105. Why community is the key to startup success: A Founder's Perspective

00:00:00
This episode is going to be a little different from the last few because, well, we're here to win the content game, right? We're here to grow our audience, our communities, and make a lot of money from our content. Right? Right. And with every game we play, whether it's in sports, in business, life, or content, a big part of success comes down to who we are.

00:00:24
It comes down to who we are for our audience, for the people that we serve. It comes down to how we approach different situations, especially challenging ones. And it comes down to us committing to this game over and over again, because that resiliency in the face of adversity is the true secret to winning any type of game. And so in this episode, I wanted to have an honest chat with another software founder, Murtaza Bambot from Heartbeat, and expose some of the existing battles that he's been having while he's been having them. Because no matter where we are in our journey to winning the content and entrepreneurship game, we need to have the courage to face them head on and keep going.

00:01:11
So I hope this episode is helpful in motivating you to do exactly that. My name is Deirdre Tshien, CEO and co founder of Capsho, and this is win the content game.

00:01:35
We're going to get straight into some of the hard questions, if that's cool. I love it. Let's do it. All right, cool. I want to know, founder to founder, because this is always on my mind, which is like, we always have problems, things that we're facing right now.

00:01:50
And it's so easy to look back in hindsight and be like, oh, yeah, that was a problem. And then we solved it. And it's great. Everything's great now. But I wanted to ask you right now, as we're standing, I'm sure that there's a ton of things happening within Heartbeat or within your business or even just your life.

00:02:06
Would you mind shedding some light on maybe, what is one hard problem that you're currently battling with? Yeah, it's a good question. I think probably one of the more difficult things is when you pick software, there's like a couple of different lanes that you can pick with heartbeat. What we did, because we wanted to be like the front end facing part of your community where everyone interacts with it. What that means is there's a lot of features and there is a lot of tools that you can use.

00:02:31
And so the surface area of that product is really heavy. And so that also means that the area for which bugs can pop up and issues and problems can pop up is significantly higher and there's already so much optimization that we've done. My co founder Makol has just absolutely killed it. But even still, I think just figuring out a better strategy of how to actually approach and tackle that, because the reality is we're a five person team and it always feels really bad when a customer submits a bug and we're just like, this sucks, and we just don't have the bandwidth to deal with it. And I'm sorry about that right now, but I think for the last couple of years we've had to give that response a lot and now we're thinking more deeply about how do we actually solve that.

00:03:12
Do we hire on a couple of additional engineers just to immediately focus on infrastructure fixes? Because you get in Google engineering salary, six months of that is not cheap. And so it's figuring out a little bit of that on the product side and then I think more on the growth side. The honest answer is growth is just constantly hard. We're a VC funded startup and I think if we were to do it all over again, we would do the same thing.

00:03:37
But when you have investors and when you do need to hit those VC returns every month, you start the month and you're like, all right, I have to hit this level of growth and at the start of every month. So like December 1, I have no idea how we're going to hit it, right. I have a general sense of we're going to do A, B, C and D, and we're going to really work hard and we are going to pray a little bit and then hopefully things come together and you're just like stressing out a little bit until you get to the 29th. And I don't know how, but for the last three years, somehow it just comes together. By the end of the month, usually it comes together.

00:04:10
I mean, we've had like a couple of growth targets that we missed by a bit and it hasn't been that bad. By the end of the month, it kind of comes together, but then on January 1, it's going to start all over again. So I think that hamster wheel of growth is also pretty difficult. And that's like a problem that I'm kind of always wrangling because most growth channels, when you actually look at them, they help you grow linearly. And so the way you actually grow exponentially is you have to keep stacking additional growth channels on top of it and just figuring out what to do, why to do it.

00:04:38
Can it be as effective as some of the other stuff that we've done. And I also have less time and more moving pieces that I have to go ahead and put towards these new growth channels. So I think on the product side, on the growth side, those are probably like the two biggest problems that keep me up. And I don't blame you. I'm like, in my head, I'm like, it's so stressful being on that hamster wheel.

