What's up, everyone? This is Cortland from IndieHackers.com, and you're listening to
the IndieHackers podcast. On this show, I talked to the founders of profitable internet
businesses and I try to get a sense of what it's like to be in their shoes. How do they
get to where they are today? How do they make decisions both at their companies and in their
personal lives? And what exactly makes their businesses tick? The goal here, as always,
is that the rest of us can learn from their examples and go on to build our own successful
online businesses.
Today, I am sitting down with Derek Anderson and David Spinks. Derek is a co-founder of
Startup Grind, a global community of entrepreneurs meeting each other in person and at conferences.
And today, he runs a business called Bevy, which allows companies to host and run thousands
of real-world community events like he did with Startup Grind.
David is the VP of Community at Derek's company, Bevy. He's also the founder of CMX, which
is a business he built after realizing the ironic fact that there are thousands of people
like myself all over the world who are building and organizing communities, but none of them
are actually talking to each other because they're not part of a community themselves.
So he built CMX to fix that.
David, Derek, welcome to the IndieHackers podcast. It is a pleasure to have you both
on here.
Thank you so much.
Derek, we're going to run a tight ship here. Derek, you go first. David, you follow up.
Excited to be here.
Thanks for having us.
So there's a lot of similarities between the three of us. Probably the most striking one
is that we've all started communities. But specifically, I started a community, IndieHackers.
I ran it as a business until it was bought by a bigger company, Stripe, where I work
today. And David, you did the same thing. You recently sold your community, CMX, to
Derek's company, Bevy. So we're really similar in that respect. This show is usually about
people who are doing things the other way around, people who quit their jobs as employees
to strike it out and become founders. What's it like going in the opposite direction and
no longer being a founder?
It's definitely a lot of change, different expectations, different pressures. I think
as a founder, you're constantly thinking about how are we getting to that next stage? Are
we going in the right direction? You feel a lot of the weight on your shoulders to make
all those kinds of directional decisions. And so no longer being a founder, definitely
feeling a weight lifted that it's not all on my shoulders. It's mostly on Derek's shoulders.
Yeah, it's his responsibility now.
Yeah, it's Derek's responsibility. But there's also unique pressures that I wouldn't have
as a founder. As a founder, you have a lot of freedom. The other side of that coin of
having to make the decisions is that you get to make the decisions and you get to choose
a direction. You don't really have others that you're necessarily answering to. Now,
I'm not my own boss and I do have to consider other people's goals, other people's direction
and the direction that Derek wants to take things and align with that.
Which thankfully, we have been very aligned on the direction of things and spent a lot
of time making sure that that was true before moving forward with the acquisition.
You have a much better job title than me. I think you were VP of community at Bevy.
I think mine, I'm like Chief Indie Hacker at Stripe or something completely silly. I
think what you're saying is very true. There's a very different type of pressure when you're
a founder that you just don't have as an employee. But at the same time, I think when you come
into a company through an acquisition, at least for me, I feel this intense pressure
to make sure the acquisition is a success. I don't want Patrick from Stripe to be disappointed
that he bought Indie Hackers. Do you feel the same with CMX and Bevy?
Yeah, absolutely.
Just a reminder, David, that I'm on this podcast too. I'm listening in on everything
you're saying.
Derek, if you want to just take a walk around the block, we'll call you when we're ready.
I think there's pressure from multiple angles. There's definitely the pressure to want to
make it successful and to have Derek and the rest of the team feel really good and excited
about the decision because they're taking a risk on us.
There's also pressure from my team that I made the right choice for the employees of
CMX who all came over with us that they're happy with the work they're doing and with
the direction of CMX. Then, of course, there's the pressure from the community and wanting
to make sure that you do right by them, which is the biggest concern ultimately and risk
when you have a community be acquired is the community has a lot of questions about how
things will change. Will we still be community-driven and focused on the community? We've definitely
put a lot of effort into making sure we communicate that stuff really clearly and we're really
transparent and that we continue to be community-driven.
Derek, what about you? From the other side of things, I know that buying a company, actually
making an acquisition, has to be stressful. I say that because for me, just hiring a contractor
is stressful. I can't imagine buying an entire company. What goes into that and how did it
feel to actually go through this process?
I think the whole thing started from the right place, where David and I had a lot of mutual
respect for each other, had developed a friendship and that's not necessarily the norm. I think
sometimes these things happen really fast and sort of spur of the moment. I would also
give David a lot of credit. I'm probably more loose and fast and David's much more methodical
and I think patient and I think sort of driving a lot of the questions up front of what is
this gonna look like? I do this sometimes and I think it's a good exercise when you
are gonna employ one of your friends, which is not really advisable. I highly recommend
not doing that in almost any situation, but when I do do that, I always sit down with
them and I'm like, look, here's the worst case scenario. Six months from now, we hate
each other. I fire you or you quit or something and what happened? What had to happen for
that to happen and how do we avoid that? I think David and I discussed all different
types of scenarios and it was exhaustive. I'm grateful for that level of detail at this
point and I felt great when it was completed and I felt great when we got to announce it.
I felt great when we had the really positive response from the community. I think we didn't
get a single piece of negative feedback about it, which of course you hope for that, but
I don't think that's a realistic expectation. It's been really fun to spend more time with
David and his team and to learn from them and for us to get better overall. We've taken
some of their values and tried to adopt some of ours to better match what they had, which
in many cases they have better way of describing things or better way of doing certain pieces
of marketing. There's just all these things that we're learning from them that's helping
us get better too.
