How to Use Community as a Lever in Your Business – Lloyed Lobo

Community-led growth is more than just a buzzword in business; it’s a powerful growth strategy. But how do you incorporate it into your organization? Our guest today has the answers!

Meet Lloyed Lobo. Lloyed is an inspiring entrepreneur, podcast host, and community builder. He’s currently the Co-Founder of two innovative companies, called Boast.AI and Tranction. Having experienced the Gulf War as a young refugee in Kuwait, Lloyed witnessed first-hand the true raw power of community in evacuating the population to safety. Fast forward a few years, he used the strength of the community as a lever for his business success. Not only that, but he even wrote a book about it! His latest accomplishment is called  ‘From Grassroots To Greatness: 13 Rules to Build Iconic Brands with Community-Led Growth’, where Lloyed shares his tips for using your community’s strength as your ultimate brand differentiator, retention lever, growth moat, and much more.

He firmly believes that communities have the power to move mountains and that if you want to get ahead in business, it’s vital to focus on community-building and connection.

In this episode of the Think Business with Tyler podcast, we talk about the importance of surrounding yourself with the right people, why it’s essential to have a genuine passion for your audience, how to use your definition of success to make important decisions, and the power of self-care for entrepreneurs.

If you want to learn how to harness the power of community in your business, tune into this episode to hear what Lloyed has to say.

Guest-At-A-Glance

💡 Name: Lloyed Lobo

💡 What he does: He’s the Co-Founder of Boast.AI and Traction.

💡 Noteworthy: Lloyed is also the author of ‘From Grassroots To Greatness: 13 Rules to Build Iconic Brands with Community-Led Growth.

💡 Key Quote: “I understood the power of great leaders and how they make even the lowest person feel like they’re part of the mission. I understood the power of people and coming together united by a great purpose, they can move mountains. And years later, I realized that it also gave me the affinity for entrepreneurship.”

💡 Where to find him: LinkedIn

Key Insights

Surround yourself with the right people in life. You know what they say: you’re the average of five people closest to you. As an ambitious entrepreneur, it’s even more vital to have this saying in mind when choosing your tribe. Ultimately, who you surround yourself with determines your reality. Lloyed explains, “Your companions matter the most. You truly become the average of the five people you surround yourself with. Who you’re with can make you in an elevated state of a rock star like mine or make you feel like a peasant, so make sure the people you surround yourself with are positive. They uplift you. They give you opportunities. You learn from them.”

Passion for your audience is vital for a community-led company. To build a community-led business, there’s nothing more important than loving what you do and who you do it for. Genuine passion for your audience is vital for your company’s long-term success. It’s what motivates you to keep going when things get tough and puts a smile on your face when every time it works out. Lloyed says,  “Do I have a passion for this audience? Can I keep creating, building a company, building a community-led company in particular is a labor of love is a marathon of the heart and mind. If you hate your audience, you will not sustain, man, because you’ve got to spend all your time with them. So how are you going to do that?”

Define what success means to you. Before you make any major decisions as an entrepreneur, it’s crucial to understand what your definition of success is. This clarity will serve as your North Star, guiding you to the right decisions and helping you overcome any challenges that come your way. Lloyed explains,  “If you want to build a unicorn, a billion-dollar company to create this big impact, do it by all means, but don’t do it for the wrong reasons. Because almost every founder that’s been successful and built a unicorn, ‘cause I’ve had so many of them on my podcast, they’re doing it for the right reasons ‘cause they want to do it. They wake up every day wanting to do it. But don’t do it for the wrong reasons ‘cause it’s sexy. It’s cool. Start by defining your definition of success. And if your definition of success is, I want to create something that will impact billions of people and change their lives and that’ll motivate me ‘till I die, and I want to wake up doing that every single day, do it, go raise venture money.”

Self-care comes first when you’re an entrepreneur. One of the biggest mistakes that most entrepreneurs make is they sacrifice self-care for the success of their business. But these two things go hand in hand. They are inseparable elements for a successful entrepreneurial journey. Lloyed says, “Self-care is not selfish. If you can do something for yourself, wake up before you do anything else, work out. Exercise releases endorphins in your brains that calms the feeling of stress, and it pumps you up. And something with weights, especially when you lift more, you can push more. Pain is the precondition for growth in life, in business. […] Pain you endure as a function of doing difficult things, taking on new challenges that were hard for you now will seem easy, and you become stronger.”

Top Quotes

“I understood the power of great leaders and how they make even the lowest person feel like they’re part of the mission. I understood the power of people and coming together united by a great purpose, they can move mountains. And years later, I realized that it also gave me the affinity for entrepreneurship.”

“Now you’d be like, Hey, a war gave you the affinity for entrepreneurship? Today, entrepreneurship has become about making money, but really, to me, what entrepreneurship is taking an obscure idea to execution and impact while dealing with extreme risk, uncertainty, and ambiguity. No bigger risk, uncertainty, ambiguity than a war.”

“My life is a lot of stories like this stories of luck. And I tell people that luck and risk are two sides of the same coin. People who don’t get lucky, they don’t flip enough. The ones who get lucky, they keep flipping risk, risk, risk, risk.”

“If you want to get better at something you suck at, put yourself in an environment, not self-motivation, put yourself in an environment that forces you to do that.”

“I don’t care what you say. One of the top skills is communication. Get better at it. Everything is communicating.”

“There is nothing bigger than the power of human-to-human connection. Loneliness is the number one killer in America. And there’s this concept of blue zones, which are the five places in the world where people live functionally until the year hundred. Functionality is key to longevity. Longevity without functionality is useless. And those places have nine traits, four or five out of the straights have to do with human-to-human connection.”

“From Christ to CrossFit, every obscure idea that became an enduring global phenomenon went through the exact same stages, exact same four stages. People listen to you. You have an audience. […] When you bring those people to interact with one another, it becomes a community. Now, when the community comes together to create an impact towards a far greater purpose than your product or profit, 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. […] And the key to taking an audience to something that’s enduring over time is community. That’s the stepping stone.”

“Number one rule. If you don’t have the DNA of giving and you want to extract value before you give value, just don’t build a community. You need to have a DNA culture of giving. Your core value should be I want to help others. If you want to extract value before you even give value, don’t do a community. Do direct response, sales ads, whatever, but don’t do this because this is a long haul. That’s key.”

“These two tactics wouldn’t come if we didn’t have a love for that audience if we didn’t understand where they eat, breathe, drink, sleep. Not only understand their problems and goals, because problems and goals are short-lived but understand their aspirations. Aspirations are long, right? And when you build a massive company, eventually, you have more than one product. If you focus on the problem, you’ll just be stuck there. If you focus on the aspiration, then you’ll build multiple things on that path.”

Links

‘From Grassroots To Greatness: 13 Rules to Build Iconic Brands with Community Led Growth’

Personal Website