00:04:56
Do you feel yourself personally getting impacted by that cycle? And do you see yourself ever being able to get out of that? So I think at the start, I did. At the start, it was always just like every week, every month felt like this absolute sprint and you're just gunning towards it. And what ends up getting sacrificed is not really work, but it's a lot of the personal relationships and the friends, and I don't call my mom enough.

00:05:25
It's all of that kind of stuff. And so when I was first building companies, even the first maybe like year or two years of heartbeat, I just constantly sacrificed everything in my personal life to make sure that the company was on the right track. Everything was moving forward. And a couple of years ago, maybe a year and a half ago, one of my really close friends that I grew up with, his company is doing incredibly well. It's a company called, and he raised like a 40 million series B or something ridiculous.

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And I got on the phone with him and I was like, hey, man, are you happy? Are you proud? That's a huge accomplishment. You've got to be throwing a little bit of a party. And he was like, mortz is that.

00:06:03
I have never been more stressed in my entire life. And I think when I heard that, that's what it really hit me of, like, this is never going to end. And so either you get used to dealing with the journey and dealing with a lot of the stuff that goes on, or you're just going to succumb to it. And so mayhew, my co founder and I, we have like an executive coach that we work with. And what we've also started getting more thoughtful and intentional about is what is the work that we're just not going to do?

00:06:27
There's only 24 hours in a day. I think we work pretty long days, but at the end of the day, I want to go hang out with my girlfriend, I want to go to the movies, I want to go to restaurants. And so we've started working a lot more intentionally about what is the kind of work life harmony that we want to be moving forward with. So I think that has helped a lot of just like, getting shocked into realizing that you're going to be on this forever, so you might as well fall in love with the journey, too. Yeah.

00:06:53
And that resonates with me so much because myself, I've got two co founders, actually, and we've just been through that exact realization ourselves over the last few weeks, and because of that, we've pretty much shifted. Like, we are so focused now. We actually cut a lot of our team, to be honest, just so that we could focus on the things that we need to focus on. And so I applaud the fact that you're like, we're a five person team. I'm like, I get what you mean.

00:07:19
We are also a small team. When you're talking about bugs coming up, I'm like, yes, that's software for it's never ending. But oh my gosh, after having made that decision between you and your co founder, do you feel lighter? And how do you balance that within the external pressures that are coming towards you, especially with investors and having to deal with all of the support tickets and everything else? It feels like something has to give, and maybe it doesn't, but I'd love to get your thoughts on that.

00:07:51
Yeah. So I think what has to give is just this personal need to always know what's going on. That's what you have to give up. And so this year has probably been the best year of my life. In terms of building startups.

00:08:06
This has been the most fun for me. I'm not constantly stressed out. I don't have anxiety all the time. I can go out of bed at a reasonable hour. I will say, looking back on having done this for the last year, it feels a lot better.

00:08:20
And I have a lot more juice kind of going into January and February and March, which for us is like our heavy sales seasons. So I feel really good and refreshed, and I'm not super worried about things. I think the biggest thing that you have to give up is just this need for control. And the problem is the types of people that become founders generally are very good at controlling all of the chaos around their lives. That's why they went out and became founders.

00:08:44
And you just start to realize there's way too much of it and you can't control it and you just let it go. And so, I don't know, it's like driving in the dark without your headlights on. You just kind of have to trust that you're a good driver and keep moving and things will work out and it's like, at the moment, yeah, it's kind of terrifying. But then when you get to your destination, you're like, all right, well, we did it. Done it before.

00:09:03
I could do it again. And so I think that's really what you give up. And it's that psychological thing because this is a conversation I've had with my coach quite a few times, is I felt like I was telling him, I was like, look, man, I just feel like I'm playing chess against my brain. And he's like, that's pretty much it. That's the job.

00:09:18
And you're going to keep doing that until you IPO. And so realizing that I am most likely the limiting factor in terms of all of that success that we're chasing after is a little bit freeing because you're like, okay, at least I could work on that. Wow, that's really insightful. And such a good analogy as all you gave with the drive. That is exactly what it's like.

00:09:38
It's like, okay, well, I'm just going to trust. I know that the curb is there, just not yet. Exactly. I can feel for a shoulder a little bit. Okay, I want to get into communities now.