Another similarity between us, besides the fact that David and I have sold our companies
to bigger companies, is that all of us are involved in the communities. All of us have
started communities, but the people listening to this podcast aren't necessarily obsessed
with building communities. If they have one thing in common, it's that they want to be
founders. Being a founder is really freaking hard. There's a million things to do. A question
for both of you, maybe David you could go first. Why should founders care at all about
companies? I think every company is a community. From the very start of building your company,
what you're doing is actually building a community. It's a community with the intention of growing
and driving profit and growing a team and providing a lot of value to customers. But
it starts with a founder or founders with an idea that goes out and convinces other
people that this idea is worth investing in and spending time on and being a part of.
They get people to join their team. That team is going to have a set of values. They have
a common interest, a common goal, a common mission. It's all the things that we know
to be what makes a community.
From the very start, I think founders need to be thinking about not just how do we build
a successful business, but how do we build a successful community? A place where people
feel connected, where they feel aligned with that mission, where they feel safe, where
they can express themselves safely and communicate safely. Those are the things that also make
really successful businesses.
Now that's on a cultural values mission and brand level in a practical level of how it
can actually help a company achieve its goals. I think that community is the future of how
businesses are working.
I shared this today. I think an interesting way of thinking about it is companies have
traditionally functioned as authoritarian governments in a way. They centralize power.
The team owns everything. The team decides everything. Then they distribute their product
and their marketing and things out to the customer.
What we're seeing is a shift to the democratization of businesses and marketing, where you have
your brand, you have your product, you have your marketing, and then you have these customers
who want to be involved. They want to be advocates. They want to help you improve your product.
They want to help bring more people in. We're seeing more and more companies now actually
give control and give power and autonomy to their customers and to these advocates and
ambassadors and contributors to empower them to be a part of the business, to be a part
of the brand.
Step one is building a strong sense of community, something that people feel like they belong
to and they want to be a part of. Then step two is looking for those opportunities to
activate those people, give them the opportunity to contribute to your mission and contribute
to your objectives. If you do that, you can actually scale up your business and all the
parts of your business in incredible ways with relatively extremely low costs.
If I'm a marketer and I'm trying to reach 10,000 people in real life, actually try to
build connections with them through offline interactions, I can either hire 1,000 people
all over the world to host events, or I can empower our community members to self-organize
and create events and now I can actually have touchpoints with 10,000 customers and be spreading
that brand in a very on-the-ground grassroots kind of way with a relatively small team.
So it's that exponential value of community that I think is a real opportunity for businesses.
As a founder, day one, you've got a million different things to do. It's really hard to
focus on something that might not pay off for a while like building a community. Is
that true? Should founders start thinking about communities from day one or is it something
you should put off until later?
Yeah, I mean, I think the quality of the community you build around your business will translate
to the quality of your business. So if you build a culture in your business that doesn't
really value the voice of your customers and the people who are taking that early leap
on you, that's going to build a foundation that as your company grows, that'll just become
part of the values that you have that you don't value community.
So I think by starting out with a fundamental belief and investment in community, what you're
doing is creating a strong foundation for the future of your business. So as you get
more customers, as you grow, that value continues to show itself and continues to be a part
of what kind of company you're building. So it really depends what kind of company you
want to build.
There are people that want to just build an app, have very little interaction with customers,
but just get kind of passive income. And that's all they want. They just basically want passive
income. They don't have a grand mission. They're just trying to make a little bit of money.
If that's the case, then yeah, maybe you don't really need to invest in community. But I
think I haven't met too many founders like that. And most of the founders I meet are
building something because they're really passionate about it because they're trying
to make a meaningful impact on the world. They're trying to solve an important problem
or a problem that they've experienced. And so the kind of company they build and how
they interact with people and the experience they create for employees and customers is
going to be really important to them.
So investing in community is, for those kinds of companies, I think a non-negotiable. And
if you're an indie business owner, especially in the early days, you have to. Your product
is probably still really minimal. It's probably got a whole lot of issues and doesn't solve
all the problems. So the early adopters who are there are only willing to overlook those
things and stick around and continue to be involved because they believe in you and your
mission and they feel like they're a part of something.
And so community is kind of a tool that can keep people engaged through those early tough
times. Make sure you have consistent communication with those users and customers so that you're
learning how the product needs to be improved and building a foundation that will help you
get to that point where the product is actually selling itself and has reached the point where
people are there just for the product.
That's such a good point. A lot of indie hackers ask this question, how do I compete with a
bigger business that has more features than I do and more resources, a larger team, and
they charge less money than I do?
And I think community is a good answer. A lot of times these early adopter users you
have are very excited to talk to you, they're very excited to talk to each other, and a
bigger company might not take the time to really nurture those relationships.
I want to understand how both of you guys ended up where you're at, but you guys had
two wildly different paths and that only just converged recently. So we're going to go one
at a time.
Derek, let's start with you. You are the creator of Startup Grind, which is an incredible in-person
community of entrepreneurs and founders meeting all over the world in person. What was sort
of the first step you took on that path?
So 10 years ago, I was working in Electronic Arts. I decided to leave my job. I wanted
to work for myself. I wanted to be more creative. And over the next four or five years, I sort
of stumbled through many different types of businesses, different ideas, different products
that I had built with the teams that I had assembled around me. And most of them were
totally unsuccessful, other than the fact that they launched, but it didn't really ever
have any overly passionate users or customers or community around those products. And amongst
doing that, I started hosting an event series in my office with some other founder friends.
