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00:00:00 - Speaker 1: You want to achieve mastery in some sense in your life. So all these things come together and for some people, community becomes very addictive. I’ve certainly been in communities about products and games, where the game or product became a. And the importance because the community in itself just became my main driver to come back to this group of people nerding out about something that I wasn’t even using or playing all that much, but I love the ideas about it.

00:00:35 - Speaker 2: Hello and welcome to Meta Muse. Muse is a tool for deep work on iPad and Mac, but this podcast isn’t about Muse the product. It’s about the small team and the big ideas behind it. I’m Adam Wiggins, joined by my colleague Mark McGranaghan. Hey, Adam. And our guest today, Ramsey Out of LogSeek.

00:00:54 - Speaker 1: Hi, Adam, I’m Mark. Great to be here. Thank you for having me.

00:00:57 - Speaker 2: And I understand you started your professional life as a Spanish teacher.

00:01:02 - Speaker 1: Yeah, that’s correct. When I finished my associate degree, I was about 16 years old here in the Netherlands. You’d leave high school very early, so 16 years old, I started my associate degree and then finished when I was 18. So I enrolled in college, did a double degree in Spanish language and culture, and then also teaching it, and that is basically what, yeah, triggered. The obsession with learning and specifically learning languages, so both natural languages and computer languages. That is how it all started, all the sleepless nights trying to figure out why something is not working or why I don’t understand something.

00:01:43 - Speaker 2: Can I assume you probably fell down the space repetition on key rabbit hole at some point.

00:01:49 - Speaker 1: I’m still hooked 15 years after discovering it, so I just finished before we started this call, I just finished my 100+ Italian repetitions, which I’m now doing, so I’m learning Italian through immersion, flashcards, and a lot of TV shows, so, yeah.

00:02:07 - Speaker 2: Netflix has definitely been a very big boon to language learners, particularly with their very solid audio and subtitle selections and the ability to rewind and relisten when you didn’t quite catch something, and so on.

00:02:19 - Speaker 1: And the tools build on top of that, so there are actually tools that will let you capture subtitles with a screenshot. I think there’s even options to capture the audio, like a piece of audio with it. So, yeah, definitely the tools in the last decade have definitely made language learning easier. Obviously the flashcard tools, but also note taking tools, obviously, as you dive deeper into a language, really make it a study project. That is basically, I started with the flashcards and then I moved more and more towards the personal knowledge management nerding out over the more intricate parts of the languages that I was learning.

00:03:01 - Speaker 2: I guess I can see the path there. This is the part where I’d normally ask what was the path that brought you to lugs seek, but I think that almost answered the question a little bit, especially when you talk about the, is it the Think stack Club is your kind of online learning platform that maybe bridge the gap between those two endpoints.

00:03:18 - Speaker 1: Yeah, so in like very quickly run through my curriculum, so basically after graduating as a Spanish teacher and teaching for several thousands of hours because internships are very early in the Netherlands, I couldn’t find a job as a teacher. Teacher. So I ended up actually as a telemarketer for 2 years on the phone with IT managers, mostly decision makers or stakeholders in IT departments trying to get appointments like physical appointments for colleagues of mine.

And I would just cold call people each and every day. That’s where my hunger for learning came in very handy because I had to learn a lot about the IT space so what companies operate, what technologies are there, so not just from a software perspective, like I knew obviously operating systems, but also servers, networks, complex systems, so I had to learn a lot. So note taking became more of a focus for me as I was on the phone, taking lots of notes.

Finding basically little rabbit holes to go down to as someone would mention something like a technology on the phone, I would just say, oh yeah, oh yeah, sure, sure, and and the meanwhile I would write down some terms and then spend half an hour researching that, taking some notes, like we had an internal wiki as well because there were more guys like me who didn’t know anything.

Too much about the IT like certain parts of the IT ecosystem, like the corporate IT ecosystem, and we’re eager to learn, so we’re just a bunch of guys eager to learn and practicing our skills and that ended up laying the groundwork for me becoming more and more technical, advancing through the corporate IT letter, basically joining Oracle, becoming a customer success manager.

And that helped me listen more and more to customers, figure out what are the issues they run into, so obviously, interviewing skills, note taking again, very important, came into play, and that’s how in the end, I ended up with Lux seek as I was doing more and more online with Community just because it’s a passion of mine. I like it and I got into community when I started with language learning. And I just kept at it, learning through community as I progressed in my career.

