Every Business in the Future will be Community Enhanced with Greg Isenberg

Kipp Bodnar (0:00)

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Greg Isenberg (0:33)

We're going to look back on this time and be like, this was the greatest opportunity of all time to actually understand what are these different milestones, life cycles, create internet-based products to support them, put them up really quickly, and there's going to be a lot of really big brands that are going to come out of this.

Kipp Bodnar (0:54)

Hey, hey, welcome to another episode of Marketing Against The Grain. I am your co-host, Kipp Bodnar. I am joined as always with my co-host, Kieran Flanagan. And we have a very, very special guest today. It is Greg Isenberg, who is the co-founder of Late Checkout, a Web3A community product studio and agency that designs, creates and acquires internet communities.

So obviously, everyone we're going to talk about community today and it's going to be a fun and lively conversation. Greg, welcome to Marketing Against The Grain.

Greg Isenberg (1:21)

Great to be here, guys.

Kipp Bodnar (1:23)

All right, Kieran, you're the king of community pet rocks. I know you've got a long list of things that you want to debate and argue for the listeners. So let's go.

Kieran Flanagan (1:31)

Well, first of all, Kipp's got COVID.

Kipp Bodnar (1:33)

Oh yeah, sorry. I buried the lead. So yeah, why do I sound like a bullfrog? It's because I have COVID. So if you're like, wow, he was really horrible in that episode, you at least have some frame of reference as to why.

Greg Isenberg (1:45)

I kind of like your raspy vibe, to be honest. It's a feature, not a bug, Kipp.

Kipp Bodnar (1:50)

I like that. I'm here for it.

Kieran Flanagan (1:51)

It's weird that we kind of just accept now if you go to events, like you were at our InVent event last week and you end up having a great time, but you have to accept that there's a high probability of getting COVID.

Kipp Bodnar (2:02)

You can manage risk, right? And you do everything you can, but then nothing is a hundred percent unless you just want to sit in your house away from everybody.

Kieran Flanagan (2:09)

Greg, we're so grateful for you coming on. Big fans of all your work. You create a lot of great content on Twitter as well. I know you have a community course on Maven, I think, which a lot of people have said a lot of great things about. Let's start maybe at the start and just talk about how you got into community, like how you started to get into community or see this kind of opportunity for community driven businesses. I know you have a lot of history in that space and maybe define what you mean by a community driven business.

Greg Isenberg (2:39)

I guess I'll start with kind of who I am and what type of person I am.

You know, I was two minutes late to this podcast recording because I was nerding out over different podcast microphones to buy. And I was like in the different microphone subreddits and podcast subreddits. Like I'm one of those nerds that just like nerds out about one thing. And I get really obsessed about it. And for people like us, the internet is a great place because previously, pre-internet or pre-social internet, we would have to hang out in our basements and be lonely by ourselves. Now all of a sudden we can go to these subreddits, these Facebook groups, these different communities, try to really understand the language, the systems, the products that make this community strong.

And I've just been doing this as a teenager. So fast forward today, I'm 33 years old. I've started and sold three community-based businesses. One was to a social networking company that was big back in the day called StumbleUpon. My last one was to WeWork, which was a community-based business in the sense that you walked into these office spaces and you felt some sense of community.

And I've been an advisor to Reddit, advisor to TikTok, and helped them grow through community. That's how I got into it.

Kipp Bodnar (3:49)

What was the inflection point in your life where you're like, oh, I was obsessed. I dabbled around into it. But what was the moment where you're like, oh crap, this could be my life's work or a major part of my life's work?