And we called it Startup Grind because that's sort of what my experience that I was going
through reminded me of. Five or 10 people came to the first event and five or 10 people
came to the second event. It sort of grew slowly and was not really intended to be anything
other than just a gathering of friends and an excuse to hang out late one night each
month. But after about a year, we started to get a lot of traction and people really enjoyed
it and we started to get better and better speakers. And I'd spent 29 days of the month
working on my product that not a lot of people liked. And I spent one or two days a month
working on Startup Grind and everybody liked it. So after about a year and a half of doing
that every month, we started to spend 10 days a month on it, 20 days on the product. And
then eventually spending 10 days on the product to 20 days on Startup Grind. And I had someone
in the audience saying, hey, can I do this in my city? I love the brand, I love the values,
I love the community. Basically, I thought it was a terrible idea and I thought he must
not have any idea what he's talking about. He said, no, we don't have this in LA. We
need something like this. And so we started doing it in LA and it worked. And fast forward
a few more months, we were able to sell the product that we had been working on and to
completely get out of it. And then we just went to work on Startup Grind and within six
months of going full time on it, we've gone from five or 10 cities to 30 or 40 cities.
It's been about six years, seven years since we started working full time on it. And that
time we've grown to over 650 cities. We have millions of entrepreneurs in the network.
Our goal is to educate every entrepreneur in the world and the startup teams that are
associated with those entrepreneurs. And we have about a thousand volunteers that work
on it. So again, it was not the thing, it was meetup. And it's maybe small and inconsequential
as that sounds, but it's what people wanted, unlike the products we were building. And
so we listened to people's feedback and have had a great ride working on that for the last
few years.
You just blew through this story and made it sound easy. I want to talk about your Startup
Grind period though, or your spending year after year working on these ideas. It didn't
really work out because I've been there. I spent a long period of my life in that phase.
I think a lot of people listening have tried that as well. And it's pretty scary to quit
your job and go into this place where nothing seems to be working. What's one of these failures
that you worked on and maybe a lesson that you learned from it that you took with you
into your future ventures?
I wish I kept a journal through that time because so many of the things I think I've
blocked out. And I think those lessons would be good for me to remember. Of course, I remember
a lot. I remember the big things. I at one point raised $250,000 for an iPad game, which
we launched and nobody bought. I put probably $250,000 of my own dollars, the consulting
dollars into a social networking product that nobody liked or downloaded. I mean, we had
some people, but very small amount of people. Numerous people that I tried to start companies
with. I could not find a technical co-founder to work with me. And I was sort of a product
manager and begged dozens and dozens and dozens of people and tried to find ways to work with
dozens of engineers to partner with me almost totally unsuccessfully. My co-founder, who
I work with today, it's a full stack engineer. His name is Joel Fernandez. He and I worked
together for nine years. So that's been really fortunate for me to have found him and for
him to work with me. You asked me for one sick thing that I've learned. I mean, just
to not give up. It sounds so cliche. I know it's the worst advice, but I just really believe
there were many, many times where the tunnel was completely dark and somehow Joel and I
squeaked out of it and got to the next phase. I've been rejected by, I don't know how many
incubators. All the things that could happen, I've tried. And I think 10 years later, some
things are working. It's not all working. It's not all perfect, but we definitely have
momentum. And once you create momentum, a lot of good things just happen to you. But
it's so hard to get momentum and you just have to survive a really, really long time
in order to do that. And so you may not be working on a great idea right now. You may
think it's the best thing you've ever done and no one likes it. But if you can just figure
out how to survive, I think you will get a chance. I believe everyone gets a chance to
really showcase themselves and basically a shot on goal. Everybody gets a shot on goal.
But it may be that you don't have the right pocket, you don't have the right stick. And
maybe you're in the wrong position on the field, but just stick it out and you'll get
a chance. But it's going to take a lot longer and cost a lot more than you had ever imagined
or hoped. And so make it work with what you got.
Don't give up is... It is cliche advice, but at the same time, it's underrated advice because
the fact of the matter is most people give up regardless. No matter how much people say
this advice, no matter how often it proves to be true, it's still really, really hard
not to give up. And I think people would benefit from trying to find a way to make it so they're
less likely to give up. If that means consulting on the side, if that means building a community
of friends and entrepreneurs and founders around you or finding them online just to
keep supporting you. It's so important not to give up that you're really doing yourself
a disservice if you don't actively think about how to make following that advice easier for
yourself. How did it feel after these years of hardship, of wasting your own money, of
getting rejected from accelerators, to start Startup Grind and see this thing actually
picking up momentum?
I really remember when people started to say, like, oh, what are you working on? It's like,
oh, I'm working on a thing called Startup Grind. I was like, oh, yeah, I'm a startup
Grind. I'm like, you do? Really? Are you sure? Are you just saying that? And I would call
people out on it, which isn't very nice, but I just didn't believe them.
But they had. And they had like, oh, no, no, I attended it in LA or I attended it in New
York or something. I saw you did this or I saw one of your videos on YouTube or something
like that. It wasn't like this huge overwhelming financial moment or something like that, but
I think it was just that we finally built something, as Paul Graham says, we built something
that people actually wanted and that they needed. And that was incredibly satisfying.
I think, too, at some point we had had so much failure and we had survived in spite
of it that we just didn't we didn't really care about all the things that you shouldn't
care about anymore. It didn't matter to me that the press didn't write about us. It didn't
matter to me that people didn't know or like what I was working on. I didn't care anymore.
Like I'd been through too many cycles of screwing up to care. And so I think when people
find this or coming around and saying like, hey, like actually like what you're doing
is cool or I've seen it and it seems like it's like it's got this momentum. Like I think
because we've been through the valley of death, like that actually meant a lot to us. And
you know, I was still working in my garage for many, many years. And, you know, to work
in your garage and to have people like, oh, it seems like something that seems like this
thing's getting really big. It's like, well, I work in my garage, you know, but not you
don't care about those things anymore. You just like you care about the things that matter
and keeping customers happy and, you know, being able to afford to hire one more person
like such a luxury to not have to do every single job in the company anymore. Like what
a gift, you know, and no, you can't tell anyone about those things, but it just you just you
feel it in the impact in your life and and you bring somebody that's way better at it.
