Greg Isenberg on The ONE Community Strategy That Will Make You RICH | Ep. 7

Greg Isenberg (0:00)

When I see communities that are growing at crazy rates, you want a sustainable growth, where every week, sustainable amount of people coming in, adding value, and most importantly, not making the core experience worse for the original. So yeah, I think it's totally okay to limit your growth in the early days, because I think that it'll help you really figure out, what is your North Star?

Matt Gray (0:27)

We've got a super special guest here today on The Matt Gray Show, Greg Isenberg, the founder of Late Checkout, which is a product design agency, studio, and venture fund that designs, creates, and acquires community-based technology products. Known Greg for the better part of a decade now. He's an absolute legend when it comes to all things community.

He is also an advisor to Reddit, Tiktok. He's previously sold companies to StumbleUpon, which is founded by the founder of Uber, as well as WeWork. So, Greg, welcome to the show.

Greg Isenberg (1:02)

Good to be here. Thanks for having me.

Matt Gray (1:04)

So, let's dive in. So, I mean, community is kind of all the rage these days as more and more people are looking to move from having an audience online to actually owning their community and having more rich one-to-one relationships with people. I've noticed over the last month alone, you and your team at Late Checkout are absolute machines when it comes to pumping out different experiments based on all the insights you're gleaning online and from the work you're doing with some of the best brands out there in the world. And so, over the last month alone, and I'm sure there's more I'm missing, but you've launched Dispatch, the productized agency, you've launched, you probably need a robot, which is in your words, this kind of like super niche community at the intersection of AI and productivity.

How do you think about launching these new products and how do you avoid shiny object syndrome?

Greg Isenberg (1:55)

Before I answer that, I want to clear one thing up, which is something that I see often on online, which is people using the word community instead of audience. So there's a, and I know you know this, but you know, the difference between an audience and a community is a very, very different thing. So I see an audience like a hotel. You know, you go to a hotel, you check in, you know, you're not getting to know all your neighbors. If you got to know all your neighbors at, you know, every single floor and you're going, you know, up a 20 foot, 20 floor, you know, Hilton, and you're knocking on doors, people would think that, you know, you might be insane. But, you know, when you move into an apartment building, it's, you know, when I moved into this apartment building, like I got like a cake, you know, like people were welcoming me, like we're in this together. The hotel is like an audience. There's value there. You come in and you come out. The apartment building is the community. You know, when I live in Miami and there was a hurricane here, you know, the community that like existed during that hurricane, everyone coming together, everyone, you know, do you need anything? Can I help you? That's real community.

So, yeah, I tend to, I think that there's tons of value in audience and I think there's tons of value in community, but I also, we think of them as really separate experiences. So when we're building products, we always think about what is the audience? What is the community and what is the product? So using the example you gave, you know, we launched something called you probably need a robot.com. That's basically, you know, how do you use AI to boost productivity?

You know, the audience there, like I was the audience, you know, my audience, you know, so we picked me. Sometimes we work with other creators, but we picked me. We have a newsletter that people subscribe to, and that brings them into this free community where there's programming to learn about how do you put AI into your workflow.

So, how do we, you know, to answer your question, how do we avoid shiny object syndrome? We have like pretty rigorous, when we start a project using an audience, a community and product, we have pretty rigorous guardrails around like when to kill a project and when not to kill a project.

So, you know, we do have shiny object syndrome in the sense that we see a lot of opportunity, but we know really quickly when to kill a project.

Matt Gray (4:43)

Makes sense. So using the specific example of dispatch, which is your sort of productized service business, helping people with unlimited design resources on a monthly basis, how do you kind of like decide that, okay, you have this idea, you're gonna move forward now with launching this? Like what sort of insights have you gleaned in out of the thousands of things you could work on? Why that?