John Corcoran 6:37
painful. It’s like on the one hand, you’ve achieved the objective you set out for you built this community. And then it must be so frustrating to be like, but we’re not making any money. We’re not getting that validation, and I need to pay rent.
Ryan Paugh 6:51
Yeah, well, exactly. And we also had investors who, who believes in us and, you know, it was one of the most difficult things I’ve ever had to do, which is was pivot away from that focus, and move towards a model that had more longevity, but that’s what we did. And that’s why the company is still around today. Long story short, we, we moved from the community model to more of a software as a service play. Today brazen, which is rebranded brazen careers to praise and technologies now builds white labeled software platforms that enables people to connect for digital networking events. Think about you remember, Chatroulette only I think a few of us remember Chatroulette, when it was around, it was kind of like a creepy video tool where people from around the world were connecting randomly online, there was a lot of you know, just,
John Corcoran 7:49
I didn’t, I didn’t know about that. But that sounds
Ryan Paugh 7:52
real. That
John Corcoran 7:53
sounds fascinating and creepy,
Ryan Paugh 7:55
super creepy. Lot of just, you know, if you want to be creepy, naked people online, that was site to do it. But it’s a fun sort of like piece of internet history right there. We took Chatroulette and turned it into something professional, creating randomized AB style connections between different people. So think job seekers and recruiters think students and alumni. You know, we work with all sorts of types of individuals that want to make those connections, and allow them to have a safe and professional way to chat with each other for a very short amount of time. And then look at the people they’ve connected with and decide if they want to follow up later and build a more meaningful relationship. So it’s like speed speed dating,
John Corcoran 8:42
or it’s like speed networking at a conference. Sometimes that’s become popular, that sort of thing. Yeah. What do you think what in your background prepared you that made you good at doing this and building these types of communities? Is this something you’ve always been good at? Yeah,
Ryan Paugh 8:57
no, I think that, you know, I’ve always always been someone who thrived on bringing people together and connecting dots. In college, I was always the person who was bringing people together for events and and just, you know, thrived on the energy of just bringing like minded people together in the room. I was always like, the person growing up who was trying to create ways for us to connect after high school. And I was always the one who was just really trying to make everyone feel included. And I think that’s the type of sort of healthy helper 10 mentality that makes a good community manager and community builder later in life. So I did have some of those qualities. But again, at the time, there was no Community Manager job title, there was no such thing as community building, as we know it today. I had to sort of figure that out for myself, right? There were many trailblazers at the time when we first started brazen. So it was actually tough to figure that out. But going into the real world, and not really knowing where I fit. And I was just really lucky to find my partners at brazen, and that just opened up so many doors for me, including my next chapter, which was YUC, which eventually turned into something bigger, which is now the community company right now wanted to get into asking about that. And of course, you know, it seems like you discovered, as you mentioned already, that there are many pieces to it. It’s not just about building the community, but it’s also about creating a way to monetize that community, which is important. So how did you take the lessons from brazen into yc? And how did you make that profitable? Yeah, you know, I think with brazen, you know, if we would have went back and, you know, punted intended, have been more brazen ourselves, and maybe put a price down on some of the, you know, the services we were offering. And recognizing that there’s a lot of value in curated community. It may have survived. So with yc, and everything we did there, right after, you know, we really had to make the conscious decision that we are either going to succeed or fail. But one thing was for sure, like people were going to pay to be a part of these communities. And just going in with that attitude, and having confidence in the fact that there was value in curated community, especially at a time when social media was just blowing up. And, you know, everything feels less curated and more noisy.
John Corcoran 11:43
And the opposite direction. Yeah, boy, yeah.
Ryan Paugh 11:46
Yeah. So I think so I think taking that, that leap, and putting it all on the line, and accepting that risk, allowed us to really just hone in on something special, which is this next generation of professional associations and professional communities that that people still need in today’s world, even though we are so connected through the open web web. On the other hand, we’re we’re less connected than we ever were before, because of the fact that it’s so difficult to just tell who’s legitimate from just the average huckster that’s trying to sell you something.
