2Alpha with Amy Jo Kim, the shows that help you innovate faster and smarter.
Be sure to check out our website, getting2alpha.com. That's getting2alpha.com for more great resources and podcast episodes.