I, again, found my way back to community and then see, OK, what have I learned in all these years? What have I see. Not work like communities that I’ve been a part of that went like south that became very toxic, and what are the communities that still thrive now that I look back 15 years later, there’s some language learning communities that have become super toxic, nobody is there anymore and other communities thrive and there’s some clear markers I would say that show, OK, this will. More or less predict if a community will thrive in the future or if it continues on this path, if it’s going to basically die out at some point.

00:06:24 - Speaker 2: Yeah, I think language learning is uniquely suited or perhaps I should say tends to be something that really benefits from community.

I think a lot of things do, many different interesting skills and career things and so on, but maybe language we’re learning can be just so continuously frustrating.

And you just need this, of course you need the internal motivation, but there’s something about others going through it at the same time. As you, I continue to think that the community aspect, almost the like group therapy aspect of Y Combinator is actually one of the things that makes it successful in the Silicon Valley entrepreneurship world is just being around some other people who are going through the same thing as you experiencing the same struggles, and then when the going gets tough, as it always does, you can kind of find strength in the others who are going through it with you. So yeah, I could see where language learning would be just ideal for that in some sense.

00:07:16 - Speaker 1: Yeah, it’s both for learners, so there’s a lot of knowledge in the language learning community.

Obviously, there’s also drama like in any other nerdy niche, there are people very contentious about flashcards versus no flashcards or grammar focused study over just watching TV shows.

There’s always some reason to have discussions, but it’s not just useful for learners, but I’ve also found it useful as a teacher and I think that’s how I got into community in the first place.

I as a teacher, most language teachers that I know and also myself included, we don’t really do rigorous academic research into what works and doesn’t work in class.

We work off a lot of anecdotal evidence, so trying stuff out in the classroom, sharing that with colleagues within the school, but then there’s also, especially here in the Netherlands, there are many programs to connect through universities, connect teachers and have teachers share experiences.

And then also connecting them online. So there’s a lot of useful work happening there, that’s also how you see innovation happening in language learning products.

So, Duolingo is a very simple example of making something like space repetition. Mainstream, even though before people would never mess with Aki, it can offer a way for teachers to say to their students, hey, use these different tools to get more input. And then as learners become more fanatical, hopefully they will discover unki other methods that are more suited to their style of learning and how they like to get fluent in the language.

00:08:59 - Speaker 2: And why don’t you tell our listeners what is Loseek?

00:09:03 - Speaker 1: Yeah, so LogSeek is a tool that helps you organize knowledge and make that knowledge your own. So what does that mean? Let’s unpack it a little bit. So when you open Loxy for the first time, it looks like just another outliner tool. So just a tool that you write in bullet points and you can in dense or out dense blocks.

00:09:24 - Speaker 2: And the classic outliners here would be Emacs, or mode or workflowy maybe.

00:09:29 - Speaker 1: Yeah, so the less technical ones would be dynalyst, work flowy, on the more technical spectrum you would have Emacs, for example, that are well known example I think for many listeners would be Rome research.

And then in the spirit of Rome research, Lexi is an open source outliner, but it’s built like Rome and some other tools like Obsidian, it’s built on top of a database.

So even though you work with just plain text, it’s all stored in a database as well, so all your data is also stored in a database. So there’s a lot of data about the data, a lot of metadata about the individual blocks, like the outlines.

And that including the data that you add yourselves, that yourself, for example, through links or tags or some other simple database structure that you create, which we call property. So if you use properties, you can basically give information about the data and that will help you.

Build processes, so basically pipeline systems you can use Lexi, which is very popular for project managers who take many notes and then want to reservice those notes in a single dashboard or students who want to reservice all the notes related to a class and then easily turn them into flashcards. So here again, the flashcard thing is coming back, so many students use. Logs seek, also because it’s free, it’s very easy to write just your notes in the outline as you’re sitting in class and then add a few simple hashtags to turn something into flashcard.

And that is, I think the true power of Luxeek is that obviously it’s free, which for many people is a plus. It’s open source, so it’s very hackable, but also it for many people it breeds some trust that even if we decide to stop with the company or go into a direction that our user base doesn’t like that then they can continue with the app and continue developing it themselves if they want.

And then obviously, also the ease of use because it’s in the end just an outliner, I think that has attracted many people to logs seek to use it, at least as a scratch pad for stuff that’s on their mind that they don’t want to forget and that they want to have an easy way to find back their notes.

