Lloyed Lobo With Boast.AI & From Grassroots to Greatness

Intro: Broadcasting live from the Business RadioX Studios in Atlanta, Georgia. It’s time for High Velocity Radio.

Lee Kantor: Lee Kantor here another episode of High Velocity Radio. And this is going to be a good one. Today on the show we have Lloyed Lobo with Boestami and the new book From Grassroots to Greatness. Welcome, Lloyd.

Lloyed Lobo: Thank you for having me. Super excited to be here.

Lee Kantor: I am excited to learn what you’re up to. But before we get too far into things, tell us about Boast.AI. How are you serving folks?

Lloyed Lobo: Definitely so Boast.AI helps innovators with funding to develop new products or improve existing products and materials globally. Hundreds of billions of dollars are given in government funding, but it’s a cumbersome, broken application process prone to frustrating audits and receiving the money takes a long time. So Boast automates and streamlines that process. So more innovators have money to fund their research and development.

Lee Kantor: Now, part of why we’re here is to talk about this community led growth model that you’ve developed, I guess, over the years.

Lloyed Lobo: Definitely.

Lee Kantor: Now, what was kind of the impetus to for you to lean into the community as as a way to grow rather than maybe more traditional ways? Maybe community is the traditional way, I guess when you put it under a magnifying glass.

Lloyed Lobo: Yeah, definitely. So part of it, a little bit of my DNA going backwards. So I grew up in Kuwait, in the Middle East, and my parents are from India, grew up in the slums of Mumbai. So my fondest childhood memories were spent every summer in in the slum of Mumbai, where watching TV was communal. Even going to the bathroom was communal. Fast forward a few years. The Gulf War hits Kuwait, and I experienced the largest grassroots evacuation movements. Security had lapsed. There were no cell phones, there was no Internet. And the community came together to coordinate building after building one after the other, coordinate with governments and evacuate the people to safety. Fast forward a few years, finished engineering, started working at startups, decided to start boci with my co-founder who I went to engineering school with. And when we started it and started picking up the phone and calling people to buy our service, nobody would talk to us. Manufacturing oil and gas construction. We started hitting up every single company we could find and nobody would talk to us. I mean, sounds scammy, right? Two guys hitting you up that you haven’t heard of saying, Give me your data and we’ll get you money from the government for your R&D. And so we were forced to lean into the power of community. And and that’s how it started. Necessity is the mother of all inventions. And to get customers, we had to build that community and long term. Now fast forward ten years. That community helped us not only bootstrap to 10 million in revenue with no outside funding, with no marketing team, but also ended up helping us raise more than 100 million in funding when we eventually did between debt and equity. It also made us very rich in the sense our investors who bought half the company came from that community. And I’m everything I am because of the power of community.

Lee Kantor: So now how are you defining community or is this kind of a human to human interaction at the heart of this, or is it something that can be scalable?

Lloyed Lobo: Definitely. It starts with human to human interaction at the heart of it, and then it scales, right? So today our community, which we call traction, has over 120,000 subscribers. We do meetups in different cities. We do a big annual conference, we got podcasts, we got YouTube and everything in between. So it’s human to human interaction. So the reason why I actually wrote this book was when I left the day to day of my company, I transitioned to the board and, you know, all my life I had no money. And for the first time I came in a million. But I found myself depressed and hit rock bottom. And eventually what got me through was the community again. I joined a fitness and health community and and I sailed on the other side. And then I looked back and reflected. And I realized every time in life when I had no money, I was happy. And when I came into money and I felt I lost my community, I ended up depressed. So I started looking back at all our community events that we hosted. We had some of the biggest speakers like Uber CEO come to our events.

Lloyed Lobo: Twilio ET Cetera and started looking at all the iconic brands that have endured over time, right? Like the Harley Davidsons, the apples. And I found this very common theme. Every obscure idea that eventually became a global phenomenon from Christianity to CrossFit had four specific stages, and community was rooted in all of them. And so, you know, you when people listen to you or you have something to say and people listen to you or buy your product or service, you have an audience. When you bring that audience together to interact with one another, it becomes a community. And when that community comes together to create an impact towards a greater purpose that far that’s far beyond your product or your profits, it becomes a movement. And when that movement has undying faith in its purpose through sustained rituals, over time it becomes a cult or a religion. So I started seeing this theme over and over again, and because I was asking the same questions through my research process. I was able to distill them down into 13 rules to build iconic brands with community led growth.

