Episode 10 Pip Jamieson, The Dots: The problem with building a community that delivers ROI

Speaker A: The Problem with B2B Marketing is a podcast for everyone working in B2B marketing and sales today. In each episode, we interview expert practitioners to explore specific problems each of them has faced, from common issues to emerging challenges. By talking to people who have been there and done it, we aim to share with you clear, pragmatic and actionable insights to inspire you to develop solutions of your own.

Speaker B: Hello, and welcome to another episode of the problem with B2B marketing. I'm Kevin Sutherland, strategy partner at Voluum. We're a marketing consultancy and studio working for. And, um, we're business brands. And a big part of what we do is helping them to solve marketing problems, whether that's navigating new opportunities, overcoming internal challenges, or making better use of their resources. And in previous episodes, we've talked about thought leadership, influencer marketing, content strategy. But today, we're tackling something that sits at, uh, the intersection of those things and also leans into employee engagement and technology. And it's the problem with creating a community that delivers roi. Now, in our experience, businesses love the idea of community, whether it's an engaged audience of customers, an internal network of employees, or an ecosystem of partners. But building and maintaining an active community is easier said than done. Some businesses, especially established corporates, we found, can struggle with the democratic nature of community. There's a sort of seeding of, or a perceived ceding of control and giving m more agency to your clients, your customers, et cetera. Feels, uh, a bit odd to businesses that have been used to running the show in a different way. Others can start in the wrong place. They obsess about the technology rather than thinking about the, you know, we talk about the engineering of a community, what actually makes it work, the who, the what and the why, if you like. And then some build on other people's land, you know, whether it's LinkedIn groups or Slack channels, etc. So they don't technically own that community at all. Okay, enough setup. Today I'm joined by Pip Jameson, who's the founder of the Dots, a platform that helps businesses build and sustain thriving communities. Welcome.

Speaker A: Thank you.

Speaker B: So perhaps you could kick off by telling us a bit about you and your background and maybe the origin story of the dots.

Speaker A: Yeah. So thank you for having me. Yeah, my name is Pip Jamieson and I'm the founder and CEO, uh, of the dots. Oh, gosh, my background. So I studied, uh, maths and economics at uni, but I actually started my career in the creative industries. I then started my first technology product, which was a Community based product in Australia, which I exited and then I started the Dots here in the uk. Originally the Dots was a community for my own community. So it was all about democratizing careers in the creative industries. So we actually started as a platform that was profiles and jobs. And then we realized no one in the creative industries was getting a job by applying for a job. So about seven years ago we leaned into how do we build a digital networking solution that connects people that don't know each other but have a shared interest. And in our case it was the creative industries. So we did all the hard graph on community building on our own technology first and then we started getting approached by brands who had their existing communities or wanting to create communities, wanting to license our uh, technology. Um, so we license white label apps to communities, B2B communities. Uh, we're on 49 apps and the person who started it for me was actually Nick Jones, who's the founder of sohouse. They were building their Soho Works community, which is their business community within so house, um, and he just called me and said, I love the Dots app. We're creating an app for soho Works. Can we license the technology? And that was the beginning of the journey. And it's been just magical watching it being used for so many different types of use cases.

Speaker B: Well, on that point. So I had a look in preparation for this. I think, I think there's three, possibly four apps on my phone that I think are powered by the Dots. Right. You know, they're quite the very, very different businesses, right, or organizations. So you've told us a bit about how it started, but maybe could you just sort of give us the elevator pitch for anyone that doesn't have three or four, you know, DOTS based apps on their phone, just maybe a bit more about what it, what it does and what the experience is as a user?

Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, very top level. We help brands own their own engagement and get off the teeth of meta and actually drive their uh, own roi. Not making Mark Zuckerberg richer. Now social media definitely, or you know, the big social media sites definitely have a place in terms of acquisition of community members and getting the word out there. But once you've actually engaged with a, uh, community and you've actually got in front of them, we help them own their own engagement. So we just do community and we do community very, very well. Firstly, I believe communities exist in the real world first. So we augment the real world. So we only work with brands who do have say events because I think anyone right now just pick up Your phone, look at your WhatsApp threads, have a look to see if any of your active WhatsApp threads. If you don't know anyone in that thread, the reality is real relationships happen in the real world. So we tend to work with businesses who have been doing community events, meetups, conferences. We then connect the dots between those real world experiences. So for example, on the app you can post events, but you can also then check out the guest list, connect with people in advance. If you're like me and forget who you met at an event, you can go back, cross reference, find the person you met, start swapping details. So it's just doing what people are doing in the real world. It's just instead of connecting on Instagram, WhatsApp, LinkedIn, they're now connecting in our partners environment. We also lean heavily into forums within our community, so actually delivering value for those community members. Like the brilliant thing about a community that has a shared interest or purpose is it's a trusted network that you can ask questions and advice and that constantly brings back to the app. So we do the community led features. Um, so there's group chats in the app. So if you've got loads of WhatsApp groups as a business, you can bring it all under one umbrella. And then our partners, most importantly can plug in their revenue streams. And this is where we integrate their technology so our partners make money in different ways. Some of it's via E Comm, some of it's via booking, some of it's by our paid membership. We can essentially plug in their revenue stream. So you can see a direct line between your community engaging with the app, but more importantly that delivering ROI and revenue back to the business. And that's the exciting bit. Um, and it's lovely to hear they feel very different because I mean my first client was so house, my second client was Apple. So we license a small business community to Apple. My third client was Freeze Art Fair.