John Corcoran 12:22
Yeah. So with yc, you decide, all right, we’re going to charge for the things we should have charged for before this time. How long did it take for it to get off the ground? Because there’s always I imagine with these communities, there’s an early point where it’s like, Hey, guys, join the community. It’s me and you. It’s like no one else. Right. But yeah, so how do you get that off the ground?
Ryan Paugh 12:43
Yeah. Well, I mean, you know, it’s certainly hard to sell someone to come to a party early and to help you set up. Yeah, right.
John Corcoran 12:52
Everyone wants to come when the room is packed.
Ryan Paugh 12:54
Yeah, that’s that’s exactly right. You
John Corcoran 12:57
set up a velvet rope outside, and you put three people in line you though there’s no one inside?
Ryan Paugh 13:01
Yeah, well, I in a way, that’s kind of what we do. We, you know, we have five founding members, people who we trust and people who we know are like minded, who are interested in what we’re building, and we bring them into the fold and, and offer them, you know, memberships for very little cost. And we give them roles and responsibilities and title founding member titles to be involved in the community. And they really help us see that engagement and ensure that when, you know, our first paying member walks in the door, there is actually discussion happening in our forums. And there is actually content that we’ve already published or a thought leadership platform, and that there are people they can connect with, and trust to be their ambassadors as they get accustomed and acquainted to the community we’ve created. So there’s there’s always, in a way, that seated group of people whose already they’re waiting for you at the door, like you put it, right, right,
John Corcoran 14:04
right. So and but how long did it take for yc to take off or achieve some success? Or was it profitable from the beginning?
Ryan Paugh 14:11
Well, what’s funny is, and this is one of the mistakes that Scott and I often laugh about. And we spent a lot of body artist you know, at first, we were a nonprofit. And we felt we were going to go into this and you know, the organization was going to be funded by sponsorships and, and other forms of revenue. And what we quickly figured out is, again, the only way to succeed is to like, have the the revenue model be based on the people who are going to be participating and have them put skin in the game. So there’s a high level engagement and a high level of feeling of attachment to the brand. So we did spend quite a few years just testing out things that didn’t work. Until we got to that point where we said, okay, we have to go in to this call heartedly with the membership model. And we actually picked up the pace relatively quickly reaching out to people to be involved with the community was a struggle. And at the beginning, Scott and I took every single phone call. And that’s what we were doing. Most days is like we were just like, our own personal call center, Scott and I are had booked our calendars from you know, nine to nine every day, just with calls with prospective members and some of them would just hang up the phone at us and others would be interested in, you know, a percentage of
John Corcoran 15:38
cold calls, where you cold calling people.
Ryan Paugh 15:40
No we we we set up we scheduled calls, we would email people, we were connected them on LinkedIn, and Facebook and other channels. And then, you know, we would we would give them the story, we would tell them what we were building. And I think because entrepreneurship is such a lonely place sometimes. Right?
John Corcoran 15:59
And that was the lesson because before you were working with young ambitious professionals, yeah. Which entrepreneurship entrepreneurs as a market. Yeah, talk to me a little bit about that switch. And what what, what inspired that and how it was different?
Ryan Paugh 16:12
Well, you know, I think after the young professional community that we built with brazen in some ways, I just got lucky, the collision between Scott and I, that eventually turned into a friendship and a business partnership happened because of the connections I made through brazen. And when I, when I saw what Scott was sort of starting to put together, which was like an early version of yc, I was thinking this, this would be the type of community that I would want to build next, as I, you know, start thinking about my exit plan to step away from brazen, and you know, what better thing to do, than to now build a community for all of my peers, I had spent the last five years becoming an entrepreneur, and recognizing that he, you’ve been with cofounders, it’s still lonely and hard. And you need other people that you can lean on. I would selfishly love to have this community. So why don’t Scott I partner up and build it? And that’s how it all came to be?