Lee Kantor: Now, it sounds kind of aspirational in a way that, you know, sure, everybody would love to be able to create the next Harley Davidson or Apple or CrossFit. Is it something that that every entrepreneur or brand has has a path towards if they kind of do work the program, or is it something that certain things are just more are better fits for this type of methodology?

Lloyed Lobo: I think everyone has the opportunity and that’s why I weaved in my story as well. We’re two obscure guys who built like a big company by leveraging the power of community would be more relatable, going from 0 to 10 million in revenue and beyond, raising over 100 million over time versus just talking about an apple or a Harley Davidson that’s so aspirational. Now, we of course, boast I didn’t build a movement or didn’t create a cult like brand. We stopped at community, but the journey is far ahead. But you look at another company, Atlassian, which has a movement going in the last year, their community members came together to organize 5000 events without any help from the Atlassian leadership. And that just shows, right, this brand took 20 years to get there, but it’s now worth 40 billion. So I wanted to lay in different stories so it’s more relatable to people. But ultimately it starts with an audience. It starts with understanding your niche. What are their pains, what are their goals, what are their aspirations, understanding their circle of influence, and then start starting to serve them with content around a white space that they resonate with. Then once you start building that audience, it’s about bringing them together. I talk about the science of senses and how do you orchestrate experiences that engage all the senses.

Lloyed Lobo: When people come together, they form bonds with each other and from there it’s about then how do you bring them to create impact to a greater purpose? And finally, we talk about rituals. How do you build sustainable rituals that over time you can become a CrossFit or a Harley-Davidson? Now all these steps anyone can follow. I’ve helped, like so many companies, build communities. I’ve seen so many companies build communities. Ultimately, you know, yesterday’s innovation always becomes tomorrow’s commodity, right? We don’t say.com company anymore. We don’t say social company or mobile company anymore. There’s all the rage of I. Another thing, what I wanted to convey was, hey, I built an AI company that’s successful, but I leveraged the power of community. There’s a lot of talk around ChatGPT, but OpenAI wouldn’t exist without the community. Openai was getting all its data from the community. We were members of the OpenAI community since 2019. If we weren’t feeding them with training data and helping them build the product, there would be no OpenAI or ChatGPT. So that’s what I wanted to convey, is, hey, yesterday’s innovation always becomes tomorrow’s commodity. But if you build this community, it ends up being your long term sustainable moat because they give you product feedback, they’re there to support you. They become your customers and your advocates.

Lee Kantor: So let’s kind of help our listeners with some practical things that maybe they can implement today if they are so inclined to build a community. And do you mind doing some kind of consulting on the air? Is that.

Lloyed Lobo: Okay? Definitely.

Lee Kantor: Okay.

Lloyed Lobo: Definitely. How much time do I have?

Lee Kantor: As long as you need. So I’m going to use myself and my business as this test case. I own a company called Business RadioX where this show is a part of that network. Our mission is to create communities in small communities, micro kind of hyper local business talk, podcast, slash Internet radio businesses in communities around the country. And our our mission is to be the place where the stories of business are told, where we support and celebrate business in a hyper local manner, and our studios become kind of mini networking places where people go to congregate to help tell those stories and they meet and they support each other. The way that it works is that our businesses are entrepreneurs. They are paying a license fee to us to use our branding and our kind of methodology, but that’s their own business. They keep all the money. So that’s my mission, is to put thousands of Business RadioX studios around the country to be the voice of business in those local communities. What should I do today to grow the community so that I can attain that goal?

Lloyed Lobo: Definitely. I mean, you have a great start. You already have a big community. How many people are engaged through this currently?

Lee Kantor: So we have about, let’s say, about a dozen active entrepreneurs in local markets doing what I just described in their local market.

Lloyed Lobo: Awesome. And through that, I’m assuming they’re engaging thousands of people already, right?

Lee Kantor: So in each market, it’s their own kind of community that they’re building, using the Business RadioX studio as kind of the hub and the the reason for being there as that connector, as that person serving each of those communities.