Speaker B: Ah.

Speaker A: And my fourth was Days Media. So they really put me through my pace in terms of brand customization. So it's really nice to hear that.

Speaker B: So there's elements of the story there that I wasn't aware of. Right. I guess that's why we're having this conversation. Right. Because one of my questions was what was going to be, what makes the dots different to other community, you know, based applications that I'm aware of? You know, I mean I named some of them, you know, Mighty Networks for instance, and there was Guild in the UK that uh, no longer is operating. You may have answered this question with your point about actively targeting organizations that already have a sense of community. We have had conversations or worked on projects with B2B businesses where you would say you have got a database but you don't have a community. Or you might be doing infrequent or even regular events, but you don't yet have community. So do you. You exclusively work with businesses where there's already sufficient foundation. Is that. What is that what's made the dots more successful than some of those others? What's the.

Speaker A: I think you summed it up brilliantly in the intro Digital solution will only augment what's happening in the real world. And so uh, we have over 900 brands now on our wait list, which is wonderful but they want to build community. But if you don't have those foundations, rurk, I can give you the best tech. It's not going to work. And this is why the work you do is so fundamental to us because we need someone like you at the beginning of the journey before we wouldn't work with them. So I think in that sort of scenario, I mean the only brand we've ever worked with where they didn't have a community, just had a database and they had a series of events was Apple. But it was Apple. So of course I said yes. M but they had a small business. So we look after their small business community. They define small business owners as like five or less. And we basically support the founders, connect with each other. And the only reason I was happy to do that project is because I understand founders. Yeah and um, business owners. So we were able to guide them on that process. But the reality is that never jump to a digital solution if you haven't got the nuts and bolts of what is that community, you might have a database. And I think companies jump to, oh, we want this database to convert to X sales very quickly or whatever kind of is there driving their business engine. But the more important thing is what do the members need? Like why do they want to connect?

Speaker B: Yeah, that's a great answer. And uh, leads me on to the next question I was going to ask about what the. Before we get into more about the dots and perhaps some of the use cases and the examples about delivering roi, probably useful. Just to clear out first of all, what are the common mistakes that businesses make when starting community? I mean you've spoken about starting in the wrong place. We need a platform now let's build something on it. Is it any more complex than that or uh, are there other subtleties or Reasons that typically where they start off on the wrong foot.

Speaker A: Yeah, I mean it's, it's we, we have an exercise which actually helps us vet whether someone's ready for us or not. Where firstly it's like list the business objectives of building a community. It's amazing how many people can't say like, you know, why build a community? If there isn't a clear line to the business objective, then it's who is your audience? And then from that audience, why does that audience actually want to connect with each other? So community connects with each other. Like lots of brands want to share brand messaging with a community. That's not a community, that's a broadcast channel.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker A: You know if you. And um, this is where apps go wrong. They'll build an app, they'll just share their messaging with the community, then feels like a newsletter. What happens is just no one goes back to the app. Right. I mean everyone has dead apps on the phone that they never use. And so yes, your business objective might be to reach them this way. But actually the magic happens is when you really clearly define why do your members want to connect and what value will they get from connecting with each other. And if they can't answer these questions, this is where we send them to someone like you first because um, you know, so Soho House was a really easy one for us.

Speaker B: Right.

Speaker A: You know it is a member club. They launched a co working space. It's all businesses in that co working space. They had amazing events in those co working spaces. Really uh, the members were just desperate for a space to continue connecting. So the member need on that perspective was very much around biz dev, finding work, swapping leads. And that was really clear when we started working with Apple. They actually lent on me to advise because I'm the founder of what do founders need. And so the chats in there is like how do you raise investment and how do you do share options? But I think it's really that member need. So yeah, given the amount on our waitlist, we way prefer always working with people that actually have that clear view. But I think companies, if you're doing any sort of an event, like if you're doing conferences or meetup, um, that, that is a way to learn this stuff. You know, listen, why are people, what are people chatting to in the networking bit? I mean so many people go to events now, they don't really care about the speakers, they just want to connect.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker A: Tap into why are they connecting with each other? Are they chatting? What are they like swapping on and that's I think where the sort of magic comes. But yeah, it uh, never jumped to the digital solution. I think the other real big mistake is never jump to the features in the digital solution.

Speaker B: Okay, tell me more about that.