John Corcoran 17:13
Right? Right? You know, it’s interesting, because I’m a part I’ve been for about the last five or six years has been part of a community that has probably about 100 million members and has been free, but it has had a lot of engagement. And just now actually like this week, they’re shifting from free to $1,000 a year. And so it’s pruning out a lot of people, but it’s also creating a lot more engagement. Now, there’s a lot of people out there who maybe have created some kind of community, whether it’s a Facebook group or something like that. What are your thoughts? You think that should every community be paid? Is that is it is? Or is there a role for free communities? And where do you draw the line? Where How do you make that decision between free versus paid? Thank you fell on you didn’t I
Ryan Paugh 18:02
not? Know is a good question. I think that it really comes back to what are your goals. And I think you know, before you go out and build any community or build any relationships in your life, you kind of have to know why you’re doing it. It all starts with a level of self awareness that’s critically important in anything that you do. And I think for anyone building a community, there can be a number of reasons of why you’re doing it. I think some communities are perfectly fine to just be hobbyist for the rest of your life, and they create a lot of satisfaction for you doesn’t need to be a business. In fact, turning into a business may ruin it for you and turn it into a job. But even if you are doing it for business reasons, it doesn’t have to be a direct revenue, type of business the way ours is. It can be community that purely exists to either a, create new clients for something that’s connected to the community that you all share in common and care about, or to foster relationships with existing customers. To help them get them more engaged to leave less money on the table and to get them to, to trust it and connect with you and your brand, to an extent where they want to spend more money on what it is that you provide to them.
John Corcoran 19:27
So that’s excellent. So give us some examples of some ways in which like maybe some clients that you’ve worked with where you’ve helped build that kind of community?
Ryan Paugh 19:35
Sure. So I mean, right now, we work with a number of media brands to build community around just world recognized brands that they’ve created. Forbes is one of our partners, we’ve built Forbes councils, which is a collection of industry specific and region specific communities for executives and entrepreneurs. We work with ad. And we’ve built a community for top tier media marketing and advertising executives. And we also work with American city business Journal’s which is the parent company of the business Journal’s
John Corcoran 20:13
Oh, well, they have brands within 40 plus markets around the country. And we build communities for executives and entrepreneurs in each of those markets as well. So this is really interesting. This is kind of a repeating theme and interviews I’ve done recently is the tension between the old school media approach and the new school, digitally focused approach, community focused approach and the tensions that exist. So what does that been like for you having to take these old school media properties and say, Hey, guys, here’s what we’re going to do. We’re going to build this community online. And they’re like, no, we’re not we’re going to write articles. And we’re going to keep doing things the way that we’ve always done it. Obviously, they’ve hired us. So someone, at least our management has said, Look, these you guys know what they’re doing. Give them some authority, but there has, I’m sure there’s been some tension there.
Ryan Paugh 21:06
Well, the brands we work with are the best, because they’re the ones that that get it and have brought us into the fold and allowed us to be an extension of their company, and allowed us to create really successful revenue streams for their business. Because they identify that the traditional advertising approach no longer works. And they need to vertical eyes in different ways, and build up new streams of revenue that are going to keep that traditional journalism alive. Because at the end of the day, they still all want to do good journalism. And, you know, we want to help them do that. But in order to do that, you have to be able to take some risks and think outside of the box and get a little bit more innovative because no one’s buying ads anymore. Yeah. That being said, For You know, every partner that said, yes, you got to imagine that, like, we’ve went into a lot of meetings and left with, you know, nothing more than a handshake and a goodbye. And it’s funny, like, we see a lot of those brands come back to us a year later, with a new head of revenue and growth, ready to potentially work with us because they realize that there aren’t a lot of other options. So at the end of the day, like it’s an interesting time, to be in a position where you can provide brand extensions to media companies, or any brand for that matter. Yeah, because there are so many opportunities to take these brands to a new hot to new level, and help them continue to succeed at that baseline thing that they’re so good at and is really critical, important, which is that great journalism that they continue to provide. So we can all learn and, and stay connected to the world,
John Corcoran 22:53
right? And talk about the role for non media companies, how does it work for non media companies?