00:09:48
This has also been on my mind. Let's start with what made you so passionate about communities. So I have been in communities since I was a kid. Like very heavily involved in them. So I grew up as a muslim kid in Atlanta, Georgia, after 911.

00:10:03
So we're just going to call a spade a spade. I was not going to school and making a ton of friends. Nobody wanted to be friends with the brown kid. And so most of my friends were actually online. Growing up, this was like runescape guilds and things like that that I was a part of that I was super active in.

00:10:17
I was the kid that raced home, jumped on my computer, and that's where I met and hung out with all my friends. And as a result of that, too, even our local moss community and things like that, I was really heavily involved there because that's where I saw all the other people that looked like me and talked like me and all of that. And so I did know I went to Georgia Tech for college. I started a bunch of student organizations while I was there. That's how I met my girlfriend, who I'm hoping to propose to.

00:10:44
We met because we started to start a hackathon together on Georgia Tech's campus. We did that. Yeah. That's always my advice to single founders is go start a hackathon. Things will work out.

00:10:54
That's where you're going to find your future, right? Yeah. And so we did that, and then I ran a business fraternity for a couple of years, but all of this was like different culminations of just working with and helping organize big groups of people. The bigger impetus around Heartbeat was my time with Georgia tech startup accelerator in Atlanta. So I started my first company, spun that down when COVID hit, and then I joined Georgia tech startup accelerator.

00:11:18
Initially, I was a partner for them. I was the youngest partner they'd hired at the age of 24. But I eventually became their head of community. And what I didn't know is they're actually the second largest startup accelerator in the world right now. They're running these massive cohorts, about 100 companies per cohort, so 200 to 300 founders.

00:11:36
So y combinator is the only one that's bigger at this point. They've had their first unicorn come out of it. They've had all these massive successes, and it's a public tech school that tells all of their engineers to go build startups. Right. So it kind of makes sense where all these people are coming from.

00:11:49
But what we found is that when we built community, well, every metric we cared about across the board was increasing. So we had companies going from, like, zero to six figure revenue over the course of a single summer. We had seven figure acquisitions out of every cohort. We had people going out raising these Silicon Valley level raises, and this wasn't New York. This wasn't San Francisco.

00:12:08
This was a collegiate startup accelerator in Atlanta, Georgia. I mean, these were unheard of returns. You had 19 and 20 year olds becoming millionaires. And so all of this is happening, and it's so clear that the community is the reason why. The tools to run it are an absolute nightmare.

00:12:20
I had budget. I had money. There was just nothing to spend it on. And so after looking for several months, Mayhew and I kind of got together and said, let's just build this thing ourselves, because we'd already seen all these different variations of community and how fulfilling they could be. And then that second piece of seeing what great community could look like and how it could actually move a business forward, that was kind of the unlock that I think we were missing that prevented us from starting heartbeat earlier.

00:12:44
And once we started seeing and experiencing a lot of what that looked like, we were like, we can help a lot more people do this. It's not actually that complex from a technical standpoint. There's other problems, but, like, I think we can solve this. And that's kind of what kicked off heartbeat. Yeah.

00:12:58
That's so cool. Okay. And heartbeat has been going on for how long now? So we started the company in October 2020. So it's been about three years.

00:13:05
And then we launched the product about 18 months ago. Wow. Okay. So super amazing growth from there. Congratulations.

00:13:13
That's amazing. Now I want to know. Delving into community because it can mean a lot of things. Community is such a broad term, which is probably why at the beginning, you were like, yeah, so heartbeat does a lot of things because I think community means so many different things to so many different people. So what does it mean to you?

00:13:31
What does community mean to you? I never know how to answer that question. For me, community is this space of just belonging where you can be your true self. You can take off the masks, you can be exactly who you want to be, and you have a group of people that can either support you or help transform you into where you want to be in life. And that's always what I think of is there's different types of communities, and there's always a spectrum of support and transformation.

00:13:58
Every community lives somewhere on that spectrum. Nobody is completely on one side or on the other side. And so every community is either helping you kind of live with yourself and be a better version of yourself and all that, or helping you transform and go do the next thing, learn something new, pick up a new skill. But all of them are doing that with this really intense sense of belonging, that wherever you are, you're okay, you're good. I love that you answer that very well.

