730 - Niche Down to Scale Up: Community-Led Growth, with Lloyed Lobo
Welcome to another episode of sales transformation brought to you by Leadium. Today, we are joined once again by Lloyd Lobo. In this episode, Lobo will be sharing his insights on building a community led growth strategy. Colin, take it away.
Collin Mitchell:Alright. Welcome to another episode of sales transformation brought to you by Leadium. I'm your host, Colin Mitchell. And today, I've got Lloyd Lobo on the show. He's the cofounder of a Fintech company called Boast, and he's also the Wall Street Journal bestseller of grassroots to greatness.
Collin Mitchell:Yeah. And and getting your, you know, first, you know, handful of customers, you know, that founder to founder, you know, sort of approach can be super effective. Right? Because they get it. Right?
Collin Mitchell:They've been there before. Maybe they're a little bit further along than you, but but they understand where you're at, you know, and and are also it can be some of your best customers because they're willing to give you a pretty candid feedback about stuff, which is super valuable. And in a lot of cases, in the early days, more valuable than even paying customers.
Lloyed Lobo:Exactly. Exactly. So here's, like, actually how we did it. Because when we started, so we're selling very obscure product, to a niche. Right?
Lloyed Lobo:So we're basically globally 100 of 1,000,000,000 of dollars are provided in funding for innovation and product development and r and d to businesses by the governments. Like, US government gives 10,000,000,000 every year. Canadian government gives, like, 3 and a half 1000000000. But it's a cumbersome application process. It's prone to frustrating audits, and it takes a long time to get the money.
Lloyed Lobo:So we said we'll automate this process. And so we started by reaching out to oil and gas construction manufacturing, and, none of them would talk to us, man. Like, you know, when when you're looking back, actually, everything seems like a framework when you've grown something. Now it's at over 20,000,000 ARR. But when you're in the thick of things, it's like throwing spaghetti on the wall and, God, make something work.
Lloyed Lobo:But, nonetheless, we we started by trying to sell to oil and gas manufacturing construction, and nobody would talk to us. It was very hard. We started hitting up their events, and we just looked like 2 young guys who threw on a suit jacket on top of a hoodie, and they looked like the cigars club. We couldn't resonate. So we pivoted strategies or rather we got disappointed, dejected, and started going to the new business start up events, and we felt like we found our tribe.
Lloyed Lobo:They were just like us starting out, and we had similar challenges. We started to eat, breathe, drink, sleep that where they did. We started to hang out and party together, host events together. And so then we started to bet on the startup market, and this was 2012, and we went deep there. A lot of people would make fun of us saying, oh, what are you going after this market?
Lloyed Lobo:They're gonna go bankrupt and never pay you. I'm like, your you guys don't wanna service the startups, and your customers won't work with us, so we're gonna serve our own. I think one of the key things is you gotta you know, in in figuring out your ICP, a lot of people, there's a lot written about ideal customer profile. But if you're starting out, how do you figure out your customer profile? You know, my personal philosophy is, is it a market that you that you love and you enjoy spending time with?
Lloyed Lobo:Because as a founder, if you hate your market, as your company grows, you're spending more and more time with your customers. Right? If you hate your market, you're not gonna sustain. Like, think about it. Like, because of our ICP, which is startups, not only we build post for them, which is a product that provides r and d funding to them.
Lloyed Lobo:We also built a massive community of a 120,000 people with conferences and podcasts called Traction. I wrote a best selling book for that same audience, and it's been a journey of over 10 years. If I hated that audience, I wouldn't be able to sustain. Right? The the number 2 thing is, is it a small but growing niche?
Lloyed Lobo:I think a lot of people get carried away that, they gotta start with a big niche and a big TAM because the VC world has you believe this. But the thing is, when you're starting out, you just wanna please 10, 15, 20, 30, 40 people. It's it's almost important more important to niche down than to niche up. Because when you niche down and niche down, you become more and more like your customer, and they see the likeness, and you can find white space. So we didn't go after all business.
Lloyed Lobo:We went after tech businesses. We didn't go after all tech businesses. We went after startups, and we only went after startups in, in a province in Canada versus startups all over North America. That's where we started. And we found the white spaces was, hey.
Lloyed Lobo:Nobody was giving them any love or coverage. And all the events that were happening, they were high level CEO platitudes. They were they weren't tactical advice. And, man, if you started a company, there's only so much Elon Musk you can listen to. Right?
Lloyed Lobo:You wanna know how I get my first ten customers and how I strike that first enterprise deal. So we found that WiseBase. And at the time in in 2012, Instagram, wasn't a thing for business, content. LinkedIn wasn't used for business content as like, no one was sharing, like, tactical business advice. Podcasting wasn't huge for tactical business advice.
Lloyed Lobo:It was mostly, like, blogs and events. And and I'm like, you know, it's gonna take forever to get a blog to compete with the compete with Anil Patel's of the world, the popular guys like the Grant Cardons. So, we reached out to a local newspaper and asked them to give us a blog. And they gave us a blog after much begging and and hacks and back channels. And, once we got that blog, we actually, you know, didn't, you know this is is another lesson for founders or anyone who wants to make it.