Ryan Paugh 22:57
Sure. So I mean, we work predominant with media companies today. But there are many companies that we’ve worked with smaller businesses outside of these media companies provide consulting and support. And I think every brand today needs to be focused on building community. And again, it might not be for the purpose of creating a new revenue channel, which is predominantly what we do with with our media properties that we work with. in a lot of instances, again, it’s, it’s for engaging members of their current customer base, or prospective customers, so they can convert them or so they can retain them. And I think that’s something that you’ll see a number of big brands focused on right now, Amazon is a great example. They’ve built tremendous communities around their developer programs, and ways that, you know, technologists Connect around the Amazon brands, we’ve, we’ve worked with countless other startups that you know, are doing a great job at selling, but when it comes to retention, they’re just failing. And you know, it’s great to earn customers, but keeping them is what really makes you grow it and be like that next level of successful. So we see a lot of them working and trying to build community and tools around their products and services, that allow them to feel, you know, not just, you know, connection to the software product. But But something a little squishy, but also meaningful, which is like the feeling like you have a real relationship with the people behind the scenes, and that it’s a place you can go to not just, you know, get access to a toolset that can help you with a specific business need, but get access to a community of people who are probably thinking about the same things that you are. So you can exchange ideas, connect and be better together.
John Corcoran 24:59
For these games, I know people often fixate on specific tools, more so than the strategy. I think, generally my philosophy is the strategy is more important than this specific tools. But for those who are wondering about the tools, do these communities? Should they be on existing social channels like Facebook groups, LinkedIn groups, should they be separate? Should they be their own platform? What’s your philosophy about that?
Ryan Paugh 25:27
You know, it’s, it’s a hard question to answer. And there’s no one size fits all to any of this.
But I think that most communities today
can and should start within something that is already available to them. That’s either really, really cheap, or just totally free. Some of our most successful communities today, still rely heavily on Facebook. And we made that decision strategically, because it would have cost us a lot of money to build a third party tool. A lot of time. And then why would we do that we have access to this amazing network that people are logging onto every day. And most people already have that, you know, nice little square of real estate on their phone, that they’re just, you know, obsessively clicking without even knowing it. And it allows is allowed us to build in a level of connectivity with our members, that would have been a lot more difficult to do. In some cases, if we were building our own third party app, or using one of the other, you know, apps that are available. I mean, there are countless community building tools and forum tools out there that you could, you know, spend money on and use to build your own white labeled community. But I’ll tell you what, I talked to a lot of community professionals, it’s really, really hard to get people on those platforms, you know, more and more, you know, the time that we spend connected is, is sort of like something that we think more critically about as people. And I think that a lot of us, especially busy entrepreneurs, and executives are heading towards a place where like, we’re really trying to create more form boundaries, firm boundaries, because we realized that technology and social media can just take over so much of our lives. And it doesn’t actually give that much back to us. So minimalism really matters, we’re seeing a lot of people that would rather just participate in communities on these networks that they’ve already selected as their chosen few. They try to get them on another third party platform is just really, really tough. It’ll take a lot of time and resources away from other things that you could be doing to help your community. Right, right, right. Yeah.
John Corcoran 27:48
I wanted to ask, we’re running short on time. But I wanted to ask about the role of in person versus online. A lot of these communities I think you’re talking about exists online. But there’s power to this day to getting people together in person. So how how does that play a role in the work that you do? Yeah.
Ryan Paugh 28:09
So I mean, we do both, and they’re both just incredibly important, online is so important, because in today’s world, especially if you’re a busy entrepreneur, or a busy executive, you know, you know that the challenges you have are happening right now. And you can’t wait until the next meetup or events to connect with your peers. To solve that challenge. You need answers today or tomorrow. And therefore, that online curated group of people that you can trust, almost like, you know, a peer hotline is incredibly important. But then, you know, to build relationships that go beyond that surface level, and turn into potential business partnerships, or lifelong friendships. That that requires in person connectivity. So So we do a combination of both, you know, and you certainly don’t have to be everything to everyone, as a community builder, you can pick your niche and stick to it, you may be just great at online, you may be just great at offline. And that’s okay, just be what you’re great at. But recognize that there’s opportunity in both. And just because we live in such a hyper connected world, we shouldn’t forget about the power of meeting face to face and actually experiencing something together. That takes us to a much deeper level that the internet will never allow us to do.