Lloyed Lobo: Awesome. I’ll take it all the way to the back. Right. I think I think what you have already is a great framework. But let’s say you have listeners who want to even start and they have nothing, right? So the first thing I think, I think what you shared is perfect. I have a mission. You know, great communities are built on great purposes, on great mission. So start with your purpose, your why, like, what is the big aspiration? And that’s not your product or your service, but rather what is the impact you want to create? Because the thing is, if you have no purpose beyond your profits, it’s very hard to create a long term, sustainable community because you’re always going to be looking for profits and money and it will be hard to sustain. Building a community, especially engaging volunteers is a labor of love. It’s a marathon of the heart and mind. So find something that you’re passionate about, that you care about giving. You have this DNA of giving, give first mentality. Start with that purpose, Distill it to your vision, which is your someday what the world will look like as a function of your being. Then your mission like how do you do it? And then your values. What are the core values that people show up with? The next thing is figure out the kind of community you want to build. There’s three kinds of communities you want to build. So I would say your community is a community of practice where you bring people together to learn about being better entrepreneurs. Is that more or less right? Well, we’re selling a product.

Lee Kantor: We’re not. We’re a place where businesses small to mid-sized businesses primarily, but all businesses in a local community can tell their story. It’s a place where they can be heard and they can share what makes them special. Definitely. So that’s the heart of it.

Lloyed Lobo: Definitely. So that’s a community of practice, right, where people come together to learn from one another, to tell their stories. That’s a community of practice. Now, the second kind, you may have listeners who have products and that’s turning your customers into evangelists. How do you build a community of product where people come and learn about the product? And the last one is a community of play where people just come together, hang out to have a good time, like a Nike or a or maybe a Harley Davidson. Now the key thing here is if you don’t have a product which has customers or product market fit, meaning customers don’t come repeatedly to use it, then I wouldn’t create a community of product because people will feel like they’re sold to. So create a community of practice like you guys have. Then it’s about finding that underserved niche and identifying their pains. Figure out like where they eat, breathe, dream, sleep, figure out their aspirations and goals so you can come up with the right content to help them go from A to Z. If you’re building this community of practice, like what are the things I need to learn? What are the gaps I have? And now once you have this ideal customer profile nailed like like you guys have and you understand all their pain points, then it’s about. Building their circle of influence. For example, who do they fund? Meaning what other tools and services they pay for. That could be your potential partners to promote and bring the audience. Who do they follow? Meaning who are the influencers they follow that you can bring as guest speakers so they can learn from? And then what do they frequent? What events, magazines, blogs, other things they read, what platforms they present on so you can distribute the content. Now the next step from there is starting with creating this audience through content. Now you’re already doing this content. Do you do any other forms of content beyond the blog and the events, or rather beyond the podcast and the and the events?

Lee Kantor: So we take every episode that we do is always obviously shared through all the traditional podcast platforms all over the planet, you know, every one. And then also it is machine transcribed. So the content is also in digital text form. So we have it in audio and we have digital text. And that digital text is just on our website, definitely.

Lloyed Lobo: So this is this is a great example where you turn, take one form of content, right? And turn it into multiple forms. And if somebody who doesn’t even have this, once you understand your audience, you can write down a hundred burning questions your niche audience has. So you have a repository of ideas and you think about like, Hey, if I had to write the ultimate guide to like my ideal customer profile, achieving their aspiration, what would be the chapters subchapters and key topics then like you’re doing, you can start by just interviewing experts on Zoom for best practices. Then you post the long form video to YouTube, you post the audio to podcasts. You can turn the highlights into YouTube shorts, insta reels, TikTok and highlights the text highlights for LinkedIn posts, Facebook posts and tweets. You can even take that and turn it into a weekly newsletter. There are newsletter platforms like Substack right now are absolutely blowing up because Substack starts recommending and other newsletter creators, they start recommending as well, and your audience just starts growing. And you could even take that content now and turn it into an eBook. You can turn it into a certification program like HubSpot did with their inbound marketing certificate, which in the early days drove them a lot of growth and community. Now that you have this audience that’s building, how do you bring your audience together? So what I found in a lot of companies, what they do, and especially specifically for us, our email subscriber base is now 120,000.

Lloyed Lobo: Before the pandemic, we were entirely offline. We were doing a lot of meetups, a meetup a week in some cases, big conferences, retreats. And during the pandemic everything was shut. So what we did was we opened up all our Zoom recordings, we moved everything to Zoom, and we opened up all our recordings to make it interactive. So now, like we’re doing this conversation 1 to 1, when you activate your audience to join, then they’re also chiming in and asking questions, interacting with one another. And we started doing them from once a week to twice a week. And over two years we saw our audience go from like 30, 35,000 subscribers to over 120,000 subscribers. The next thing I’m a fan of is in-person meetups, and this works really well. It doesn’t have to be a big production event like the traction we do, or a 10,000 person conference like Saster or a big Harley Davidson festival, just doing meetups in different cities. What I find that’s beneficial is consistency and cadence. When we started doing the meetups, we were doing ten person meetups. When we first first started, we would invite ten people talk about a specific topic that people would not get education on elsewhere and bring them together.

