Where is community building today and where is it headed? With Zach Hawtof, CEO at Tightknit

In this episode, we’re hearing from Curious in Colorado. Our letter today deals with knowing whether jumping onto the community train is worthwhile by understanding the future of community building.

To better help Curious in Colorado, I invited Zach Hawtof, Co-Founder, Community Manager, and CEO at Tightknit, as my guest expert. He is someone who has extensive experience building community, and not only thinks a lot about where community building is headed, but is also building the future of community platforms on Slack himself with his company.

In this episode:

(04:03) The evolution of community building over the last 10 years

(07:14) Curious in Colorado’s letter: “Where is this trend headed?”

(08:21) Why offline connection always wins—and what that means for digital spaces

(12:12) Building community where your people already are

(13:47) The cheat code for engagement (hint: it’s not better automation)

(19:18) Why Slack isn’t a community platform… and why it absolutely is

(21:12) How to become “psychic” about your members’ needs

(24:51) Following the breadcrumb trail and building what you know

(32:33) Asking better questions—and really listening to the answers

(36:08) Why some members just aren’t ready (and that’s okay)

(39:34) The overlooked challenges of the community industry

(41:13) What AI means for the future of online connection

Get the unfiltered side of the conversation, where Zach shares his biggest mistake, a Slack channel name you’ll want to steal, and the one word he’d give to his younger self. Get it here!

Resources Mentioned:

Join the Tightknit Community.

My episode with Noelle Flowers, Where is the best place to build my community?

2024 CMX Community Industry Trends Report (Page 17).

Sign up for Heartbeat. My go-to all-in-one community platform.

Join Ember. For coaches, consultants & creators building paid communities

Zach Hawtof

🖥️ Website

📱 Linkedin

Bri Leever

🖥️ Website

📹 Youtube

📱Linkedin

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Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:01

Every now and then I'll get a question on one of my discovery calls and the potential client will kind of look at me sheepishly and ask, So is this community like a good idea? Do you think it's a good idea? And while I understand the spirit and intention behind this question, the only honest answer that I or anyone else can give you is I don't know. And to be honest, be on the lookout for anybody who does give you a different answer than that because they're probably trying to sell you something. I'll give my prospective clients this really brutally honest answer because I just think it's not the right question to ask. And at the end of the day, the market is the only place that you will be able to go to find out if your idea is a good one. What I can help with, however, is a different interesting question. And that is what is the time and space and place in which I am coming into the online world to create this community. And it has truly never been a better time to build an online community than where we are right now. This episode explores why that is and what we can expect in the future. Enjoy! Welcome to Deer Brie, an advice column for community conundrums, fiascos, and drama. This season of Deer Brie is sponsored by our friends over at Heartbeat. Heartbeat is an all-in-one community platform, and it's the one I chose to host my own community. Your members can finally have events, conversation, content, and even courses in one distraction-free, intimate, customized home. I chose Heartbeat for three reasons. First, Heartbeat is unparalleled in their events management features. Events are a core part of my community architecture, and their features make my life so much easier. Second is segmentation. It's super easy to break my community into smaller, more niche subgroups and create a more customized experience for that group in Heartbeat. And finally, their courses. Being able to host my educational materials and learning journey in a community-first platform makes my community that much more valuable and retention that much stickier. I'm an affiliate with Heartbeat, which means when you sign up through my link in the show notes, I get paid a small amount and no extra charge to you. Thank you for supporting my work in that way. And finally, I usually record this podcast from Hawaii Island. So a special thank you to the Kanakamale people on whose land I currently reside. And we're back. Our guest today is the co-founder, community manager, and CEO for Titanit, the first community platform built for Slack. He's also the New York City chapter lead for Slack, the largest chapter in the world. Before that, he spent nearly a decade building community tools at Salesforce Community Cloud, where he left as director of product. Zach, I'm so thrilled to have you on the episode. Welcome.

SPEAKER_00 3:11

Thank you for having me, Brie. I'm very excited to be here.

SPEAKER_01 3:14

I love stalking Zach on LinkedIn. Probably one of my favorite things is like seeing you in the comments. One, you're just a very thoughtful commenter. I always really appreciate it when you show up in the comments on my posts, but I love just noticing you showing up across the internet. Anytime that I see, like, oh, Zach commented on something, I'm like, ooh, spicy. Let's go check it out.

SPEAKER_00 3:37

Good. Nice. All right. Well, that's what I like to hear. I mean, I'm so shocked by the people. There's so many people that like just scroll LinkedIn and I'm like, you didn't have any thoughts about it? Three minutes reading this whole person's post, and you got nothing to add. I'm like, come on, there's something there.