John Corcoran 29:30
I couldn’t agree more I do before we run out of time, I do want to ask you about your book, super connectors, stop networking, and start building business relationships that matter. Tell us a little bit about what’s in the book.
Ryan Paugh 29:41
Yeah, so so thank you super connector is really a combination of 10 plus years of Scott and I building community together, and everything we’ve learned about what works for people and building meaningful relationships, and what does it mean everything in my life that has led to a success for me, I can trace back to a person or a handful of people who I invested time in, and built relationships with who eventually gave me an opportunity. And to that end, I just think it’s really important for us all to remember just how important these relationships are and how they lead to some of the most pivotal moments in our life. And super connector helps us all sort of revisit the fundamentals of what it means to be a great relationship builder, and to make really great connections in a world that has unfortunately bastardized the term networking, and has become more difficult to navigate because of the landscape that social media has become, which is, you know, predominantly overly salesy, you know, everyone’s got a pitch. And it’s really hard to distinguish someone who’s real for someone who’s fake. So we try to present a bunch of our ideas, as well as ideas from different people who we’ve deemed to be super connectors, that that can help inspire you to walk away and figure out how you can build better relationships in your own in your own life. And there’s no one size fits all approach. But I hope that anyone who reads the book will take away some inspiration to start figuring out what their goals are, and what they want to achieve the relationships and to develop their own sort of process of becoming a connector and perhaps even a super connector.
John Corcoran 31:32
That’s great. I love that. I want to wrap things up the question that I enjoy asking last question is, let’s pretend we’re at an awards banquet, much like the Oscars or the Emmys. And you Ryan are receiving an award for lifetime achievement for everything you’ve done up until this point. And what I want to know is, who do you think? Who are the people who are the relationships that have been instrumental to your success in your career so far? Who are the colleagues, the friends, the mentors, we all met your family, me? Sure, that’s great, you can do that. But also know who are the peers, who are the business partners, who are the people that you would acknowledge?
Ryan Paugh 32:07
Well, that sounds really nice to get this award. And I appreciate you know, and I accept it humbly.
You know, for me, like, of course, beyond family, friends, my children, everyone who just plays such a big role in my personal life, like, the people who I would think the most in terms of business success are those individuals who have mostly like, put me in positions to be uncomfortable, and to really work hard. And I’ve always surrounded myself with cofounders, and partners who, in a lot of ways, like, know how to rattle my cage, and know how to really push me to my limits, and know how to help me challenge myself to be a better person. So I would thank all of them, as well, as anyone that I’ve, I’ve chosen to align myself in my life, who is actually the polar opposite of me, and, and continues to, you know, push me harder to be a better version of myself, but also provides me with an extension of who I am. And a skill set that is, is very much aligned with who I am, you know, people that can help, you know, complement each other’s strengths and weaknesses tend to be the best business partners. And once you tend to be too much alike, don’t end up succeeding together, because there’s too much redundancy. So I really would thank all of them. And I would encourage anyone who is looking for a partner and looking to become an entrepreneur and be successful in business to to look for those qualities and the people that they’re going to work with, and try to work with people who make you feel uncomfortable, and really challenge you every day to be a better version of yourself. Great advice, super connector, stop networking and start building business relationships that matter is the name of the book, the community company is the name of the company. Where can people learn more about you? Right? Yeah, I’m pretty easy to find online. You can find me on Twitter. My Twitter handles Ryan, Paul, my, my website is Ryan port calm. And again, our website is community.co. So definitely check us out and give me a holler if you ever want to kick out and talk about community. I’m always into that.
John Corcoran 34:22
I certainly enjoyed it. So I would encourage others to do it as well. Alright, thanks so much, right.