I remember saying like, no one can ever sell sponsorship or start writing to me. I remember
telling like, and that explicit conversation with people about that they remind me of this
over the years. Like, I can't like no, why can't nobody sell star crime with me? And
then somebody came along and they and in two months they sold it way better than me. And
it was like, oh, it's just like the greatest feeling ever. And it's not that like the feeling
you should have is like, man, you are seriously inept. Like look how much better this person
is after two months than you are. But actually, it's just like such relief and just joy that
like, this can work and you don't have to do everything. And there's a lot of just personal
satisfaction in that. And that's even just with two or three or four employees, like
you can get that basically immediately. Once you get through the value of debt.
There's so much good stuff in there. And something that you said that like, it keeps coming up
over and over, which is that your, I guess, perspective of your own success and impact
as a founder is oftentimes like understated. Like you're just so your heads in the weeds.
Like you're actually doing work day to day to day. And you're not really sure like how
the thing you're doing is affecting people. So you said, you know, people come up to you
and you know, talk to you about startup grind in the early days. And like, you didn't even
believe that they really knew what it was. And I know so many founders who do that. Like
my friend Kadron runs his online community, alpha, and people who are part of that community
talk to me about it all the time. Like there, it's a community for women in tech and I'll
tell her, I'll be like, Hey, Kadron, someone told me, you know, this great thing about
alpha and she doesn't believe me because you know, from her perspective, it's just not
as big as it really is. I want to get into the story of how you transitioned from startup
grind into bevy, but I'll hold off and switch over to David. David, you ran a community
called CMX and it was a community for people who themselves run communities. So I imagine
it's a lot of pressure to do that. What was sort of the origin story? How did you get
your first community members? How did you build CMX into what it eventually became?
So I mean, like the threat of community kind of goes way, way back for me. Like childhood
very much struggled to find community, felt pretty ashamed of who I was, didn't really
find my group, didn't really find my identity. I ended up turning to video games a lot to
find the community. I was always very entrepreneurial as well. So if I couldn't find community,
I would end up building one or I'd end up creating something to solve my own problem.
So in the early days of video games, I built like the Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 4 community
was like the first online community ever built. And we had a very active forum. We were running
online competitions. We had a whole ecosystem going and I was 13, running it out of my house
in my room. And so I've always been really fascinated by how technology can bring people
connection. And as someone who struggled early on to find it in the real world and then found
it online, that power was always really impressive to me. And so as I grew up and new social
platforms kept coming out, whether it was like the early days of that journal, Live
Journal or Myspace and Friendster and all those kinds of platforms, I just became really
interested in all these new tools and how they're connecting people.
And so when I went to college, I ended up going for business and started writing a lot
about how community was developing online, about how businesses were starting to use
these kinds of social platforms to connect with customers. And that ultimately led to
me getting first an internship that was focused on digital media and how businesses were going
online and then eventually to my first community manager job.
And so I graduated college. I got this community manager job. I was pumped. I felt like I was
like I knew the space in general and just assumed that there were a lot of other people
doing this work that I could learn from. And so when I got the job, I started looking around
for training programs I could take or other people that I can learn from or communities
that I can connect with around community management and building community for business. And there
just wasn't anything there. No one was talking about it as a profession or an industry. There
were no resources on how to do this work. There were no communities to connect with
other people. And so I found myself just figuring it out on my own and then slowly but surely
would find other people who were doing this kind of work and just connect with them and
ask them questions. And I was living in New York and just started having regular lunches
or breakfasts with other people who were doing community work and just supporting each other.
So we found each other all feeling isolated in our work building community, ironically.
And over time, it started to grow. The group started to grow. More people started to talk
about community. There was a meetup in New York called the Community Manager Meetup that
started. And so we started all getting together in person once a month. And I ended up co-founding
the communitymanager.com. And so we were one of the first sites focused on this profession.
And so we had a job board. We had articles that we were publishing. We were inviting
other people who were doing this work to publish their articles. So starting to create kind
of more of a narrative and a messaging around this category of community.
And simultaneously, I had also been building other businesses. So after that first Community
Manager job, I ended up running a company called Blogdash, which was connecting businesses
with bloggers. I did that for a year and a half before joining Zarlie as the head of
community there. And I was running a full community team and running our New York office.
Mind you, this was still 2 years after I graduated. And I was a director of community managing
multiple people. So I was in way over my head in a job that was still had no guidance on
how to actually do that work and knowing you had a valued community.
And then I also started a company called Feast, which was an online cooking school, which
was very random in my narrative of my career, but an incredible learning experience. It
didn't work out in the end. We worked on that for about 2 years as well. Went through 500
startups. One of the first batches, we were about 6 or 500 startups.
So the communitymanager.com was a side project while we were working on that. And then we
had talked about doing a conference for a long time, but it just never quite happened.
Running a conference felt pretty intimidating, pretty scary to run a big event, didn't know
how to do all the logistics. And it was actually my friend, Max Altshuler, who he ran a conference
called Sales Hacker. And so he came to me and said, hey, you know that conference that
you've wanted to start for community professionals? I know how to run a conference now. Do you
want to start it together? I'll handle all the logistics. And he was going to help with
sponsorships and stuff like that as well. And I would handle all the marketing and curating
the speakers and essentially create the messaging and shape the whole event.
And so I said, yes, let's try it. And we kind of just put it together. It was kind of fire
festival style. It could have gone really poorly because we just started selling tickets
and we didn't have a venue or food or anything. And then when we'd make enough money, we would
put down a down payment on the venue. And then we'd sell more tickets and we'd put a
down payment on a caterer.
Sounds stressful.
It was very stressful. But I did a bunch of research first and talked to a lot of people
to gauge whether or not they would pay to come to an event like that and got a very
positive response all around. So I felt pretty good that there was demand for it. And then
when we did it, the demand was there. We had 300 people came out from all over the world.