00:12:01 - Speaker 2: And it’s interesting that you sort of lead with the outliner, the indented bullet points, and then you mention links, you know, when I think of Rome, which obviously is a source of inspiration, it makes me think of almost the category I think they sort of invented, which is what I call, would usually call a knowledge graph. Now obviously there’s a history, a much deeper and longer history of linked. Databases, the web with hyperlinks is sort of the ultimate of that, but also something like a team wiki, like you mentioned using in your previous career steps, but also, obviously something like notion, how important do you think of linking as being in sort of the logseek product?

00:12:39 - Speaker 1: I think linking and indentation, so basically the Document as a mind map, so instead of having a text document or just a paper where you have a linear piece of text, you have more like in a mind map structure in computer talk, call it a tree-like structure, you know, and programming language.

So That I think is the root also of the web.

So those are two things that are root of the web. So if you look at a normal web page, HTML page, the documents that you look at, the code is structured in a tree-like structure, so it’s basically an outline. Every web document is basically an outline. So, that is one principle that many people are not aware of, but that I think once you rock that idea. Then you can become much more flexible with your knowledge. You don’t have to flesh out an arguments linearly. You can just choose to upload your thinking and then branch out. So just like as you would design a web document, you would first maybe start with some headings, then you start filling those headings in the same way in an outliner, you would start with the top level blocks. And then as you become more and more nuanced, you add more and more blocks underneath and then linking helps to link to any data that is not part of that same block of information, so that same tree like branch, you can then link to other branches basically. So that will allow you to hop from branch to branch. So that’s why I lead with the idea of an outline structure because Understanding a graph database, like graph databases were around before Rome existed, like far before, so it’s not a new concept, but many people are not familiar with it. Whereas if you say there’s no taking tool, it’s like a mind map, you just create a collection of mind maps and the outline is nothing more than a mind map. For many people it’s much easier to understand, even though I still use terms like tree-like structure and traversing the tree, for example, or branches. I still think you should learn that as a user, if you’re serious about knowledge work, then you should definitely become more familiar with the language. But the first principles of it being a branch, your notes being just a bunch of branches, I think that’s the most important thing. And then obviously there’s nowadays also the meme, oh, I will just use Apple notes, why do I need a complex note taking tool? I think if you think that way, probably Apple Notes is good for you, but if you want to think very thoroughly over time, if you want to refine your thinking, you need to have some tools to support that. So if you don’t have some deep intellectual projects that you’re working on, Maybe designing a product or mastering a language, for example, that in itself I would count as an intellectual endeavor that takes a long time. If you don’t have that, just use Apple notes to scribble down your grocery lists and stuff that you don’t want to forget, but don’t overcomplicate things. So I’m really focusing on the people who are not familiar with this, but who have some kind of yearning to organize their knowledge and are willing to put some time in it to learn the basic principles of a tool to help their thinking.

00:16:09 - Speaker 2: The term note taking in some sense is overloaded and even we pushed back in the muse kind of positioning, messaging basically what goes on our homepage describing what it is. I always pushed back against the note taking or didn’t love that because it does make you first think of scribbling down a grocery list in the default notes app on your phone.

And I do that, and I think it is correct to call that note taking, but it’s also correct to call it note taking that you’re developing a large body of work over a long time in the process of a deep intellectual process like learning a language, writing a book, developing a software project, building a business strategy.

So it’s a little tricky that both of those use the exact same word.

00:16:53 - Speaker 1: It’s not taking the act of taking notes. I think that is correct, even if you do, if you work on a super deep project trying to figure out a piece of software that will help people unlock a way of thinking, for example, in the case of Muse. You want to help people think through something, right? But the act of writing something down, that is taking note, but then what do you do with it? How do you process that knowledge? How do you connect with it? What is your inner dialogue? And then obviously a tool can help you have that inner dialogue, but then obviously you first need to set up the tool in a way that it can fire up the inner dialogue.

So very concrete example. In Oy would be you can create templates and many users create templates for maybe a project there that they are running. So they have just a bunch of headings, maybe a query that automatically picks up some kind of data from a graph, but in the end, it’s just a piece of text that is structured. But first you have to think through that structure. You first need to know how will my way of thinking lead to something like how can I make it more likely that I gain insight.

It’s not about taking notes, it’s about getting to an insight.

It’s about solving a problem, then exposing yourself to ideas and think through a problem to then come to a solution. And taking notes in that process is part of the process.