SPEAKER_01 3:52

That's where the gold is. When you get past the initial like layer of LinkedIn, you start to realize the gold mine of comments on threads. You've definitely tapped into that. So I always love seeing that. Our letter today deals with understanding the future of community building, something you and I both nerd out about, something that we think a lot about. And in honor of looking ahead, I actually want to start by looking behind. So when you think about the evolution of community building online, what have you noticed about how it's changed in the last, let's say, 10 years?

SPEAKER_00 4:31

Yeah, I think even you could even say in six months, it's already going through massive changes. But yeah, like 10 years, I would say let's rewind all the way when you and I are probably far too young to even remember it. And I think if you think about what the internet was in its earliest, it was just the ability to connect other people with content, right? Like suddenly for the first time, you could share a piece of content globally to another person who could read it and share something back to you, right? And so I think that obviously evolved pretty quickly into what we had as the discussion forums of yesteryear. And then eventually you come into social networks. And actually, there's a good question someone asked me the other day, and I've gotten down to this point of there's a very small difference between the community and a social network. And the biggest difference is mostly just on sheer numbers. If you think about what Facebook was when it first started, like day 10, it is a community of what you and I call communities. It's a community within a college. And so it's, I think just we're jumping really quickly through that, but like that evolution happened pretty quickly. And now today we've gone to this new evolution where I think we're just inundated with content. We've reached this point where I was just having this conversation with someone. They're creating a Slack community, and they're like, what do I do? Because the Slack is so busy, and how do I make sure that people can hear it? And I'm like, I want you to ask that person, do they think their email is busy? Do you think the rest of their lives are busy? Because I think generally what I hear is when people say that, it's not one product is too busy for them. It's like everything we experience now is just so busy. And I think that's the new age that we live in community-wise, is sifting out the noise is gonna be bigger than creating more content. And so I think that's this new future state that I'm looking at.

SPEAKER_01 6:28

That's such a good segue into what we're gonna talk about next. And I have a couple like little taglines and mantras that I like have developed over the years, and one is like going from feeding an audience to fostering community, and I think we're completely in that era. Also, AI is just heightening this like exponentially. It's no longer helpful just to be creating more content and adding more noise. But community creates a smaller, more intimate container in which if you're looking at it from the content perspective, you can actually create a little bit more of a clear journey through content. But really, the bread and butter and value that community brings is you're not just experiencing that content in isolation. So I'm so excited. Okay, are you ready for the letter I've prepared for you today?

SPEAKER_00 7:16

I'm very ready. Let's get it.

SPEAKER_01 7:18

Dear Brie, I'm exploring creating a community for people seeking education in alternative health and wellness practices. I'm unfamiliar with the community industry, but I'm so curious about its growth, especially for community memberships and the overlap with courses. I'd love to hear your thoughts on how this space is evolving. Do you see community coming in hot and burning out quick as a new trend? People are eager to belong to community spaces online right now. But how do we know what we build is going to stay compelling to our members? Is this like when Zoom came onto the scene during the pandemic and then three months later we were severely burnt out on Zoom calls? Is this wave of community energy at the very beginning, the middle, the end? I want to get a high-level perspective of where this industry is at and where you see it headed. And in particular, what challenges you think we'll see next. Signed, Curious in Colorado. Zach, do any of these questions stand out to you?

SPEAKER_00 8:23

Yeah, none of it. None of it's very interesting. No, I think it's I think it's like it is such a strong existential question, right? Is community a fad? And it's one of those things where I think the real question is also going to be is digital community the fad? Probably more than anything. I think that's probably one of those big questions because at its core, I don't think community for the last uh how long have human, you know, Homo sapiens been around, two million years. I think we've been operating in community-like oriented business for so long, right? That's the like stamp of civilization was could we take multiple tribes and bring them into one location and hope that they find ways to interact with each other and build systems amongst each other, right? That's OG community at its core. Yes. And now we're in the digital space, right? We've entered new layers of technology on top of it.

SPEAKER_01 9:18

I love this point. Oh, can I add to that remote? Oh, please. Okay, don't lose that next thought. Yeah, I completely agree. Community is actually what makes us human, like categorically, like as a species. But the question of does community work? It's like literally baked into our DNA and how we survive as a species.

SPEAKER_00 9:36

And not only that, it's like we that phrase of we build on the shoulders of giants, right? Like no great idea was ever created in isolation. It is any book that has ever been written steals from someone prior to it, right? It's just if you did not, if you want to do something great, you have to do it with other people. And anyone who thinks that someone did something alone is not thinking this through. And I think that I say this a lot to a lot of HR leaders, which is actually very fun. They are community leaders themselves, right? I think what we call a company is such a human construct, it's not a real thing. A company is like it is just a group of individuals working towards a common goal. That's it.