All of them were practicing community professionals. They were people who, as part of their job,
was building community. And all of them felt like they were the only ones who were doing
that. They didn't know that there was anyone else who did that work for the most part.
They all felt isolated. And then we put them in a room, 300 of them, put the best speakers
I knew in the space on stage and inspired them and gave them a message of importance
and validation because I said, I think this is the future of how businesses will work.
I think community professionals, it's going to be an entire professional industry.
I think community is going to be extremely valuable to businesses and essentially validated
that their work is important and that it's a growing space, which is something they never
heard before. And the response was incredible. Just people felt empowered. We got tons of
messages from people that just couldn't believe that event like that could exist. They just
walked in and walked in expecting it to be like other marketing events or something else.
But then realizing they were surrounded by their people was really impactful.
And so going back to what Derek was saying about momentum, we had felt zero momentum
for a while with Feast. And I all of a sudden felt this huge amount of momentum around CMX
and building the community industry. My co-founder and I at Feast, Nadia, Ekbal, we were out
on the same page and mutually decided to wind down Feast. And I switched my full-time focus
over to CMX. And we started growing the community and products that we would offer from there.
So first, I want to make a note to people listening. If you are in the market for coming
up with an idea, you're not sure what you should work on. Notice the similarities between
my story with Andy Hackers. I wanted to be an Andy Hacker. I didn't know anyone else
who wanted to be one. So I started a community where like-minded people could come together.
Derek, similarly, was a founder, was going through all these struggles, wanted to meet
up with other founders. Suddenly, the small meetup among friends turned into something
much bigger. And that is now Startup Grind, which has hundreds of thousands of people
attending events all over the world every year. And David, same with you. You wanted
to meet other community managers and these community managers who never met each other.
And just by bringing them together, you created a ton of value. So this is an idea that I
think can exist. And Miriad Spaces, probably everybody listening to this right now has
some area where they feel slightly alone, where there's others who probably feel alone
as well, and there might be some value in bringing them together.
The other thing I want to mention is that in both of your stories and in mine, there's
this common thread of starting things over and over and over again, and something's kind
of working out, something's not really working out. But then having like a real success,
that all of us can tell us something real and meaningful because we can compare it to
like our past failures, basically, and say, hey, this one really stands out. Like this
one's got legs. Let me double down on this.
David, where did you go from the point of your first conference succeeding to building
CMX into what it eventually became?
Yeah, so we immediately put the profits back into the company. We took just a little bit
of our to pay bills and started planning our New York conference. That conference did not
go so well. We were kind of high on the momentum and we're like, great, we'll throw an even
bigger event on the East Coast now that we know how to do 300 people, let's go 400 people.
And it turned out the Bay Area was a much easier market to sell tickets in and there
are just more community people here at the time. And in New York, it was much harder
to sell tickets. And so we kind of bit off more than we could chew and made commitments
on venues and things that we ended up not really being able to afford. So we had to
make some pretty massive decisions in crunch time to... We actually switched our venue
in the month before the event, which if you've ever organized a conference, I'm sure you
just had a heart palpitations just hearing about that. It was a very scary moment. But
we're able to make some really big key changes and still throw a pretty incredible event.
And all of our speakers are happy, all of our attendees are happy. It just ended up
being smaller and we didn't really make money on it. But that was better than losing $50,000,
which is the predicament we're facing. And that would have just ended CMX right there.
So we survived that and then just kept our heads above water basically and then started
planning the next San Francisco event again. And all three of these first three events
were in the same year in 2014. So we threw three conferences that first year, which in
hindsight was insane. Now we do one a year. But we were hungry and felt that momentum
and tried to take advantage of it. So we hosted the next San Francisco event and that one
went really well. The next year we did one in San Francisco, one in New York again. And
this time we're just a lot smarter about predictions of numbers and didn't... And we're able to
make money on each one. So we just made a little bit of money and put it back in and
made a little bit of money and put it back in.
So the first event we hosted, we created a Facebook group for attendees. And then after
the event, we were like, what do we do with this group now? And we decided to open it
up to anyone who wanted to join. And so that's now the CMX Hub Facebook group, which has
kind of been the heart of our community for the last five years now. And it all started
from that first event, just a space for attendees to talk to each other. And now there's close
to 10,000 members and it's extremely active, extremely positive. We do very little moderation.
It's a pretty incredible space for community professionals.
And so the next five years, I would say... Here's an interesting thing because we talked
about that momentum and feeling something that worked. And it definitely did. But the
next five years was somewhat of just pushing through plateaus after plateau. It was like,
we're trying to bootstrap this business. We're trying to figure out a profitable, sustainable
business model. We're running two events a year. We launched a training program. We started
doing some consulting for companies, helping them with their community strategy.
We tried all these different programs and products and things. But it turned out to
be a really hard space to build a business in. Because even though it's growing, it still
has been pretty nascent over the last five years. It's been pretty small. Community professionals
are still hustling to get buy-in in their companies and hustling to get budget.
And so when we asked for a premium price point on products, it was hard for community professionals
to get that support from their companies.
I struggle with this sometimes where CMX doesn't feel like it was a runaway success or anything
like that. It's been a lot of really, really hard work in keeping our heads above water
over five years to keep bringing value to the industry and keep experimenting and iterating.
That said, I think the impact we had on the space has been really substantial. And it's
definitely the most impactful work that I've ever done.
And so it's been worth continuing to really hustle and push through those hard parts to
just keep getting to that next level, which ultimately led to the acquisition with Bevy,
which has been pretty incredible.
It's only been two months since acquisition about. And we've already been able to unlock
so much more value and do so many more of the things that we've known needed to be done
in this space, but just didn't have the bandwidth and resources to do now with Bevy. We're growing
the event by more than 2x this year. It's going to be over 1,000 people.