So you’re collecting maybe potential solutions. And then you structure those notes in a way that it becomes more likely that you come to a solution because you process those notes, you don’t just Write them down, you then also prompt yourself to look for other related nodes or for contradictory points.

And in the case of, for example, a software project, you would look for a solution for a problem, but then you would also look at what other problems with the solution cause, like what would break and what are the trade-offs in, for example, UI decision and do we have to rework in the back end. That in itself, you take notes, but you come to an insight through those notes and you need to have some kind of process to get to that insight. It’s not enough to just note something down and then I see also many people mention, if only I had some kind of AI reservice notes for me as I’m writing something, then I can just automatically link all those notes. Like, no, you are here to do the creative work, you’re revisiting your notes to feed that brain of yours. It’s basically almost a black box. At some point something comes out and let you know down again, and that becomes basically the entire cycle until you come to that insight that will help you, that solution to a problem.

00:19:48 - Speaker 2: Completely agree.

00:19:49 - Speaker 1: Well, I think this could be a segue into community because at some point, so let’s talk about this from the standpoint of a tool creator. Like you are more builders than I am. I’m just the community manager. Like I use Loxik myself, but I am not technical. I’m not an engineer. I’m not a designer, I’m not a products person at all.

So I have to distill. Learnings from the community in some way because I want to use Loxy in a specific way. Obviously I’m interested in the feedback on the products, but I’m way more interested in how people use the products and then distill patterns from users because that’s in my position, the best thing I can do. So you were talking about what is it that our user base wants to get done using our tool. Then you can discover that in many ways. You can do one on one user interviews, which often are a little bit more artificial. Like I see the best things in office hours where people are sharing their screens and like I’m trying to get this working and then they share the screen and you see the structure of their notes and you ask why have you structured it that way, what does it help you with? and then you get insights into how people use it. You see YouTube videos where people share it. And that’s basically the beginnings of a user community where people are starting to share how they use a tool, and then an outsider may ask, why would you create a video about how you use a tool. Well, can be many reasons, maybe you’re just very nerdy, you want to share how you use something and because it makes you happy. Like I’ve done that, certainly, but I see also many users who create a video about the workflow and say, well, this is what I’m trying to achieve. This is the compromise I’ve made so far because I couldn’t get this to work, and then you get other users to chime in and say, oh, maybe you can use this, or here’s a plugin to do that, or in our case, here’s a proposal for a feature request and the more votes something gets, the more buzz there is about a feature request, the more we learn. About what workflows people are using. So it’s very valuable. We as developers learn about our user base, how they use the product and how we can improve it, and then users learn from each other and create a network where knowledge is going around about this tool. So that’s outside of basically the tool creators control, like me as a community manager for Lexi, I try to capture stuff like I try to curate stuff from the community. I try to encourage people by meeting regularly by having events and stuff like that, little mini courses that we do with the community, but in the end, the community is just doing what it does, it’s like trying to get stuff done for themselves and then sharing knowledge how to do it, asking questions. And then I think the job for us as a tool creator to listen, to see how is our tool used, like we can basically hear from our community, what is our user archetype or archetypes and then how can we better serve those user archetypes? Like what features do we need to add or what UI improvements, UX improvements do we need to do? To better facilitate this group of users and then maybe as your features improve, have more people from that niche, from that type of user come in, and then obviously your feedback becomes better and more refined over time. So you’re not trying to create a tool for everyone, you’re really trying to look, who do we resonate with, and then we focus on those user group first, like to serve the community as well.

00:23:38 - Speaker 2: Yeah, a good segue and good kind of context for I think how a product company, especially a tool creator, would use community.

So yeah, our topic today is community and why one reason I thought you would be a great guest to talk about this is first of all, LogSeek has a great community, very vibrant, and part of that’s the open source element, but part of that is just, yeah, that sharing of workflows and so on, but also of course your background as you said with the language communities.

We were also in the Rome community for a while and I think in the kind of tools for thought world generally, so you have experience with a number of those and maybe a good place to start here is I think you’ve teased it a little bit, but it’s sort of better defining what we mean by community.

It could be a group chat or it could be a forum, but I think that probably is a little too mechanical. I’d be curious to hear for both Uam and Umar, what to you is the core of what makes a community or a good community might be a way to put it.

