Level Up Your Company with Community with Anna Maste

0:00and I had so many conversations amazing conversations with dozens of people where I heard over and over again things like oh what your company is doing is so cool or a hundred thousand dollars ARR that's my dream right now or I'm still searching for an idea it turns out that validation from your customers is only part of the battle validation from your peers can be equally important I am the founder of subscribe sense but I'm also the co-founder of a company called boondockers welcome and boondockers welcome there we go is a platform for rvers that allows them to connect with other hosts who will let them stay on

0:42their property for a night or two for free so think Couchsurfing but you bring your own couch uh I co-founded the company in 2012 with my mother who has over 20 years of rving experience and last year we sold the company for a life-changing exit [Applause] 2012 when we launched like MO most first-time Founders we were incredibly naive the platform essentially works as a two-sided marketplace with members signing up either as hosts or guests or often both and my mother had at that time a relatively successful series of RV travel guides and we were able to use the mailing list from those guides to seed our membership and get our first

1:33200 hosts and guests and then after that we figured we'd sit back and wait for the rocket ship growth to happen unsurprisingly it did not for those first five years after we launched we did essentially zero marketing we certainly didn't do any paid acquisition but we didn't have a Blog we didn't have any SEO focused content or landing pages we did send out sporadic email newsletters but and this is incredibly embarrassing to admit to we only sent them out to current customers we didn't even collect email addresses on our home page from interested leads I don't know how Shoeless Joe Jackson was ever going to find my Field of Dreams

2:20but at that point the company was really just a side project my mother was still traveling a lot and working on her guides which did send us some traffic and I was working a full-time job or at home with two young kids and yet five years after we launched by about 2017 we had reached sixty five thousand dollars in annual recurring Revenue not rocket ship growth to be sure but not too shabby for doing no marketing how on Earth did we manage this it turns out we had a product with built-in marketing what um the entire concept of the platform was based on the fact that our viewers

3:07are inherently social when you pull into a new site and meet your neighbors sharing a drink around a campfire is the norm and often invitations to come stay in my driveway if you're in my neck of the woods are exchanged after a single evening so our customers liked to talk and after stay with one of our hosts at the next campfire with their next new neighbors the conversation would inevitably turn to where are you coming from and where you're heading and that's when our customers might be overheard saying something like oh I just stayed with these amazing boondockers welcome hosts they gave us fresh eggs from their

3:46chickens and took us square dancing you've got to stay with them if you're heading that way so it turns out we had a ring of fire that was a Community Driven Word of Mouth in-person growth cycle of growth but the double-edged sword of community-led growth is this you can't buy it on the one hand that makes it incredibly cost effective and if you're a low LTV b2c company like we are then that's fantastic but it also means it's very hard to scale that said I was able to pinpoint three things that we did that really helped us capitalize on this community-led growth first have an amazing product make sure that

4:37what you provide is worth talking about around the proverbial campfire and make sure that you provide not just monetary value but experiential value also listen to your customers and try to make sure they feel that their success is your number one priority second Give It Away with no expectations to those with an audience in your community in our experience we never had any success paying influencers to try and flog our product but we had a great deal of success with YouTubers who would create Rave review videos after discovering our product either on their own or after we gifted them a membership with no strings attached if you are reaching out to influencers

5:24one thing to remember is that the size of Their audience is not the most important metric much more important is where Their audience is on their customer Journey so we could have a Instagram van lifer with tens of thousands of followers post about us and it wouldn't even register but if you're willing to watch a 15-minute YouTube video on the best free campsites on the beaches of southern Texas there's pretty good odds you're a good Target for our product three create a place for that Community to gather in public and then get out of the way once you've got enough converts who are passionate about your product and want

6:07to share their experiences give them an opportunity to connect with each other and build a community around your brand for us that was a Facebook group but it could just as easily be a subreddit or a channel on a forum in your Niche or your own bespoke web Community the most important thing to remember is to not restrict it to only current customers you want anybody who's considering buying your product to be able to have some degree of interaction with that online community and then get out of the way let your customers sell your product for you being able to ask your questions to current users who aren't just

6:46spouting ad copy is an incredibly powerful conversion tool you should really only need to step in to answer questions that the community hasn't answered for you or to correct incorrect information that anybody may have shared and depending on your Niche you may need some degree of moderation to keep the flame Wars down but at least in the beginning you can probably find one or two passionate community members who are willing to do that for free so thanks to the power of community we were able to grow for those first five years when we weren't even trying and then in 2017 when my children started school full-time we were able to

7:24implement some of those other tactics I mentioned as well as some more traditional low-cost marketing and we saw significant growth in our trajectory and when rving became the only safe way to travel in the pandemic we had built ourselves a brand as the best alternative to free camping almost entirely or sorry the best alternative to full campgrounds almost entirely by word of mouth in the community and when a competitor came looking to acquire us we were able to command a premium price for a life-changing exit and yet all that almost didn't happen so by 2017 even though we were seeing some increased or 2019 rather we were seeing

8:13some increased trajectory I was feeling stagnant at that point we had about a hundred thousand dollars in ARR but I was unsure what to do with the product next and in addition my mother was in her late 60s by this point and was looking to retire and she had taken care of all of our customer support so I knew I was going to have to hire someone to replace her and that terrified me so when a small player in the RV space reached out to us at that point asking if we were interested in selling we told him to make an offer and we were ready

8:47to accept just before I signed the letter of intent I came to my first microconf I had been lucky enough to receive one of the scholarships that was mentioned earlier and came thinking I would gather as much information as I can could to take that home and put it into practice in my next company after we sold as bootstrappers we are often alone quite literally in our houses our Apartments doing this thing that nobody really understands for me I was surrounded by friends who I all either had full-time jobs or were stay-at-home moms and what was I was I a stay-at-home mom with a side hustle or was I an entrepreneur who

9:38couldn't afford daycare that lack of representation in my everyday life had slowly been eating away at me and I hadn't even realized it once I got to microconf though and met all these people and got over my initial fear of talking to strangers I realized the importance of being part of a community and I had so many conversations amazing conversations with dozens of people where I heard over and over again things like oh what your company is doing is so cool or a hundred thousand dollars ARR that's my dream right now or I'm still searching for an idea it turns out that validation from your customers is only

10:25part of the battle validation from your peers can be equally important and it may well be that you don't even realize you're missing that validation until you find it and in case it's not yet obvious at the end of those three days in Vegas I did not sell to that first offer I gained that validation that I was missing and the confidence I needed to continue to grow the company and I went home and hired a customer support person to take over for my mother in fact I hired her from our community our boondockers welcome Community we only posted the job on our newsletter and social channels and we had over 180

11:14applicants for the job so Community for the win and I just and we continue to build the company for another two years after that before we finally did exit for an order of magnitude more than that initial offer was for I just want to take this opportunity to thank the microconf community for welcoming me with open arms once I decided I finally wanted to be one of you and as mentioned I am here not just as an attendee but also as a sponsor because that first scholarship I got was so instrumental and life-changing I'm here to pay it forward and I hope that there is a scholarship recipient out

11:55there this year who is receiving the same benefits that I received and having the same Revelations that I had and you can recognize now the power of community to level up not just your company but also yourself

12:26[Music]