We relaunched our local events program, we're relaunching our research program, all these
things that were really important that we just weren't able to do. So it's kind of just
like the next chapter of this journey.
It's something telling in your story that I think really highlights the value of community
is that you had sort of the opposite problem that most founders have. Most founders I talked
to, they've got their business model sort of straight. They have a business model that
makes sense. They have a product, but it's really hard for them to get customers or users
or anybody to care. Whereas you were almost the opposite situation where you had a ton
of people who were touched by CMX, who were actually impacted, who cared about what you
were doing or talking to you about your business. But you couldn't fit a successful business
model onto that.
And I think it just speaks to the fact that community is so good for growth. It's just
so strong. If you want to actually build a loyal customer base and user base to organize
them into a community, even if you don't have a business model, it still seems to work on
the growth end of things.
So a question for both of you. Since Derek also had a lot of success with growth, turning
Startup Grind from just one small meetup into hundreds of events and conferences all over
the world, what have you guys learned through your struggles and your trials as entrepreneurs
about growth, about marketing, and about getting people to care about the things you're building?
Derek, why don't you go first since you've been silent for a while?
Well, I think that having one clear goal or two clear goals and everyone driving around
that, I think that helped us really early on. Our goal was to get into 20 cities. And
once we got into 20 cities, our goal was to get into 50 cities. And it seemed to me in
my brain that if we could get what we were doing into 50 cities, that somebody that was
much more established, that had a much bigger brand, that it would be very hard for them
to come and displace us if we were in 50 cities. There are other people that were doing similar
things to us, but we just sort of were relentlessly focused on that one goal. And I moved my office
back into my garage. I was sharing an office with someone, and this just sort of predates
all the co-working spaces and everything. And I moved back into my garage and I worked
and I ate dinner with my family and got my kids to bed, and then I went back and worked.
And it was just around this goal. We took phone calls at all hours of the night with
trying to convince chapter leaders in different cities around the world to do it. And we're
just on Skype sometimes for five, six hours a day, just trying to talk to people and find
people that matched who we were and try to figure this out. And with lots of failure
and people we thought would be great, it didn't work out. Others who we didn't think would
be great, it turned out to be great. So I think having a clear goal in the early on,
once you sort of figure out, this is the general direction I need to go, you don't need to
start a grand submission now is to educate every startup team in the world or every entrepreneur
in the world. That's not what the mission was in the beginning. I had no concept that
there were hundreds of millions of entrepreneurs around the world. I had no concept of that.
But I could see into 20 or 50 cities. I sort of thought once I got to 50, maybe we'd be
saturated across the world. But I knew we could get into 50. And then when we finally
hit 50, and then we plotted those dots on the map, first we were like, okay, great.
It's going to be really hard for anybody else to catch us and copy us. So they should just
partner with us. And then I plotted the dots on the map and was like, oh my gosh, we're
not even in a fraction of the biggest cities in the world. And we're in 50 cities. We have
a chapter in Reno or Boulder or something. We don't even have a chapter in Paris yet
or in London. Then our minds start to expand to what was possible. But the only thing that
mattered was getting into 20 cities and getting into 50 cities. And we just were relentlessly
focused on that one goal. And then we popped our heads up at that point. And then we re-evaluated
goals and set new goals. And I remember at one point, somebody saying in one of our brainstorm
sessions, we're in about 100 cities, they said, you know, what are we going to do when
we're in 500 cities? And I just I remember laughing because they just thought it's just
not possible to be in five. It's not possible to manage 500 cities. It's not like who does
that? Who has 500 cities? Well, now we have 650 cities. And we've hosted events in over
800 cities, but we have 150 or so that aren't active. And so we don't we don't count those
or try to reactivate those. But like, now we're talking about well, how do we get to
a thousand or two people that we work with some of the companies that we work with? They're
in thousands of cities. And it's like, geez, how are you? I mean, I haven't I now I like,
I think that now like, how are you doing this in thousands of cities? That's impossible.
But I have I have somebody I'm talking to right now that's literally saying, like, what
are we going to do when we're in 10 10,000 cities? And I'm like, this is just insane.
But then you get there. And then you're like, oh, like, why did I ever think this was insane?
It's totally logical, but it could get here. And it's just like the compounding interest
of time and energy and, you know, and all this work over time. And now, you know, many
years later, you know, it would be very hard. It would be it would be stupid for somebody
to try to copy start. They should just work with us or, you know, or, you know, try to
be a partner or something, which people like Google and, you know, and Intuit and Oracle
and others have done, or, you know, Stripe's been a great partner of ours for many years.
So like, these are the, you know, I think over time, your mind expands and grows into,
you know, what you can actually be and what this can can be common in the beginning, like,
just one or two really clear, simple goals, and just charging at them at all costs. You
know, that was really helpful for us.
Yeah, I think to build on focus, so like knowing what direction you're heading is really important.
And then something I've learned is to give up control, to give up control to really great
people. And that can mean people on your team. And that could also mean your community. So
I think like, especially when you're a small indie kind of company, it's tempting to do
everything yourself. And for a long time, I probably needed to have my hands on everything
too much. And I handled most of our growth, I handle most of our things. And, you know,
and then eventually, like, I hired I was able to hire really great people. So we have like
Erica McGill, McGillivray, who runs CMX Summit, who took our event to a level that I never
could have and saw things that I couldn't see because she had a different level of experience
with running events and different viewpoints. And that was hard. That was really hard for
me at first to give up that control because it's like kind of handing over your baby to
other people. But that that's what unlocked that next level of growth. And then same we
hired Sam Weber about a year ago, who's who's now our head of growth and marketing. And
he took all of our content and our marketing and all of our metrics and everything to a
whole nother level. And so if you have to be really clear on what your goals are, like
Eric said, have that really clear focus, and then put really great people in the position
to execute on those goals, and kind of like get out of the way, or just try to unblock
them and make sure they're set up to be successful. And I think you can continue that mentality
into your community. So right like Startup Grind being driven by these local organizers
who are running events all over the world. CMX has had local event organizers all over
the world. We've empowered members of the community to be admins in the online community
and to take more active roles there. We have an entire Slack network that's completely
run by the community. And so giving up this need to control every aspect of our brand
and every aspect of the business, and trust our community members to continue to grow
it and to take it to that next level, that's really how you grow is you empower other people
to take that special thing that you've built and spread it.