00:14:23
Even though you said you were going to struggle with that. That was an amazing answer, because that actually leads me to when I hear that, it vibes me. But I don't know whether a lot of people, myself included, is well equipped to build a community like that in that sense. So I don't know, and I might be wrong, but I'd love to hear from you. Do you think that everyone's cut out to build a community?

00:14:44
What makes someone suited to really building a thriving community? Yeah. So here's my honest take, is we as human beings have been in tribes and all of these different networks and communities for the last 10, 20, 30,000 years. At this point, it's evolutionary. It's in our blood.

00:15:06
Right? If we'd just been doing this for, like, five years. I sound like an asshole saying that, but we've been doing this since hunter gatherer tribes years and years and years and millennia back. So my take is, yes, anybody can build a community, but let's talk about what the actual hurdles are for doing that in today's day and age. I think one of the biggest hurdles is the understanding and just feeling comfortable going out and using technology.

00:15:31
Because even for me, my take is all of the community tech is actually pretty new because the Internet itself is new. We are still trying to figure out how to take a lot of these things that worked in person, how we built relationships, specifically how we built trust and safety. And then how do we take all of that and move that online? Because that trust and safety is probably one of the most important pieces of building a good community. Nobody's going to have these vulnerable, honest conversations if they feel like it's going to be tweeted tomorrow.

00:15:59
So understanding how to move a lot of those conventions online is, I think the biggest difficulty right now for a lot of people. The second thing I think that hurts people is focus. Where we are at in today's world, you're just bombarded with so much information and so many different options and all these things that you can do. And what I find is the communities that really struggle, they're doing way too much, way too early. And it becomes this kind of like death by 1000 paper cuts thing where it's like, all right, I have these events that I'm running, but I also have this course, but I also want to release this workbook, but I also have this ebook that's coming out and it's just like cut all that out and just focus on one thing and make it really stellar in ten X.

00:16:38
But I've been so surprised by the types of people that have built communities on heartbeat. At this point we have over 5000 communities on the platform. We've got people in their fifty s and sixty s who have been able to build really great empty nester communities. There's a really successful community which is just for women over 50 that want to be fit. And it's just like a fitness community specifically around that.

00:17:02
We've seen communities started by neurodivergent folks which historically struggle to build a lot of social relationships that are massive and very active because it's something about interacting online that makes it easier for them to communicate versus trying to tell a bunch of facial cues in person. One of the more interesting ones is we have a community of brain damage survivors and the crass joke that one of the founders made and she's like, look, your UI is so easy that people with brain damage can easily use it and I haven't had any click. Great. That was not what we were going for, but I'm really happy to get the mark for you. But it's all these different types of folks that we've seen build these successful communities.

00:17:39
So at the start, I think I was like, oh, people have to look like me and be like me. They have to be like these folksy, Jonesy people. They really don't. Any type of human can build this, because if you go out and build a community, it's likely that you're bringing more people together that look like you and talk like you, and that's great. Those people will vibe a lot more with your personality and your communication style than they would with mine.

00:18:02
That's so interesting. And you mentioned before about how there's just so much that we get bombarded with now in this day and age. And I can tell you the number of, quote unquote, communities that I'm part of on Facebook. It's just like, group, group, group. So heartbeat was amazing because it's like, okay, this is now a way that we can get people off all of the noise on there.

00:18:23
And yet still, I know that people, even in our community, in many other communities, and talking specifically to coaches, consultants, service providers mainly, I would say that a lot of them would serve other entrepreneurs, potentially. And we know that they're in a lot of communities. Right. So how do you become the place for people? What's your thoughts on that?

00:18:49
How do you become the number one place that your people want to hang out in? It's by building, like, a TEDx. Better experience is the honest answer. And that's a high bar. So let's kind of break that down, because there's also a lot that's baked into it.

00:19:04
So I think one of the harder things is actually building founder communities, because founders just tend to be so busy, they're running around like anybody that's running and building a small business has a million things on their plate. So my take is one, just ignore all the other communities that people are a part of. There will always be something shinier, better, cooler, or whatever than what you're doing instead, what I kind of recommend, as you're thinking about amping up engagement, specifically satisfaction with the community, is, first off, just picking one lane that you want to do better at than anybody else. If you think about a small business owner or a consultant or like a coach, there's a lot of times that you'll send them content and they'll hit delete, spam, whatever. But there are also times where you'll send them something and they will always pick it up.