00:24:37 - Speaker 3: Yeah, well, I think there are different types of communities, but when I think of community in the context of tools and companies and interests, it’s often just a group that shares an interest and it sort of grows from there, and there are all sorts of emergent behaviors and patterns that we tend to see that we can talk about, but to my mind, it’s the foundation is having a shared interest in acting on it together.

00:25:01 - Speaker 1: Yeah, so shared interest, to start that as a starting point, I fully agree. So there’s a shared interest, but there’s also a need for each individual. So what you see happen nowadays is especially as community is seen as a moat for products like, oh yeah, this will guard us against our competition.

I’m a little bit skeptical of that because especially if you talk about the tools for thought space. The hardcore first adopter group, they will go from tool to tool and like rip it apart and say what they like and don’t like. So those are very vocal minority. And then often as a product matures and a community matures, you have a few people that derive a lot of value from a tool and they have a reason to show up in that community.

So if I look at Luxy, Luxe is not the easiest tool to use. We don’t ship with a nice polished handbook like Muse ships with. So just our feature overview for that, you would need to have a community.

Obviously, you can use blockseek just as an outliner, you don’t need much to get started with that. There are some YouTube videos that will show you exactly how to get started, but then to get deeper into a tool. So once you derive some value from a tool and you think, I want to master this, I want to see what else is possible. I think that for people is a strong driver to join a community and keep showing up.

And then like in social psychology, it’s over time valuing what’s yours and uh part of your identity will be that community, so you start to value it more over time and that’s also tied in with another thing from social psychology. Is this need for mastery. You want to achieve mastery in some sense in your life.

So all these things come together and for some people, community becomes very addictive. I’ve certainly been in communities about products and games, where the game or product became. Of second importance because the community in itself just became my main driver to come back to this group of people nerding out about something that I wasn’t even using or playing all that much, but I love the ideas about it and I always try to learn things from communities that would then benefit me in other parts of life, like bringing my learning obsession for languages to note taking. And then thinking what other skills can I learn using the tools that I’ve already learned. So I think for community to thrive, you need to have an influx obviously of fresh insights of people coming in.

So it needs to be a welcoming, friendly place, doesn’t scare off people or people check out your product and then they see a bunch of toxicity on Reddit or Twitter or wherever, so I think that is important. And then obviously, also, can you make your product stick in some ways, so can you deliver value from a community about your product and maybe some users, they will get to a point where they know how to use your product and that’s all they need, they will use your product but not go to the community because they don’t need to learn more. They don’t need to figure out more how to use the product. So there’s less of a need for them to keep showing up to the community.

So even these people, they will still be connected to your products. They have not abandoned you, but they may have become dormant in the community because there’s just not a need for them. They don’t need to achieve more mastery. They are already busy, they already have some connection in other parts of their life. They don’t need to come back to the community and that’s fine. So community changes and I think that it’s fine, and it’s an illusion to think, oh, people keep the same interests, will keep the same needs, yeah, and the rent.

00:28:57 - Speaker 2: Yeah, I certainly think when you think of a community connected to a product, which obviously not all and even most communities are that, but in that specific case, now you have a kind of a Venn diagram of people who currently use the product and get value from it, and then there’s people who are in the community and then there’s overlap, but actually you have people who are in each group, that’s certainly the case for Muse. I know we have folks who either listen to this podcast or Follow us on Twitter or otherwise in our sphere of discussion that just feel like we share values or like to follow along or we’re just friends with somehow, but they just don’t happen to have an iPad or don’t happen to have a specific use for the product or maybe they did in the past, but they don’t at the moment, but they’re still sort of interested in the people and the culture.

Around it and you certainly have the other way around as well, but I think certainly most products and tools will always have a much bigger user base who are just more transactional. They just have a problem to solve. The product solves a problem for them.

Maybe they pop into the forum or whatever the community location is just to get some information, but again it’s very transactional.

00:30:02 - Speaker 1: Yeah, and I still think there is for these types of users, there’s still a reason to come back to the community every now and then and maybe another segue because we prep like a few points and also you ask what are communities that I see as a successful example of a community, like as an aspiring example. One community I keep coming back to is Reed Wi, so Rewise. It’s a niche tool, I would say not everyone takes highlights from books and wants to revisit them.

So it’s definitely for a specific type of person, like person who wants to, you know, the more PTM person.

But in the end, it’s not a very complex tool, it helps you achieve a few very important things, and then that’s it, so you can get started with rate wise in the afternoon and then have it give value to you for years, whereas you don’t even dive deeper into the tool, you just use it.