SPEAKER_01 10:22

That's it's just also a great definition for community.

SPEAKER_00 10:26

And so that's one of the fun things about having worked in the community space. What you at Salesforce was a great example. When we first started to build customer communities, it moved into partner communities. And then almost immediately after that, it was like, could we do this for our employees? And suddenly you have this concept of an employee community, and you realize it is just groups of people, right? Like at its core, we are all just groups of people working towards common goals. So I think like exactly what you're saying, it just ties in so well with that whole narrative. Okay, what was the I'd already lost it, but that's okay. That's what I love. These, I don't remember where I was going with the rest of it. Anyway, cop friend from Colorado, I'm also from Colorado. Shout out Colorado. I would say, don't worry, is I guess the biggest thing to tell you is that community takes a lot of shapes and it will never stop ceasing, both in person and online. There are different shapes of community, right? So she's already mentioning like, did the Zoom stuff burn out? Absolutely, right? Technology will come and go. I say this, and I say this openly and honestly. I build a community platform for Slack. Do I think that is the end all be all? Absolutely not, right? Like it is a time and a place, and this is the point when I just see this growth happening in the way we converse on a platform that many of us already have on their phones. But will it be the final answer for us all in 20 years when technology changes? Probably not. And I think that's like part of the fun, is finding how to build community where your members are, right? That's like the number one thing that I always tell people to go think about is there's no amount of tools that any platform will be able to give you to solve that problem. You have to be able to find people where they are and meet them on their level. And I think that's like what I would tell your writers in. I would say like, just don't fret. Try to find what your members care about, where they want to be, and meet them there. And if 10 years from now they want to change, follow them to the next platform. Because this is ironic coming from a person who builds a platform, but the platform is not as important. I know how crazy that is, right? Like it is just not as important to do that. I would say focus more on where your members want you to go.

SPEAKER_01 12:47

That's really good. And to Zach's credit, I think this speaks very highly of your integrity and just the way that you like your perspective in the space. When we published the episode with Noelle Flowers, which is titled Why Are We Still Building on Slack, which is a great follow-up to this. Zach actually reached out and was like, Oh, actually, can you share a little bit of your reflections on that? I'd actually love to hear have you share a little bit.

SPEAKER_00 13:11

That's why I'm here today, people. That was like the no, that was such a fun one because you reached out and you're like, I'm about to launch a podcast that you're probably gonna want to listen to. I'm like, I'm definitely gonna listen to that because it's so relevant and core to our business. And I was like, what are they gonna talk about? Bash on Slack, but it was funny because I ended up agreeing a lot with what both of you were saying, right? I think you know, it's one of those things that I tell I try to tell anybody the reason that we chose Slack and the why we chose Slack, and I know that everyone will disagree a little bit on this, was we just saw how many people would gravitate to it and could not leave it. And so when you realized like community platforms were offering these incentives of this just leave and we'll give you all these cool toys to play with, we just said, oh no, we're gonna bring the cool toys into the place where your people want to be. And I think it's funny if I wish Noelle was here right now, because I'm sure we would have the same conversation. But I think the listening to what you two were talking about, and I wish I could remember it, I wish I listened to right prior to this. But I didn't disagree with most of what you're saying. Slack can be noisy, Slack can have some of those flaws that I think as a community platform don't provide. But I one thing I will not forget, and I say this all the time, is I think it was either you or her said it's basically a cheat code for engagement. But engagement's not always good, but it is a cheat code for it. And if you are trying to find highly engaged communities that are easy to onboard, Slack is really easy for that.