00:19:51
And I would think about what that looks like for at least startup founders. I know there's two things. One is if their investor calls them, they will always pick that call up. But two is if a really talented founder is there that they look up to. So it's like if I run a founder community and every two months I bring in the founder of somebody that started a billion dollar business, I can guarantee that no matter how busy their days are, they're always going to show up on that call because they want to be there live.

00:20:22
Especially if I give them the answer to just ask questions in the audience and have the conversations they never could get before then. It's huge. The other thing that I found with founders specifically, and this was when I was running Georgia Tech's community, is there's so much going on, and you don't really have a time to process it mentally. And most founders don't even have health insurance. They can't afford a therapist or anything like that.

00:20:44
And so the second secret thing that I found is they love therapy. And so we used to do these events once a month, and we would call them fuck up Wednesdays where you just show up and you talk about the biggest screw up that you made that month. And we would always kick it off where we would bring one of the mentors, one of the coaches of the accelerator, someone that was really respected, and they would kick it off talking about their biggest screw up. One of them, basically. We've had some cool stories of know, hey, I did this, and then my co founder sued me, and then I was in court for a year, and it was exhausting.

00:21:18
There was one of them where they were like, I had the chance to acquire Photoshop before Adobe did, and I didn't. He's like, I think about that all the time. It's like, things like that, right? And so it kicks off the conversation. Everyone's like, oh, wow, we could be really vulnerable here, and everybody can kind of let go of a lot of the stuff that they're carrying with them.

00:21:37
And there's something about just saying it out loud in a group of people where he just kind of lets go into the universe. And so it was things like that that got people to regularly show up regardless of how busy they are. And so my thinking is, know, what are the phone calls that a consultant will always pick up? It's going to be often clients, but there's probably a couple other angles of that, too, that really, really matter to them. With heartbeat, what we found is the events that drive the most attendance are anything around monetizing your community, anything around growing engagement or growing the membership size.

00:22:09
If we do an event on any of those three topics, we can snap our fingers and get to 200 RSVPs. So that's what we started tinkering around with and testing with. But if you think about just like, a general community, once you start really hyper optimizing on those things, sure, your community might not be the best place to ask a question and instantly get 20 answers, but you probably have the best events on the block, and everybody's showing up. And the way people will even phrase it is like, yeah, if you want to get the most out of this community, show up to the events and ask some questions live, and you'll get a ton of help. And there's a bunch of people in the audience that are great, and that's a really good place to be.

00:22:43
Right? Like, okay, you've got your edge. You've got the thing that you're working on now. We can just continue optimizing it and scaling it up and making that thing work, rather than trying to say, we have the best events and the best courses and the best discussions, then there's always someone over here. And then, by the way, we have office hours, and then we have this feedback chat, right?

00:22:59
Then you just get lost in all the minutiae. That is so cool. Okay, because I'd never thought about it this way, but what I want to ask you now, because this is, like, totally opening my eyes to the possibilities, is, like, when we do look at the quote unquote success of a community now, from you saying that, I'm like, that would look different for everyone, for anyone building community. So I want to delve a little bit into that with you because I know that there are people listening to this who are fully like, and I say this because I'm one of those people, like, oh, my gosh, I feel like I'm failing at this. We don't have the most active discussion board happening.

00:23:36
We don't have, as you said, like, a ton of people piling in to answer questions, all these things. So how do you break down success of a community? And what are some different ways that we can be looking at our own community in those ways? Let me talk about this lens from the hearth, like our own customer community, and how we thought about a lot of that. There were a couple key goals, but there was one basically master goal above everything else.

00:24:01
The smaller key goals is we needed it to be, like, a really great shining example of what a great heartbeat community could look like. Because when people are coming in to test out heartbeat, play around with it, it's one of the first things that they're going to see. The other thing is we wanted it to be a place to get answers to questions and support and things like that. And this is purely like a math thing, is if you look at the prices that we're charging, you cannot profitably offer live chat support to people on a $50 a month tier. The numbers in Excel just do not map out.