00:31:02 - Speaker 2: And I do wonder if there’s often a connection between communities and more complex or customizable or challenging to use.

You mentioned for logseek, I think this was true for Rome in the beginning, lack of documentation in a way can actually create a stronger community in a way because you’re helping each other figure this thing out, but Even putting that aside, even with good documentation, if something is complex and customizable, then that naturally leads you to want to talk to others about what they are doing with it and see their setups and so on, whereas a product that’s kind of only used in one way or a tool that’s very simple and can only be used in one way, probably not that much to talk about.

00:31:44 - Speaker 1: True. And at first sight, you would think, oh, read wise, why would they have a community? Their community is pretty young. They started with a discord and the way they used it was they would approach people who were in the community for a long time who had spoken about Loseek at some points. Obviously they had to find some way to identify people.

A good example of how Readise uses community, even though at the service, the product doesn’t look so complex, is how they test drive new features. So one thing they do really well, I think with their community, which is still quite young, but already very thriving is because they reach out to users, ask them if they want to test drive new features.

The way they use community is by first onboarding a batch of testers themselves, so they bring them into Discord, they bring them into an audio or video room, showcase the new functionality. Tell people how to get access to that functionality, the basics, and then they use that group of testers to onboard other users. So they basically say if you want to have access to this new feature, you have to onboard one other tester, and that way they have little cohorts of people using the same functionality, they have a reason to come back to the community to give feedback, but also to ask questions from other users, so that’s how you see.

Little cohorts of like community cohorts exist to test drive functionality and you see them. You meet these testers in different other little cohorts as you’re test driving maybe feature A but not feature B, and then you have some time to test feature C.

So you come in again, you see people you already know, and like, hey, weren’t you working on a dissertation? Yeah, yeah, I finished and then now I use Readwise for this, like my use has changed and like, oh, interesting. I’ve just started learning X, Y or Z. Interesting to hear how you use Readwise, so that’s how people connect even though in the beginning.

They might not show up to ask something or to share something, but there’s a reason for them to show up in the community again, that is to test something out. And I think that is a very nice way to reach out to your veterans in your user base of people who may not come into the community every day because they’re just busy using your tool, but then because they know your tool so well, because they know already what’s possible with it. You ask them to test drive new functionality and that brings them in contact with other people from your community. So there are several ways you can still activate community. Even when your documentation is awesome, like the product is relatively simple, your feature set may on the service look like it’s locked. There’s still reasons for people to show up, even veterans, I think, in the community.

00:34:43 - Speaker 2: Mark, what are some examples of great communities in your experience?

00:34:48 - Speaker 3: So I keep going back to this more network oriented community. I think as a proprietor of a business or employee of a business, we often initially think of a community as like the space that we bless for people to talk to each other about our thing. And that has an important place and for some companies it’s a very big deal. But to my mind, a lot of the most interesting communities and a place we can learn a lot is more network-oriented ones. So let me give you two examples.

One that’s sort of halfway in between would be the communities that form around specific games. And these are huge, you know, there are millions of people, a bunch of people who make their full-time living in them, for many people it’s their main hobby, and so on. And these have varying degrees of support and guidance from the central commercial entity, but a huge piece. of it is just people talking to other people about their interests.

At the base of it, that’s what a community is, is people talking to other people about stuff they think is cool.

And then you can go kind of fully networked, and I would give the example of econ Twitter. So this is the group of people on Twitter who talk about economic topics, and obviously that’s not blessed or controlled by anyone. It’s just people talking about stuff, but it has these incredible emergent properties where people find all kinds of new interesting ideas and data and theories and find cool people to follow and it’s kind of its own whole thing.

00:35:59 - Speaker 2: Yeah, for me, communities, at least my favorites that I’ve been a part of over the years, and many, most of them actually are technical or entrepreneurship oriented. I was part of the Linux world kind of late 90s, early 2000s. Ruby on Rails was a big one I was part of later on.

Silicon Valley, you could argue. A type of community. It’s also an industry and a field which has its own qualities, but also on a smaller scale things like, you know, when I adopted a dog going into the kind of subreddits for raising a puppy and you have people who are again going through that same struggle as you, you’re trying to learn from each other and trying to get empathy for your challenges, but also find solutions.