SPEAKER_01 14:56

100%. Yeah, gosh, I was like, I think we both came into that episode, like feeling some strong energy in one direction. And by the end of that conversation, we were like, wow, like here's the whole spectrum. Here's the gray, here's like where it makes sense, here's where it was like, yeah, that was such a rich conversation. And I appreciated your additional insights on it. So thank you. This reminds me of an analogy that I use because the concept of building where your people are. So we hear that a lot in marketing. Go to where your people are already gathered. And I like to just create a tiny bit more nuance in the community spaces because I do think it's important, especially when your community is connection-centric, which a lot of Slack communities are, the value of that experience is primarily coming from your interactions between members, not like your course, your guided educational experience. So when they're connection-centric, it's critical because the entire value of the experience is dependent on your members being able to show up. It's important that we show up in places that are at least easy to access. If not, they are already familiar with accessing that space. And I think it's also there's a layer in community building where building good, I like to say good marketing goes to where people already are. Good community builds where people feel safe. And I liken it to thinking about where you're gonna meet up with your friend at a coffee shop, right? So let's say your friend just got a divorce and you're like, oh my gosh, we need to catch up and I'm like, I'm here to support them. Are you gonna like go to the Starbucks next to Target? Actually, you probably even wouldn't be in a coffee shop. So maybe this is a bad example, but that's not the place where like you're going to gather with your people, right? It's like the, oh, I accidentally wound up in Starbucks after buying toilet paper at Target. That's good marketing for Starbucks, right? Like I tripped into Starbucks on my way out of Target checkout. So that's good marketing, make no mistake. But good community building goes the extra mile of asking, like, what is a space where people are going to feel safe here? Like there are some certain places online where, quote, everyone is where that is not the case. Facebook groups, for example. Like I would put Facebook groups and list Starbucks inside of Target in the same realm, right? Like, you don't know who the heck is going to walk through that door. And I would put Slack and I would put community platforms more in this category of boutique-y coffee shops where it's like the vibe and you like the barista and you like feel this sense of home and belonging, like when you walk into your local coffee shop. You did have to probably get in your car to drive there. So there's a little bit more barrier to entry. It's not just whoops, wound up here, but it's still like that's the space where like real community and belonging starts to blossom.

SPEAKER_00 17:47

Yeah, and I'll say this. If, by the way, people are building their communities out at a Starbucks next with Target with toilet paper, go for it. If that's the spot where your people meet, do it. Keep going. We got nothing against you. No shame. Seriously. And actually, I will defend Facebook groups on one thing that I have seen. K through 12 communities. Like when your parents in you don't know what age bracket and the technology is just so diverse. I've seen those communities still successful. If you're in anything else, I probably wouldn't recommend you to go into Facebook groups for it. But like I still see some thriving Facebook groups, which is fascinating. But it has to be that kind of audience. I'll say this is also really fun. Slack is not a community platform. I'm gonna say that. And it is funny to hear it from me, but it also is one, right? And I think that's the key thing, is I start with those are both true statements. Slack was never supposed to be one, and even today, the Slack team will tell you it's not a community platform. But it goes back to what you and I were talking about. It's like the difference between a company and a community is not as big as we would want it to be, right? It is people working together. And so that's really like the mission of Titan It is we basically have pushed the Slack team, we've pushed the whole ethos around it to push in that direction of Slack is a community platform and it can be a community platform. And so one of my favorites is the like report that comes out. I think it was the CMX report that like lists where people put their communities. And Slack is still, I think it's like several years running, the number one community platform for most people's communities. And it's the only one of the top 10 that does not say it's a community platform. And so we've always thought that's a telling sign, right? And that's really what we have tried to go and build is say, how do we take this sleeping giant and just cut the cord so that it can actually go be what we want it to be? I wish, and it's funny to say this. I do think if you're a founder also, that you should be thinking a little bit like that. There's so many products out there that there are niches and gaps where they're being used for something else. Go find that because there's a lot of opportunity if you're like thinking about solving problems in the white spaces where big businesses just don't have the incentives to go and chase. And so that was also just going back to our story is how we kind of realized we had to go build this thing.

SPEAKER_01 20:22

Okay. I love that insight. And it leads me to this next question. So people don't always see where things are moving. People don't always, it sounds like this is a skill you've developed to observe what's happening and a little bit of a psychic ability to be like, wait a second, here's a gap. So my question is how can we foster those skills? How can we build those skills of observing, seeing and anticipating what will come before it comes? How can you teach us to be more psychic?

SPEAKER_00 20:54

Oh, yes. All right. Let's get into our psychic states here, right? Let's all take our biggest. Calm down, tap in. Right. Yeah. Listen to the wind. No, I think so. I my background is as a product manager, and one of the things that I think is like a product manager's superpower is if you're a phenomenal listener. And I don't mean I don't mean listening to what people say. I mean listening to what they say, and then knowing that what they said is actually not what they wanted, if that makes any sense. Like sometimes there comes a point when people, but there's that Henry Ford quote that if he really listened to people, he would have built a faster horse. It's you're trying to figure out the why. It's in in product management, it's called the job to be done. It's not so much you never should listen to a customer on how they want to do something. You should listen to what do they want to achieve. And when we first went out to go figure out what to build, like how do you go build the next generation of a community product? We saw tons of community products out there. And all of them, and I love Gareth Wilson's recent post about this. He had this big post about are we in trouble? Because one of the hardest things about building a community product is the breadth of features that you have to go build. And where we realized we had this big upper hand is if we could tap into that big embedded market and just listen to people that like the communities that we serve today that did not leave Slack, a non-community platform, to go to these community platforms. We realized there's something seriously sticky here, and we need to be able to help these people solve that problem. And so that was it, right? We went, we listened, we built, we listened, we built. We're super community-led in terms of the way we build. We now have just hit 500 members in our community, and these are all prospects and customers and just advocates. And if you're interested in joining, go to community.tynit.ai, tell us what to build next. But that's exactly how you should be thinking is how do I just solve a problem for one person really well and then solve a problem for two people and then three people and then continue from there. And I think everyone who's trying to think in scale, they're thinking of it wrong. Like I think we always get into this I could build something huge and it could be this big, and it would everyone in the world would use it. But you do really want your like core group to love what you're doing so much that they tell people around them and so on and so forth. And that builds not only a trust in your product, it builds a trust in your brand, it gets you invited to Breeze podcasts, it does all sorts of things for you. So I think that's what I would recommend of building product sense. It's not ideas, is probably the best way to put it. Just if you're coming up with your own ideas, you're probably doing something wrong. You really have to get down to your customer's level and try to understand not what they're telling you, but what they're trying to achieve.