Easier said than done, especially as a founder of a tiny company where you've run everything
by yourself, and you're worried other people won't understand it or care about it as much
as you do.
Yeah. And I think we've also probably all had experiences where we handed it off to
somebody and they didn't do a great job. And so we developed this fear from those experiences
that we can't hand it off. They're not going to do it as well as us, might as well just
do it all yourself. But I think you have to keep trying because ultimately, that's the
only way things will scale beyond yourself.
So David, you had a community of community managers. I think one of the coolest things
about running a community is you just learn from so many talented people, kind of like
we're talking about right now. What are some things that you learned from the people, the
community leaders and your community at CMX?
Oh, I don't know. That's a big question. I learned an insane amount. I mean, we've had
a couple hundred different speakers on our stage at CMX Summit, who have all brought
completely different perspectives and voices and tactics and things that they've shared.
I would say everything that I know is a combination of insights that I've learned from our community
and from the work that we've done. I mean, I guess I would say that I've spent the last
five years in this kind of meta role of building a community of community professionals. And
now working with Bevy has been kind of an exciting new experience where I get to actually
think about building community for a brand again and focus on customers.
And it overlaps really well with Bevy, obviously, because Bevy customers are also CMX community
members. It's the same audience. But instead of just building community, largely for the
sake of community like with CMX, now there's a Bevy platform, which is this really powerful
tool to help them manage their communities. And so Bevy is still growing and at a relatively
early stage to a lot of other SaaS products. And it's fun to think about the onboarding
experience and how do you create content and materials and support that ensures that people
are really successful in using the product? And how can community contribute to that experience?
How can you build a community that makes every single customer who uses your product feel
not just supported and not just like they can get answers to their technical questions,
but they are truly valued and connected to everyone else who believes in that mission
and who's using that product?
So taking all those lessons from the last five years and now getting to apply to a real
business.
Derek, what about you? You've spent a decade as an entrepreneur, you've run an entire community
full of founders. What are some of the things you've learned from that that you've applied
to Bevy, especially getting started with Bevy in the early days?
Well, I always think that actually, Startup Grind is its own greatest success, that we
made mistake after mistake after mistake and then start doing these interviews with these
influential and brilliant people who had been there and who had done it. And then you couldn't
help at the end of these events, like go home and sort of sit back in a chair and be like,
my gosh, why am I not doing that? And you compound them and then the next month you
get somebody else new and somebody else new and somebody else new. And so we applied all
the things that we've learned on the stages and from these people.
One thing that I've learned is that spending time around these speakers, these very successful
people, billionaires in some cases, people on the cover of Time Magazine or Newsweek
Magazine or other things, I've learned that these people are as human and as similar to
you as just about anybody you know. I've spent a bunch of time on Steve Case's Rise of the
Rest Bus. 60 Minutes just did a big feature on them recently that you should check out
if you haven't seen it or heard of it. I've spent hours and hours and hours around Steve
Case, observing him, talking to him, having dinner with him, traveling with him. And the
overwhelming thing that I learned is that Steve Case, who is one of the first internet
IPOs, AOL, founder, co-founder of AOL, he is no different than anybody. He's no different
than my uncle or my dad or my neighbor. He's got the same issues that we all have.
So that really started to empower me to say, wow, these people are on the cover of these
magazines and they're having a little success. But really, they're human beings. They're
really not that different from anybody else. So that's something. And another thing that
I've learned is that despite people being somebody that's at the top of the food chain,
besides somebody being really successful and wealthy and whatever, a lot of these people,
they're still very thoughtful and kind and generous people. And a narrative that we have
about a lot of the founders of Stripe, Patrick and John, being at the very, very top of that
list. These guys have every reason in the world to be rude and to be demanding and to
be high and mighty. And these are some of the most humble people I've ever met. They're
also the smartest people literally that I think I've ever met.
So it's very interesting to see people who have been incredibly successful in business
who are also still just decent human beings. And that's not always the case that we see
in the media.
It's interesting listening to you guys talk about the things that you've learned. Because
there's these salient events where you hear somebody talk and they bestow some amazing
wisdom or advice on you and then you go home and you ponder it. Then there's this undercurrent
of things that you're not really aware that you're learning, but you look back 10 years
from now and you're a totally different person and you realize your entire worldview has
changed.
Most people at the end of this podcast are in the very early stages of their careers
as founders and entrepreneurs. Their worldviews haven't changed that much. And they're going
to be completely different people five or 10 years from now. What advice did you guys
have for these sort of fledgling entrepreneurs? How might they change the way they look at
this entire journey today to help them be more successful?
I look at my entrepreneur career as a 20 or 30 year journey. So what happens to me this
week is probably not that important. Unless it's something just absolutely crazy outlier
thing that happens. But generally speaking, it's not really going to matter that much.
And so I'm not going to get too worked up about it, whether it's good or bad. It happened.