Lloyed Lobo:Never ask for permission, beg for forgiveness unless you're doing something illegal. But we call that blog we call that we we call that blog post startup of the week, which implied that the newspaper the national newspaper is giving love to all the startups every week. And then when that went live, this is another thing people don't do, is they put stuff on different platforms and they hope the platform will distribute it. No. You gotta drive traffic to those first several ones.
Lloyed Lobo:And so we begged our friends and, all our network to, like, share, socialize it, and then the editor calls me and says, hey, man. If you commit to writing this every week, we'll make it a print column. And then we I wrote that start up of the week print column for almost two and a half, three years. And so we had a it did a few things. 1, it gave us instant social proof because what we're selling is give me your r and d data and I'll get you funding for the government.
Lloyed Lobo:So it's a huge credibility play. And with the newspaper giving us social proof, we got that credibility. We got a backlink from the highest domain authority website in the country, which is the newspaper. Right? It's I think it's it's on par with the EDU sites.
Lloyed Lobo:And then we put a form in there saying if you're interested in being featured, apply. So everyone would apply. Now whoever applied, we started a weekly meet up meetup at a co working space. Initially, 10 people showed up, would invite a speaker who'd talk tactically about how they got their first ten customers or how they did their first enterprise deal or first angel investment because we knew that was the gap. And we didn't care how many people showed up.
Lloyed Lobo:We just invite everyone in our network and everyone that applied. It just we'd never stop. It just be, like, unfiltered open agenda. We did that week on week on week on week. And one day, 200 people showed up at the coworking space, and they said you can't have such big events here anymore.
Lloyed Lobo:And that evolved into a big traction conference. But because we were in this huge credibility play, meaning we need to show credibility, and our product is, like, almost $20,000 a year ACV. So we need to get in front of people. And I say this now to a lot of people is if you wanna be the cool kid on the block, be the kid that hosts the cool parties. Meaning, we started hosting these start up events.
Lloyed Lobo:We the coworking space let us do it for free, feeding them was pizza and soda, and we would just bring a good name speaker. And to get one good speaker, probably reach out to 50 and one person would come for free and share tactical advice. And, that gave us immense social proof. Right? You got we got the brand rub of the speakers.
Lloyed Lobo:Eventually, others started sponsoring who are bigger named companies that sold to the same audience, and we got their social proof as well. And literally, that's how we started getting customers. And, we were able to bootstrap to 10,000,000 ARR over time with no marketing team, man.
Collin Mitchell:Wow. That's impressive. But that's definitely some out of the box, like, strategy there. Right? And, I think that people don't often think of, like, nontraditional ways of how do I reach, you know, my ideal customer profile, build that sort of brand and reputation in the process.
Collin Mitchell:Right? And and this was obviously like pre, you know, or, you know, social media platforms were kind of where they are today, where, you know, you can do some of that, but I mean, ultimately, people love in person events and it's a huge opportunity to get in front of a lot of your potential customers and do it in a way where you're adding a tremendous amount of value. Right? So I love that. Lloyd, it's been awesome having
Lloyed Lobo:As a founder, you know, as a founder, you have the latitude to do these things. If you're working somewhere else, you can't experience Yeah. Like this.
Collin Mitchell:Yeah. Exactly. Exactly. Yeah. There's there's no boundaries.
Collin Mitchell:Right? So test everything. Hey, Lloyd. It's been awesome having you on the show. Any final thoughts, and then where's the best place for people to get into your world?
Lloyed Lobo:Definitely. You know what? I'm I'm on a LinkedIn sabbatical because I'm on all things business sabbatical, but, you know, I've I've posted some good content on LinkedIn in the past, which has done really well. But, you can follow me on Instagram these days. I talk about all kinds of stuff, double l o y e d, Lobo.
Lloyed Lobo:My book, it's all about community led growth. So the key thing there was I looked at my journey and also researched all the iconic brands that started from nothing, and I found a huge commonality. Basically, every obscure idea that eventually became a global enduring phenomena from Christ to CrossFit went through the exact same state same four stages, and I unpack that in the book. Stage 1 is people listen to you or buy your product. You have an audience.
Lloyed Lobo:When you bring that audience together to interact with one another on a cadence where you're not forcing it, but you're the facilitator, it becomes a community. When the community comes together to create impact towards a greater purpose far beyond your product or your profit, it becomes a movement. And when the movement has undying faith and its purpose through sustained rituals over time, it becomes a cult or a religion, audience, community, movement, religion. So you can find that on lloydlobo.comorfromgrassroostogreatness, dotcom. Yeah.
Lloyed Lobo:And my company boast.ai, boast.ai. If you need r and d funding in the US or Canada, just hit that up and ask for a demo.
Collin Mitchell:Awesome. We'll drop all the links there in the show notes to make it easy. Appreciate you coming on the show. If you enjoyed today's episode, please write us a review, share the show with your friends so we can help more sellers and sales leaders transform the way they sell.