SPEAKER_01 24:01

Well, okay, so that last point actually is sticking with me. And I'll maybe offer a slight amendment where because my one of my working hypotheses, an axiom, if you will, I don't know if we can ever prove this, is that we generally will try to solve the problem that a past or former version of ourselves had. So insofar as you are tapped in to that past version of yourself, creating a product, a community, a service that helps that past version solve that problem. I think our own ideas, like we can actually get a lot from that own our own inner journey because we have full empathy for what it feels like. And usually we've overcome that problem in some way, shape, or form, and we want to create more access for other people in the same way. So I think you mentioned just like your own ideas, and I would say if it's coming from that place of a past version of you who's had that same experience, that can be helpful to tap into.

SPEAKER_00 25:11

Okay, so what you're saying is the way I used to hire as like for product managers. What I would tell people is like this people that wanted to break into product had the same problem as he. It's kind of a catch 22. If you're not in product, how do you break into product? Because the only two ways to get in there. And then not the only, I'm boiling it down. The only two ways were you either were a product manager and I knew you had the skills to learn the tools that we were building and learn the customer, or you had such ingrained knowledge of the customer because you either were the customer at some point, or you've been working with this problem space so much that I could teach you product management, but I can't deep down, like I can't actually get as far as you have gotten in solving your own problems. Those were like the two things. And obviously, yes, there's other social skills and technical skills that came in with that, but at the core, you had to have one of those to really be a viable candidate. Because I think it just made sense to be able to solve your own problem in that sense, right? It's like something you care passionately about, the problem space. And you see it so often in history, how that works out. And when we first started to build a company, it was not the right one. We this is this was actually the pivot, if that makes sense. What we went to go do is we saw all this cool AI technology. We went and built like a marketing automation tool, listening to your calls and creating customer stories. And I suddenly realized we got way out in front of our skis because I had never built in this space before. Like it just was new to me. And so I had one crazy sleepless night and said, just build what you know, Zach. We've been doing this for a long time.

SPEAKER_01 27:05

Wow.

SPEAKER_00 27:05

Go build what you know, and then Titan it basically came out of that because I think we so often assume people know what we're talking about. Like the things that we know, obviously, others know. But then there's some like deep-seated community language that, especially in the enterprise, like people have never heard of. Like the words case deflection, that's like my favorite word. If you've been in the enterprise community space, you probably have heard the word case deflection. But if you haven't, case deflection is about scaled customer support. It's this idea if one person asks the question and someone answers it, you have this resource that you can now use to deflect future cases by answering said question. And so case deflection is the idea of using your community as like a wall to protect your customer support team. That knowledge, I realized later on, I would not have had if I had not spent a decade building enterprise community software. So I tell people, like you just mentioned, build what you know because you have such a strong background on it, and you're very much falsely assuming people know what you know.

SPEAKER_01 28:18

100%. I resonate with that so strongly for my own journey as a community strategist. And it's like the call to action, dear listener, is follow the breadcrumb trail. So there is something, whatever is next for you, and all this all wraps up back to our like ability to predict the future for yourself and for your own, like what's next for you? Follow the breadcrumb trail. What's there there was something in your recent or not so recent past that has perfectly equipped you for the next tiny step. And when you take that next tiny step, the next one unfolds, and then next one unfolds. When I quit my role as director of leadership development at the social enterprise where I was leading community, I just my tiny breadcrumb trail next step was I said, I'm gonna have 100 phone conversations in 90 days. And this was in February of 2020. If we can all remember that time. And that was literally, it was just like one breadcrumb after the next. But it I love that vision of really listening to your own experience and what you have in your past to find what's ahead of you, too.