It's a dot on the radar and I'll get another dot next week and it'll be better or it'll
be worse than the dot was today. But I think when I left EA and started working for myself,
I sort of thought like, oh, I'm going to like, you know, I just, my impression of it was
more of like doing it for all of the wrong reasons. And I think as the years have passed,
the failures piled up and then as a few successes, which is what we spend most of this time talking
about is David and I successes, which probably the things that certainly like that impacted
us the most are and the things that we think about the most are probably the failures.
You know, you got to think, what am I going to be doing in five or 10 or 15 or 20 years?
And when I talk to somebody, am I treating them that way? And when I am dealing with
a customer, am I treating them that way? And in my, when I hire somebody, you know, I used
to think like, man, no one ever works at companies for more than two or three years anymore.
I have people now that I've worked with. I mentioned my co-founder for nine years. I
think he and I, I hope we work together for the rest of our lives. And I have other people
that I've worked with for five or six years. So like now I'm thinking, well, how could
I get that person to work with me for 10 years? Or maybe can I add other people to that sort
of career journey? We can all go through life together. And so I think like I now just think
about things at a much longer scale. And I think if you think like that, like you won't
get so despondent when somebody shuts an important door on you and you won't get so,
you know, euphoric when somebody opens the door for you that you really need open, you
kind of like, you kind of stay in the middle and just realize like, it's going to ebb and
flow and I'm going to take it as it comes and just keep plodding along and you know,
I'll look up every couple of years and see, wow, I've personally made a lot of progress.
Wow. My business has made a lot of progress. Wow. The people that work with me have really
grown as human beings. Wow. My customers, their lives have really been impacted by what
we're doing. Those things to me are ultimately like the most rewarding things that I've gotten
from being an entrepreneur. Not speaking or I'd love this podcast, Coreline. I'm really
grateful to do it. But it's not speaking. It's not pressed. It's certainly not pressed.
It's not the praise that people give me. It's not what my parents think or my in-laws think
about me. It's really these core things that, am I personally growing? Are my team members
around me? Are they growing? Are my customers finding joy in my product and success? Is
the business healthy and is it more healthy today than it was before when I last looked
at it? Hopefully, people, if they don't have that perspective, maybe they can start trying
to find that perspective if it's good for what they're doing.
David, what about you? How do you think your perspective has changed throughout the course
of your journey as a founder? How do you think some of these changes might benefit others
who are just now getting started?
Well, first, I want to just like that. What Derek just said really reminded me of a line
from Ted Reingold, who was an entrepreneur, founder of like Catster and Dogster, two of
the earliest, most successful online communities. He passed away recently, but one of the messages
he left, it was actually an autoresponder that he put up while he was in the hospital,
but one of the key messages from that was, the journey is the destination. That really
stuck with me. It's everything that Derek just described that I think for most of my
entrepreneurial career, you kind of paint this picture of this point that you're going
to reach where now you're successful, now you have the answers, now you've done it all
and you're accomplished and people see you as successful. You have this state that you
imagine you're going to reach when in reality, the day you reach that, you're probably going
to be terribly bored. You're probably never going to reach that because you're an entrepreneur
and you're always going to have more questions. You're always going to have more challenges.
You're always going to be trying to improve yourself and the day that you're not growing
and you're not seeing yourself improve, you're going to get really antsy and you're going
to look for new challenges. Just reminding yourself that the journey is the destination.
There isn't this destination that you're going to reach where now you have everything figured
out. What you're doing now is the point. You're experienced now, whether it's good or bad
and that's going to change from day to day or even hour to hour, that's the experience
and finding that appreciation for that experience is what's important.
Then I think one other thing that I've learned is just to not take all advice at face value.
Early on in my entrepreneurial career, and I still do this, where you'll see someone
say something on stage or tweet something about how you should build a business or how
you shouldn't build a business or what you should do to grow, what you shouldn't do to
grow. The temptation is to immediately apply that to what you're doing and say, oh, well,
shit, I should be doing that or, wow, I've been doing this thing all around.
What I've actually found in practice is that most advice is not that helpful. You have
to take it to context where that person giving the advice is coming from. If somebody's running
a billion dollar company and telling you how to build your culture, that may not be helpful
for you if you're just starting your company and you have two employees.
People coming from different backgrounds with different levels of privilege affect their
advice. People give advice based on what they know best. If you asked 100 different marketers
how to grow your business, the SEO person will tell you to do SEO. The ads person will
tell you to do ads. A community person will tell you to do community. You get all this
advice online, offline, from mentors, from advisors. It can really create analysis paralysis
and make it hard to make decisions. Listen to advice, consider it, but always come back
to your own truth and come back to what you know and what you believe. Follow that because
you have to figure out where your center of gravity is so that you're not constantly being
pulled in every different direction. I think that following too much different advice has
directly led to failures that I've seen throughout my entrepreneurial career.
Yeah, and it would really suck to follow somebody else's advice and have that take your startup
to the graveyard because you don't even have the satisfaction of knowing that at least
you did things your own way and you really gave it your best shot. Anyway, I've enjoyed
having both of you guys on the podcast. Can you let listeners know where they can go to
learn more about your journeys with Startup Grind, CMX, and Bevy?
Yeah, absolutely. My email is just derrick at startupgrind.com. That's my primary email
for Startup Grind stuff or just advice in general. So feel free to reach out to me if
I can be useful. In terms of Startup Grind, just go to startupgrind.com slash about us
if you want to learn more about it or if you want to attend an event in your city and you're
not sure it's worth it. You can draw me a note and we'll get you a ticket for a local
event. I'm Derek J. Anderson on Twitter.
And I'm at David Spinks on Twitter, davidatcmxhub.com. You can find everything out about cmxatcmxhub.com.
You can find our conference there. You can read more about the Bevy acquisition on our
blog there. Yeah, that's it.
All right. Thanks so much, guys.
Thanks for having us. This is great.
Yeah, thanks, man.
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