00:24:33
And so we didn't want to just say, like, we're taking away live chat from everyone, but we wanted to figure out ways that we could offload a lot of the burden from the live chat team that we have and shift it over to the community. So at least you have the community members actually coming in and supporting you. So those were kind of like two of the smaller goals. And the last smaller goal was to be really like a lighthouse of what great community content and learning and practices could be, so that if you wanted to come and learn how to build a community better, you could come into ours. The overall big master Mac Daddy goal is sales.

00:25:08
Like that community drives sales for Harvey. And so that's what we're thinking about a lot, is, when we do this, is it going to drive sales? Is it not going to drive sales? Because if it's not driving sales, then it's going to leave. Obviously, you have to do things from a very genuine and human and honest standpoint.

00:25:23
People should not be in your community and feel like they're constantly being sold to, but, like, that's the reality of why the community exists. And we don't shy away from that. We'll tell people that on calls. Yeah, we put in all this time and energy and money into here because of sales for heartbeat. Otherwise my investors would kick me, like, and even Katie, who runs the community, and I feel like I'm pulling up our shirt a little bit, but she doesn't have a community background.

00:25:45
She's never built a community before. When I was looking for that role, I wanted someone with a sales. Like, I wanted someone who understood. How do you get people in? How do you make them feel comfortable?

00:25:55
How do you answer all their questions? How do you get them into the right buying mindset, swipe a card, move forward? And then how do you line out that whole process and fine tune and optimize every single step of it? Right. And she had the right temperament to run a community.

00:26:08
If you see her in group conversations and things like that. She knows how to make people feel included, feel like they're a part of it, to lead and guide the discussion into a place where it needs to be. So it was kind of seeing that she's got the right temperament. She knows how to work with people and manage these large creeps. But she is killer at sales.

00:26:24
Like, what Katie did is by the time she was 23, she was running a seven figure CPG business at a retail contract with Walmart. I mean, Katie is. Katie is sometimes hungrier than I am on some of these deals. We'll list a custom price point for one of our larger business customers, and Katie will be like, bump that up 20%. Right.

00:26:41
So it's like, we didn't even hire a community person to run our own community. As a community company. We hired a salesperson. That's why I really do believe all of these are learned skills. But your community does have to have a specific goal, and then everything does have to tie back to that specific goal.

00:26:55
Yeah, that's super interesting. Okay, so obviously, everyone on here, I will get my butt kicked if I don't ask this question, because I bet everyone's listening to this going, oh, my gosh, I want that to be my goal. Right? Obviously, we're all founders here. How does Katie actually, and I'll say the word funnel, I don't know if it's.

00:27:16
But that's just how my mind works in terms of the steps. How do you think about the things that you put on, the conversations that you start, whatever it is, how does that get choreographed in a way that does lead to a sale? Can you give us any insight into that? Yeah. So the biggest thing is the events.

00:27:32
And so what we do with the events is we are bringing in folks to three times a month. We'll bring in some small business expert, somebody that's going to teach some degree of community building. So, like, yesterday, we had someone come in and they were talking about events, facilitation techniques to make really life changing events. And so they'll come in, they'll do a talk. The way we structure that is the first 50 minutes of the call are really all theirs.

00:27:56
They can talk about whatever they want. And because there are a lot of small business experts, a lot of them are also there to get clients and things like that so they can get their face in front of a lot of the heartbeat customers on our end, that last ten minutes is actually like, we sell you on Heartbeat and talk about, hey, this is what we're doing. This is why we're doing it. It's not like a super aggressive sale, but we'll flash the screen with a nice graphic, they'll show you all the features. And then we have, hey, you can use this link and you get a discount, but you have to use that link in the next two days.

00:28:23
And you don't even have to swipe your credit card. You just have to go create a community. And we know the product is the best salesperson at the company. And so if we can get you into the product, then we're kind of good to go. Either you're going to buy or not buy, but past that me knocking at your door, there's nothing else that's going to actually get you to buy this thing.