SPEAKER_00 29:34

People out there, you are underestimating yourselves. It's like we do it all the time. We I've said this, I only know about 5% of what I probably need to know about building a community platform, but most people only know 1%. And I think that's what you you forget is like there's no way to be the perfect know it all. Like, I know exactly what I'm doing. This is my first company, right? I don't know exactly what I'm doing all the time. It's going out and doing my best every single time and making sure that I'm listening to our customer and solving their problems and making sure that they trust me to do it. If I'm doing that every day consistently, then I will get to that point, right? But it's like you said, those incremental breadcrumbs to get there. So you start low. And I think that's the other thing that I tell people too is like, look, if you don't know a space, join a community because there are a lot of smart people that are willing and able to answer your questions, and they are excited about the next generation of people that they can help up level as well. And so most people don't like bringing up the ladder behind them. They want to, and rightfully so, in not a bad way, it is also a little bit of an ego thing. There's so many people out there that want to be able to say, look, I made an impact in the industry that I'm a part of, and they will help you move the needle there. Not everyone needs to be starting a company, not everyone needs to start their own communities. Some people just want to be able to help a few handful of people just be better at what they do every day.

SPEAKER_01 31:09

I love that. It reminds me of one of the mantras that we have in the Ember community, which is look for the person who's one chapter ahead and one chapter behind, because those are the people who you need to be journeying with. You will learn just as much from the person who is one chapter ahead as you do mentoring, journeying with the person who is one chapter behind. And don't believe me on that. Test it for yourself, and you will be shocked because you learn just as much from connecting with the person one chapter behind as you do the person who's one chapter ahead. I want to just reflect back to you what you shared and see if this summary lands for you. Let's call it the cheat code for predicting the future. So, number one, I heard you say ask good questions. Don't ask for what they need. Ask for what they want and ask why they can't get what they want today.

SPEAKER_00 32:08

Yes, I mean ask that, but listen closely, right? And ask a good question is really ask someone why they want to solve that problem because that's like at its core. If you can keep getting down the line and figure out why they want to solve it, one of my favorite things, again, I love to boil things down, but something super simple that people will understand is if you're building a business and you're in the B2B business, you're building for business software, what's your goal? Because actually, there's only one goal of most businesses, and it's this it's to get whoever buys your product promoted, give them more time or more happiness. That's it, actually. That's all. There's nothing else. Now your job is to figure out how to do that. But those are the only three things that you should be trying to figure out. Get them promoted, make them happier at their job, more fulfilled, more time. If you can do one of those three things, I don't care if you build a product, I don't care if you build a service, I don't care what you do, that person will come back and be your customer every day if you can deliver that one of those three things every time. And then you go build a product if you think that a product will help it, or you go build a service if you think a service will help it, or you go do something else if you think something else will help it entirely. But that's what you do, that's what I do. We both do that. You deliver a service, I deliver a product, but at the end, we are still doing one of those three things. So that's like the thing that I want to make sure everyone knows is when they're working for a customer, that is what you have to go and set out to solve. And it's through like product, it's through services, it's through education that you can do all of those things. And that's why, like I tell a lot of engineers, don't go build for six months because you're gonna end up, you're not who are you doing that for? Like you're doing that for yourself. You're trying to you're trying to get your own chops, but you're not thinking about the customer in that sense because there are so many quick ways to deliver big wins for customers, and you need to find what those quick wins for customers are.

SPEAKER_01 34:28

This podcast is sponsored by Ember Consulting, where I'm the founder and head community creator. At Ember, we help people who are familiar with running their business on content, coaching, or consulting become community-powered. As you hear in this podcast, creating a community is really tough, and managing it can be even harder. So don't do it alone. Whether you're looking to launch a new community or pivot your strategy, our one-on-one consulting helps you skip the learning curve and do it right the first time. And when you're ready to belong to a space just for community creators learning, testing, and growing their communities together, check out the Ember community. Now, back to the episode. Do you have any advice for getting people to share? Because okay, here's what I found. Asking the question, like, what's your greatest challenge? What's your greatest problem? Sometimes they know. Sometimes they have no clue. And that question is just not helpful. So for people who in the scenario where they aren't aware of the problem, do you have any advice for other questions that might be more interesting to help us understand what the problem might be?

