July 8, 2022

Community building is proprietary marketing

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EJ: That's a great visual. I now see you putting those pieces into place, and you

start to get a large enough community, and then start to snowball and build

momentum. The referrals start coming after you get those first pieces-and

everything starts building on it?

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Raad: Yeah. We have private communities for both sides. On the client side we're

throwing workshops and events almost every week. We have an online, private

community, we have a separate Substack, and we also have a separate podcast

for them. On the talent side we're about to roll out a Discord channel and recurring

town hall meetings.

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It really is investing into the community. Sometimes that takes awhile and you're

not going to see immediate results in the same way that a good AdWords campaign,

or a Facebook ad gets you immediately after you spend the money.

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Once the ball gets rolling, and once you hit a critical mass around a certain talent

type or practice area- it really does snowball. You're still putting in work. You're

still putting together amazing content. We're actually about to do our first annual

conference next year.

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But it is a lot of upfront work and it's important to make sure you have the runway

or you're cashflow positive-because there isn't really a blueprint out there for that.

Most of the marketplace hacks and articles out there are focused around either selling

to SMBs or selling to individuals. They’re all viral growth marketing tactics.

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It really is a slow burn process for service, tech-enabled marketplaces focused around

specific industries. But it ends up being amazing because you get companies that expand,

and you get companies that refer you. You just drive really good word-of-mouth growth,

and your ROIs are insane.

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It's amazing, because we previously sold just to SMBs. When we eventually pivoted out

of that market segment, it was like night and day. So it's been pretty fun.

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