#44: Greg Isenberg – Community-Based Businesses, Startup Ideas, WeWork

Jason Levin (0:00)

Sup, nerds, welcome to The Jason Levin Podcast. I know it's been a while, it's been over six months. I have been traveling, I have been starting new businesses, everything has been crazy. But I have a very special guest for you. His name is Greg Isenberg, and he is an eight-figure entrepreneur. He is the founder of Late Checkout, where he builds community-based businesses. The man is a myth, he is a legend in the Twitter sphere, in the greater entrepreneurial community, and I'm very fortunate to call him a friend and my old boss.

He is actually one of the first people that I ever cold DMed on Twitter and started working with.

Greg took a huge chance on me, literally hopped on the phone with me the next day. Greg has been a great friend and mentor to me ever since, and I'm really excited to share this episode with you. Get ready to learn how to build a community-based business from the ground up. We're talking pricing, finding an audience. How do you figure it out? Do you go in person, physical? We talk everything right here.

Greg Isenberg (0:53)

There's a human tendency to want to be like other people. I think they call it the mimic desire. And when I see people buying a certain car, hitting certain revenue numbers, starting a certain business, buying a certain business, creating a certain type of content, I'll take note of it sometimes. I'll be like, okay, maybe I do feel like I do want that car. But I let it sit, I let it sit. And I tried to, in the past, when I was younger, I would be like impulsive a little bit and be like, this person orders an old-fashioned, I'm going to order an old-fashioned.

And now I take a second and I say, you know what? Maybe I'm not even in the mood to drink tonight. Maybe I just want a sip of water or maybe I want a beer, or maybe I want a hot tea, even though that's weird to go and order a hot tea at a bar.

And I think that's okay. So I think growing older, you become more okay with being weird.

Jason Levin (2:01)

I completely agree. I've become weirder or being okay with being weird more and more as the as the couple of years have gone on. I think like, I don't know, I think it's one of my competitive advantages is just being willing to be weird or be seen as cringe or whatever by some people, because somebody is always going to call you cringe. But I want to talk about specifically community. Speaking of contrarian, speaking of belonging with people, people are 2021 community was hot and we're not hearing about it as much, but you're still as bullish ever as ever on community. I'm still as bullish as ever. Alex Hermosy just dropped a tweet today that he's investing in school.

So why are online communities like, why should people invest in that in building them?

Greg Isenberg (2:50)

Okay. So a little back story. I've been writing about, I've been writing and building internet communities for literally 20 plus years.

So there was a long period of time when I wrote about internet communities and people literally did not pay attention. In fact, by March, I don't know, I have, I don't know, 360,000 plus followers on Twitter. In March 2020, I had, I don't know, 10,000 followers on Twitter. And all those people that followed me were diehard internet community people.

It's not like in 2020, I just decided to tweet more and I got all these followers. The only thing that changed was the market perception of internet communities. So all of a sudden, instead of a tweet getting three likes, all of a sudden I was getting 300 likes or 3000 likes, or even sometimes 30,000 likes. It was crazy.

Now you enter 2020, 2022, 2023, and it's human nature to want a new shiny object. And of course, community falls out of vogue. But to me, I like when community is out of vogue because to me it means there's more opportunity to... there's less competition basically. So I think right now, 2024 is an incredible opportunity to pick an underserved niche, build an internet community, and be weird. Going back to our earlier point, be weird with them, right? What's their weird? What's their version of weird? And allow them to express themselves in that way.

Jason Levin (4:28)

Yeah, as I've been building my community now, I've been so happy. Like these calls, I, as a creator, I want my time for myself doing like art and writing and making videos and stuff. But as I've been doing the community now, and people are joining and joining, these calls are actually like the highlight sometimes in my day. Where like they bring out some different sides of me and we share ideas, share memes, share like weird PR hacks in the news. Like people are just constantly in their messaging about that stuff, and it feels pretty cool. And it's one of the highlights. And I thought it would be like a time suck, but it's an energy, energy plus, honestly.