So each of those in their own way contributed to my life, but for again solving problems I have personal growth, that sort of thing. But also then yeah, you make connections with people that can turn into lifelong friendships or just be very rewarding in and of themselves, almost kind of separate or removed from that core shared interest.

00:37:00 - Speaker 3: I think the puppy Reddit is actually a really good example of how, to my mind, the two fundamental driving forces of community on which all of our stuff is based is searching and sharing. So searching is, I have a problem, which is a new puppy, I need help. So what you do is you go into T. go and you type puppy Reddit and you go on YouTube and you type puppies.

00:37:18 - Speaker 2: Well, realistically, it’s probably even more specific than that. It’s, you type in puppy won’t stop barking or something to that effect, you know, I’m at my wits end and then you suddenly find this place where all these knowledgeable people are gathering and sharing their stories and sharing their solutions and suddenly you have this sense of, oh, I’m not alone in the world in this challenge.

00:37:41 - Speaker 3: Yes, and eventually you get there, but that emerges from these two. In the end, it’s just individual people doing individual stuff. They’re searching for stuff and they’re sharing that’s the other fundamental urge, which is I’ve accomplished something, I have some insight. I want to share it, you know, I’m the puppy whisperer, so I make a YouTube video or whatever. And then from that you get all these emergent properties up to it, including people who make their full-time living supporting these communities.

00:38:03 - Speaker 2: Yeah, the pet example also shows how you have people who contribute to the community who are Call them like gurus or they’re just professionals.

So for example, professional dog trainers, there are some fantastic YouTube channels where people do this stuff for a living.

I think for them it’s probably a, you know, a lead source for their business or they’re selling a book or something like that, but they’re very genuinely making these videos showing them, teaching about a specific thing you might train a dog or a specific thing you might need to deal with, showing it with.

Real dog talking about it, you know, in this live way and in doing so providing you some value and then of course you can follow them and maybe that leads to their business.

So they’re a very knowledgeable person sharing because that benefits what they’re doing in their career, but then another category is often someone who just solved the problem and they’re so relieved and they want to go and share that maybe in some cases with the of the community, right? You see these posts where it’s update this problem I wrote about that was destroying my life. We found the solution. It was, you know, I combined a few ideas that you folks shared. Here’s where I landed, they share their solution and in that moment of breakthrough, as you said, they want to share, they feel excited and compelled to share with others, not because they think, yeah, just because I think it’s a natural desire when you’ve had that moment to want to pass that knowledge on somehow.

00:39:24 - Speaker 1: This is interesting also, Mark, that you say most communities are made up of searching and sharing.

00:39:33 - Speaker 3: It’s my argument is that that’s where they start. And then you get like higher order behavior that we would more typically associate with community like, you know, collaboration and real-time discussion and belonging and leadership and you know, all these things, but I like to study the emergence of these phenomenon, that’s all.

00:39:49 - Speaker 1: Yeah, and I think that is also to maybe segue into the platform discussion because I think for many community builders, the perennial platform discussion is very interesting. What is better is a Facebook group better than a subreddit or a proprietary forum like that I host myself better than Discord? I think first the discussion is what kind of medium do you want to facilitate, so. Obviously, there are emergent communities where there is no driving force from a brand, and you see those often pop up on social media. So Twitter, now Twitter also has community, so you see users create in the case of loxy an unofficial loxy community. We obviously as a company started a Discord, which we promoted. We started a subreddit which we promoted, but that’s not always how it goes for many projects, especially open source projects. Like it’s almost as if the community sneaks up on the creator. I’ve spoken to open source creators who said, I didn’t expect this project to blow up. I don’t have time to manage it. I hope to just pass it off to someone as soon as possible, so we have other maintainers, so that can happen.

00:41:09 - Speaker 2: And a canonical example of that one is the notion TikTok. I think this was a couple of years ago.

Notion actually was having some scaling problems because I think it was mostly students that were sharing their personal dashboards and how they would put it together and it was a lot about aesthetics and things like that.

The overlap of the sort of people that work at Ocean and the people who are on TikTok, especially a couple of years ago, was not big and so they were totally caught by. Surprise, where is all this new usage coming from, but that’s a good thing.

You want to invest in that or double down on it or support it because community that emerges is even better than when you’ve seeded yourself, but you may also be in a position, I think I suspect they were, where they go, wait, what is this weird new way of communicating? We need to learn the language of this platform that’s TikTok, where we see that our users have emergently chosen to gather.