SPEAKER_00 35:48

It is a great question. And honestly, I would some of my like closest friends who are in sales, I think are some of the best people at this. I think having become a founder and having to do so much more in the sales world than I ever have done in the past, I have so much more respect for the sales position because the ability to uncover the problem is so understated in terms of a goal. Like I think the one thing I will say is if someone is coming to you to set up time and they're willing to give you their time, very often they have a problem, at least, right? If they're coming to you for something, right? And if you're able to just keep peeling back the onion, and I don't, there's no I don't have a cheat code on this, right? It is making sure one that they trust you, that you don't want to be a judgmental person. Sometimes people just like straight up have little tiny problems that they need to solve, and they're almost afraid to ask for help on them because they don't want there's that imposter syndrome, or they just don't know what to do. And that's the other fun one is sometimes you don't want to do this in an overbearing way, and I'm sure you've run into this before. Is like when you want to tell someone how to build their community versus point them in the right direction, you have to balance it because sometimes you do actually know the right answer and you do want to get them there, and you have to push them there, and you have to just straight up stop and go, listen, Brie, we gotta stop right here. You probably shouldn't be on my product for X, Y, or Z, or you haven't done this yet because of X, Y, and Z. Let's go solve that first before we start thinking big picture. Anyway, being transparent, honest is still the number one. I mean, we learned it since kindergarten. It's still rule number one. So I'd say approach sales like that.

SPEAKER_01 37:45

I loved that answer. And here's how I'm taking away from it. And this might be like a weird angle, but just stick with me. What I heard you say was that you're the people who are not aware of the problem, they're not a customer yet. They're still in your sales funnel, they're still in your marketing funnel. Only the people who are aware of the problem and acutely aware of the problem really belong in your customer base. If they're not aware yet, maybe they're curious, maybe they like have the rumblings, maybe they know something's off, but they can't articulate the problem yet. Those people belong in your sales and marketing funnel. And that's the job of our sales and marketing is to help elucidate the problem, help them get super ultra clear on the problem so that when it comes time to buy your business, your service, join your community. They're like, yep, that's my problem. And I know that because I've been listening to Dear Bree for a year now. I know exactly how hard it is to build community.

SPEAKER_00 38:42

There you go. I mean, your listeners probably get it. I think this is this industry is so tough because there are actually more problems in this industry than I think almost any other, right? If you go to sales, the sales industry, what is the goal of sales industry? Most of the time, more sales. That's actually it, right? But what is our like in the community world, what is our more? It's such a weird thing to say this. Like, what do you want more of? It changes based on which customer you speak with. And that's, I think, actually one of the like I it is so much fun to catch community managers young in their career or community consultants young in their career, because it is, I'm also teaching them to think that same way that you're gonna have different buyers, you're gonna have different departments, you're gonna have different people with different problems in different spaces, but they don't even know how to describe it. They're new to the community space too. So as you learn it more and more, you start to be able to tell people what they should be looking for, if that makes sense. What does good look like? Being able to explain that to someone that just was tasked by this their CEO, go build us a community. And they're like, what am I being judged on? What does that mean? What is the goal? What's the win here? And I think part of your job is explaining that. And that it's that's why community is tough, but it's also why it's so rewarding, and it's why it's also so sticky when it works, right? When it works, it works, and when it doesn't, it doesn't work. So it's just it's it's just that beautiful kind of like it is more of an experiment. And one thing I think just kind of highlight, because we should talk a little bit about AI, what podcast happens now without an AI conversation? I really do believe that as AI starts to cannibalize other industries, as it eats up sales and eats up marketing, you're finding roles across each of those. Like the fact that sales has moved into a lot of people now in sales have moved into growth. This concept of like, how do I connect with people when there's so much noise, and that's really their new job? And building content and in inbound sales is massively growing versus outbound. Marketing has moved very deeply into customer marketing because suddenly you don't want this performance marketing because it's gotten so crazy, everyone's email inboxes are wild, don't even know where to put your money for advertising and SEO. And so suddenly it's how do I take human beings and put them in front of other human beings? Another great community lens to it. And then finally, the community space itself. I'm still waiting for the moment. I haven't actually done this yet. But I want to speak at a conference, I want to walk up on stage, it has to be a pure community conference. I want to go, please raise your hand if you're an AI in this room. And I want to tell everyone in the room that in 20 years this will not change. Because that is at its core, the one industry that can't actually be replaced is you have to have people at the center of your community. It is ridiculous for me to think about a world where AI would be an individual at a conference sitting there and watching me speak. Why would they? And so the community world, I think, is going to balloon like crazy. It goes back to this letter. It is not a fad. If anything, it's going to become more of a luxury that we have these community experiences because so much of these other industries are getting eaten alive a day by new technology. And I'm watching so many of these founders realizing their moat is not technology, their moat is not money, their moat is what do people trust I'm going to go and solve for them? If they continue to trust me to go and solve it, they're not going to leave me for a competitor who they do not trust because they don't see the story. And so I think that's what we have set out to go and try to build for our customers bringing community at its core and helping them solve problems for people with people and using AI to deliver better experiences on top of it.

SPEAKER_01 43:08

I love that. Yep. It really, I wrote a I did a write-up on my kind of existential crisis on AI the other month. This is a plug for the newsletter.