00:28:39
So that's sort of our goal with the events, is let's just get you into the product. Now, what that then means is we need to drive a lot of attention and RSCPs and engagement into the events. And so we use our own product to do that. We have pop ups and things like that that will show up in the product for all heartbeat customers. They're just the admins, not the members.

00:28:57
That'll drive them to the events and kind of amp up the attendance. And then what we also do is we have a really strong network of affiliates. It's a lot of customers, a lot of these small business consultants, things like that, that have come in and become affiliates because they believe in heartbeat and they're telling their customers about it. They want some skin in the game, too, which makes sense. What we've done is we've made it so that when an affiliate refers someone to an event with their token, we can track that.

00:29:22
And if that person then ends up converting, they'll get credit for it. So three times a month, the affiliates now have a reason to tell all of their audience, all of their customers about these free events that we run. And they're pretty genuine and they're it. So even if you're never going to buy heartbeat, you're always going to go with, I don't know, like Facebook or something else. You'll still get a lot of value out of these events and 95% of it will be great for you.

00:29:44
And so the affiliates tell people that heavily started amping up our attendance numbers. And then the other thing that we do is we take the entire event recording that we have and we run it through an AI video processor descript, and then turn it into these little bite size five, six minute videos. And then we also publish that the same thing. The affiliates can share that as well, and they share it with their token. Anybody watches a video, we track them and then we can give a conversion back to the affiliate.

00:30:11
And so building that massive content flywheel around events, affiliates driving the engagement, turning it into content, affiliates, driving engagement of the content, that's how we've turned this community into this massive engine that constantly brings new folks into the door. So that's like one of the aspects of how we thought about it. Now, the funny thing is, I have not mentioned conversations in that at all. I think what happens is when you build these really great events and when you start curating this high quality group of people, they naturally just have pretty decent conversations with them. And so where the conversations stem is like, hey, we talked about in this event and this thing was kind of ruminating in my head and I was thinking A, B and C, and I'd love some perspective on that.

00:30:53
Or a lot of the people that are building communities again, they're doing it for the first time, or they're doing it solo. And so they're just trying to get some eyeballs and some help and some feedback, and so they'll make like a loom video of the community they made posted in the heart and five people will comment on some feedback and some stuff that they could improve and things like that. But those five people are also scanning to constantly see how other people are building their community because they want inspiration too. They want to see how can I do this better. But all of the conversation that we have actually bleeds out of the events.

00:31:20
We don't really do anything to stir the pot. I don't do daily posts or things like that. It just all happens. That's awesome. Wow.

00:31:28
Okay. I could honestly talk to you forever about this stuff, but I don't want us to end without you selling. Please tell us about heartbeat and where it is that people can try it. Yeah, absolutely. So if you go to Heartbeat chat, that's the website, and you can go on create your own community, it takes like a minute or two and you'll get everything started.

00:31:51
And the reality of what we focus on with Heartbeat is we want to give you all the tools that you need. So the conversations, the documents, the courses, the events, all the automations to run a community. But where our bread and butter really is, is our payment suite and our payments features and making it as easy as possible for you to not just run a community, but a community business. Because what I found of helping run and lead communities over the last ten years is the ones that stick around. The ones that are here for the long term are the ones that actually have a financial plan in place.

00:32:20
They're either charging members, they know how to charge for different products, they're actually building and scaling up revenue. And we want to help you do that as much as possible. So sign up on heartbeat and create your community. We'll help you build and monetize it. And then the last piece of that is as you're actually building that.

00:32:34
We're here with you every step of the way. There's a calendar link on the home page. You can book time with me. We can jump on a call and actually strategize and build your community together. And that's something that we plan to keep going for the long term.

00:32:44
Because honestly, those are my favorite calls of the day. I have the best job in the world of just like I just get to talk to all the community builders, the people that spend all their time thinking about how do you bring people together? Wow, what a generous offer from a generous man. I hope you enjoyed the conversation with Murtasa. Let me know through the comments section of the show notes.

00:33:02
And we've also left the heartbeat sign up link there too. So please go ahead and try it out. Think about how you're bringing people together and go ahead and start building that community. I'll see you on the next episode of Win the content game. My name is Deirdre Tshien and stay intelligent at they lazy.