00:42:01 - Speaker 1: Yes, and I think it’s very important as a brand, once you see that there are communities about your products that you tap into that and that you support those existing communities instead of saying, oh, we’re going to start a competitive platform and then siphon off all the members. I think that that will not do you a lot of good in the community, especially not as people put in time and effort into cultivating those early communities outside of the brand.

At some point, I think you’ll have to. Manage it a little bit as you see needs pop up within the community.

So very concrete example within Loxy that our Discord is now growing towards 20,000 people, so 200, and it’s becoming a wild west because you see people ask questions all day every day, and many of the questions have already been answered. So what Mark pointed out, so many communities, they come by because people are searching.

If I look at Discord communities, it’s often the default is asking instead of searching, and that is I think because searching in Discord communities is so like search and discord is not good, it’s flawed in many ways, and then also how it organizes discussions unless people say, oh, I’m going to open a thread now, it will be like scattered around, other discussions will be going through. So as long as a community is small, I think chat. And basically the scattered nature of a community are fine because people like little packets of people, they are finding each other and they’re small enough that there can be real time communication and people can benefit real time from each other.

But as the repository of knowledge grows, you want to have some way to capture that knowledge so that people don’t have to ask the same question over and over again. So that is a conundrum that we are in now.

Where we have a wealth of knowledge in Discord, it’s almost impossible to search and to avoid more knowledge from leaking basically through, we are trying to direct more and more people to our forum, and it’s a little bit of a confusing name, but discourse is a very good forum software, so not Discord with a D, but discourse is really good forum software that has Many of the principles that also the modern note taking apps have built in like bidirectional linking, they have built in and mentions and stuff like that, so I can link to a post and the creator of that post will get a notification that someone has linked to their post and at the bottom of that post will appear all the other posts that have linked to that one post, so you have a sense of bi-directional linking.

It has wiki functionality. So what we are now trying to do is encourage more people to write on the forum and then that our moderators curate as much as possible, moving, finished and answered posts to a section of the forum where they’re easier to find, helping people search the forum. So that’s where the knowledge in the community becomes. Like you’re creating a canon of all the knowledge in your community by providing a platform where it becomes easier to sort through that knowledge.

So in the beginning, I think you want to make it very easy for people to ask and to share. Chat is a great way, but then at some point you will see that people are asking the same questions over and over again. And then I think that will become a very Good impetus to look into other platforms that will help you manage or at least make knowledge searchable instead of having that big mess on social media, like Facebook groups, Reddit, Discord, and then have it centralized and indexed by search engines, preferably.

00:45:56 - Speaker 2: Another company that went through a similar transition just recently is Kraft, and they also had a Discord or a Slack, maybe I think it was, got quite busy, and they recently set up on Circle, which is another kind of, yeah, forum style product, and yeah, same thing where they can curate it much more and you come in and you have A help section, but also an inspiration section.

Here’s some workflows. Here’s where you post feature requests. There’s a lot of curation beyond just the very most basic, like let me pin a thing to the top and that it’s just a, you know, a flowing feed of, you know, real time information that is sort of very hard to sort through if you’re new to it.

00:46:40 - Speaker 1: Yeah, and that knowledge, I think also when it comes to a platform because you’d mentioned Circle, I’m not too much into the loop of Circle in recent months.

But I know for example, Discourse, it does really well in combination with Google, so the posts are really well indexed so when people search online, it’s very likely they will end up on a forum post on the official Lexi for.

So I think that is also an important consideration.

So Google or Dotao or any other search engine, obviously, but I think for Taking your user base into consideration, like what are the tools that people use to find knowledge? Are they inclined to look in your app, so not go on any search engine, but just look in your app for guidance on how to use the tool.

If they do, then you can, for example, say you want to connect with our community, here’s a link to our form and then you send them to circle.

So in that case, even though if The platform is not indexed by search engines.

If the majority of your users access your knowledge anyway outside of search engines, just by going to it directly, that may be a good choice.

In the case of LogSeek, we have a very big subcommunity of programmers, coders.

What do programmers do? They use search engines. They’re not going to, oh, I go into this menu in the app and then click on help and then scroll down and oh, here’s a link to commute. They don’t do that. They just search like problem, help log seek, and then they find a forum post, and that could be their entry into the community. So, I think it really depends on what kind of user do you have and what are their behaviors. So again, coming to the user archetypes, what are the behaviors of your users outside of Your products, like how do they interact with technology in general? A