Lloyed Lobo: And every time we’d host that meetup, more and more and more people would show up. One day we had 200 people show up at the co-working space and the co-working space were like, Listen guys, this is not a pizza meetup anymore. This is a full blown conference. And that evolved then into a 500 person conference and a multi thousand person conference. Anytime you engage more than two senses, you start to build stronger connections. And that is what drives community stronger bonds, right? So we’re now sound and sight or rather, we’re not even sight, we’re just sound. But when you’re in person, your taste, touch, smell. And once you start integrating that more regularly, even small meetups, you’ve got so many groups in different cities. Can you do a regular mastermind over food and drinks? Just 1010 people and that you will find grow when you done over cadence and then you tie it all together with like your newsletter with a WhatsApp chat group. And so something, a cadence, a good cadence would be like you have daily social posts, let’s say shorts, LinkedIn tweets, you have a weekly podcast like you already do. Then you do monthly pin ups or meet ups Every other week. You get into a quarterly retreat and you do an annual conference and all the communication flow is through a newsletter.

Lee Kantor: Wow, that’s great advice. Thank you so much for sharing that. Is there. One of our challenges is identifying people who believe what we believe in. Markets were not. Not in yet. So we’ve been able to grow kind of organically from people who have been part of our community in that they’ve been to a studio, had an experience, really enjoyed it once to contribute that way. But how do we find the person in a market that is doesn’t know who we are at all? How do we kind of get begin conversations with people who aren’t familiar with what we do right now?

Lloyed Lobo: Definitely. So when we started, nobody knew us, okay? And so we were in a small, obscure market. And now, of course, we’re in different cities, 7 or 8 different cities. But when we started in this small, obscure market, what we did was we started talking to our ideal customer profile. We built the list because we knew exactly who they were. And so we found the matching of what? Who are these people in these communities? And we started talking to them. And one of the best ways is you either email them or call them. Another great way is you just host an event and, you know, you have this framework of who do they fund, who do they follow, who do they frequent? So maybe partner with somebody else they’re familiar with. So you get their social proof, their brand rub, invite a speaker or two that they follow that are experienced in that community so that social proof will reel them in. So a great example was we started doing these meetups, right, and we started inviting influencers who are known to them to talk about their business. And as a result, we got the social proof of the influencer in that community. And that brand rub helped us build not only visibility but credibility with that audience. Another thing what we did, which really worked is hit up the local newspaper and ask them to give us a column.

Lloyed Lobo: Now, initially they didn’t give us a column, so we wrote for a second tier publication and drove so much traffic to it, then followed up with the newspaper and the newspaper saw the traffic and said, okay, we’ll give you a column and we call that column Startup of the Week. Basically, we’re weekly covering each business. Being in that newspaper gave us instant credibility and it gave the companies we were covering a lot of social proof and they started sharing. Now that created this boomerang effect because more and more people wanted to be in that column and so they would apply and our database started growing, and then whoever would apply, we would also invite them to the meetups. And that started to build social proof. So I think in the early days when nobody knows you, it’s about finding people that have more social proof in that community. We call them out a lot of people, but if you have a network, leverage that network to bring them as guests to partner with them and you get their brand rub. And over time now when two obscure guys host an event and a CEO of Twilio, which is $20 billion company, shows up, that gives me the social proof of that that influencer.

Lee Kantor: So what do you need right now? How can we help you?

Lloyed Lobo: Hey, I’m just pushing the book. I want to spread the message of community and building sustainable businesses. It’s on from grassroots to greatness. Dot com. The digital is for $0.99. I could have made it free, but if it’s free, I have to spread it. If it’s $0.99 more, people will buy it. The reviews will spread it and put all the templates step by step templates on a notion workbook which will be available on from grassroots to greatness. Dot com forward slash bonus.

Lee Kantor: Well, congratulations on all the success you’re doing such important work and we appreciate you.

Lloyed Lobo: Thank you so much. Thank you. I appreciate the.

Lee Kantor: Interview. All right. This is Lee Kantor. We’ll see you all next time on High Velocity Radio.