SPEAKER_00 43:20

Only once a month, Brie. I mean, come on.

SPEAKER_01 43:23

It just it culminated. It culminated because I was like, I realized like my role with AI now as this companion, my role as a content creator was shifting into more of this like number, just practically like an editor. Like I love writing my newsletters by hand. Like I don't use AI for them because I don't want to edit the AI to sound like me. I just want to be me. So it's I had this moment where I was like, oh my God, am I gonna be like the only one writing my own newsletter in 10 years? Like, am I gonna be like the only one? And how do I, how do I adapt to AI in a way that's gonna be Meaningful and contribute to my business, but also that is not forcing me into a box that I don't naturally want to be in. I don't want to be an AI editor. I want to be a creator. And so it really got me thinking about this shift for myself from and that I think we're going, this is this would be like my big future prediction of the space and where it's heading, which is from content creator to community creator. How and I think AI will also evolve to help us make more connections between each other. I think it can be a helpful tool in that. But I see AI first tackling like the content is tackling the content space, making copious amounts of content that's even better than like we can come up with. But if we can shift our role and our identity from being the educator, the person creating the content into the community facilitator, the connector, the person who is setting the space and the environment in which these interactions could happen. Like that seems like some pretty good job security to me personally.

SPEAKER_00 45:08

Again, I believe you're safe, right? And I hope so for both of our sakes, right? That the community industry is impervious in that sense to like what AI can do to other industries. And yeah, I tell people, look, the thing about AI is it's gonna get rid of a lot of menial jobs. Like a lot of the tasks, anything that's like a task, what you call like a task, you're probably gonna be like, all right, those are gone. So my hope is that it's a utopian view. My hope is that we have more time to sit in rooms together or to sit online but speak with other people. And there's an AI in there with us that's listening to solve those problems and do those things, the things that we have to go and actually do, but you and I are just collaborating about the future and it's going out and building it with us, right? It gives us this new tool that actually goes and does things for us. I don't particularly love the AI companies that are trying to like call it like break humanity, if that makes any sense. Like they want to be human and they are trying to trick us and make us feel like there's connection undeservingly. I don't get mad at people that want to use this to create like equality and accessibility. I think there's a lot of people that were not dealt a fair hand, and they want to be able to basically sell themselves in a way. I think one of the things that I've noticed, and this is why there's always a gray line, is look, if you're a beautiful person born in America, you are probably going to have a lot of an easier time selling products and selling all sorts of things here than if you're born in a country where you maybe didn't have access to technology, and there's different levels of attractiveness, and we all love to look at the screens, right? Like maybe you're not the one in front of the camera, but now you can actually create an AI that helps you sell what you're selling. That is an equalizing effect. And I do understand you are tricking people. It is not you behind the scenes, but it is a little bit of this equalizing aspect of now someone who did not have access to be able to sell here in the States because of prejudice, they can do that. And it is a unique way to look at it. But like the thing that I get nervous about are when people use that technology to scam others and to trick others and to break that human the human trust. So that makes me nervous, but I also get very excited.

SPEAKER_01 47:40

Yeah. That's really good. We could go down a whole other rabbit hole. But I want to bring us back. So Curious in Colorado, thank you so much for your letter. And just to pointedly say, I think as far as every year, I'm like, oh, okay, we're we're moving past the beginning of community spaces. Like every year, I'm like, we must be in the middle. We must be in the middle. And I'll say, I think we're still in the very beginning, which is five years in on my community strategy and consulting. It like feels weird to say that. But every year, I like a new layer unwraps, or like AI explodes, and I'm like, nope, we're just in the beginning again, still. So that's my one take. I want to do the secret podcast real quick. So, Zach, what's your favorite Slack community? Most painful mistake you made in community building. If you could go back to when you were starting tight knit and you could share just one word with your younger self. What one word would you choose? This can be a secret code, this can be a word of advice. It's one word, what would you say? Wanna know the answers to this lightning round? Sign up for Dear Brie, the Extended Edition. It's a secret video podcast you only get when you're signed up for the Ember newsletter. You'll hear their answers and put a face to the voice you've just become friends with over the last hour. Click on the link inside the show notes to join. Zach, thank you so much for joining us on this episode. It was such a privilege to have this conversation and to glean your thoughts on the future of community work.

SPEAKER_00 49:26

Yeah, and thank you for having me. I've been excited about coming on and speaking to your audience and jealous of what looks like Hawaii in the backyard.

SPEAKER_01 49:35

It's a sunny day, can't lie. Thank you so much for sharing some space with me on this episode. Please like and review wherever you find your podcast. To submit your own community conundrum, fiasco, or other drama, go to the link in the show notes. Aloha and catch you next time.