Speaker A: So we get people approach us and they've sort of done a huge feature list of what they want their digital member club app to do.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker A: And it's based on someone decided they want, you know, Instagram stories and they want reels and they've looked at other social sites. The reality is the uh, question I ask them is why? And then the reality is things like reels work really well on something like Instagram. But that's because there's billions of users. You know, there's, it's a different environment when you're talking about smaller communities and what features work. So I would highly recommend A, never build it yourself. B, always license it, whether it's us or mighty or whatever, always license it from someone who's learned what smaller communities need.

Speaker B: Um, yeah, makes a lot of sense. So perhaps a slightly different question then. I, you know, I absolutely get that it's a very strong basis for the growth of the dots which you identified, uh, around your offering being about augmenting a community experience that already exists. We, you know, we, we do have conversations with brands that I would say are more perhaps community curious. They don't, you know, they maybe have the bare bones of what you're talking about. You know, that's why I was talking about you've got a database or you run some events or, or indeed maybe their certain point is their content. Right. They maybe made a significant investment in content assets. And can this perhaps be a, a platform for us to develop a deeper relationship, perhaps move from audience building to community development? Okay, so I mean is that possible? Do you need to have something more meaningful? You spoke about building on foundations. How deep or how strong do those foundations have to be for uh, a brand to, to, to you know, realistically be able to start building ROI in this, in this way.

Speaker A: I think, uh, our advice is actually unless you've got a well developed community already, like soha. Yeah, it's actually starting small is good, but there is a critical mass of members. So our ah, apps are networks. Right. They're like private LinkedIns. Right. And the reality with the network, only 1 to 5% of people ever post into a network. Most people are what you call active lurkers. They'll like, they'll reply, they won't post. We were chatting earlier how we're terrible at posting, but I, I will, I will like and reply to people's posts. So what that means is say you've only got 100 members, that's like 1 to 5% of people posting each week. What that makes is the newsfeed feel very flat. Isn't enough engaging things for people to come back to. So we only start with businesses that have a community of like 500 plus. But from there actually you can learn so much if you're still in your infancy by involving your community on that journey. So one of the things we do is we take our partners through kind of a playbook. And it's partly from everything I mucked up from building my own community, the dots, because you know, we got to over a million members and I made so many mistakes on that journey. But it's also now the learnings from our 49 partners. So we update that playbook based on those kind of strategies and learnings. And so, for example, one of the learnings I've learned from the DOTS is I was too central to the community. That was fine when we were like 10,000 members. When we hit 100,000, it wasn't, I'm not scalable. When we were over a million, that was a nightmare. So what I should have done, and we did later in our evolution was actually build the community from the grassroots and involve the community and the community building. And so. And actually I learned a lot from Soho House with this because for example, at Soho Works, most of the events are run by community. You might do your own event, it's great. You're not, it's not the Soho Works team who are organizing that event, it's you actually doing that event. So when you're smaller, what's brilliant is you can start looking at the data of who your most engaged community members are. And we have like a dashboard that shows the engagement and you can start empowering them to do events for you, you can start empowering them to run groups, group chats in the app for you. And actually then you're starting to build, but then you're learning what the community wants as you go along. And I think that is how to make a community scalable. The top down approach does not work with community building and this also makes it scalable in other countries. And this is where I love seeing our product, where you can do a playbook style, this is what works in say, London, but then you can roll that playbook out to people in Zurich or Japan or where. So it's, it's Actually about empowering those community members to build that community for you.

Speaker B: So you've touched on lots of things. I mean, this is maybe a clumsy metaphor, but there's a number of levers that you can pull right to, to make an investment in community or in the digital community a success for the members and for therefore delivering ROI for the, the organization or brand. I mean, you touched on, and I'm paraphrasing here, but you know, having a clear point and purpose, what does this, or what is this going to add to the experience you've already got? You've spoken a bit about UX UI and you know, making sure that it works. You've spoken a bit about kind of community management or even catalyzing engagement or action. And um, um, we've touched on the role of content and what have you, um, two questions around that. In your experience, are any of these more important than any of the others or does it differ case by case? And the other question. Well, maybe let's touch on that first. Yeah, let's go with that first.

Speaker A: Yeah, I mean, I think the main thing in the. So when we look at the metrics and we have a dashboard that we share with partners and we basically track a load of metrics that I learned with a really healthy community, everyone obsessed about the numbers of members, ignore that. Like it's great, that's a glory stat. But you want to look at your monthly active and your weekly active. So how many people are coming back on a monthly or a weekly basis? But more importantly the one that we look at most is how many of your, what percentage your members are engaging with each other. Now what I find interesting about content, back to your content point, is content can play a role. But where I've seen communities go wrong is where the company is posting too much content because what then flips is that then feels like a newsletter. And actually this is what all of the other community platforms say to do. Post content, post content, fuel engagement. That way, what actually happens is then people think, oh, this isn't a place for me to post, this is a place for the business to post. And that's when you start seeing engagement plummet. And we can see that very quickly in the engagement metrics of members are stopping engaging with each other, they're engaging with the M company. But what actually happens is the monthly active, the amount of people coming back on a monthly basis starts falling. So what I always advise the companies that we work with in terms of content is you've got to think about content differently. To say something like LinkedIn, if you post, you're never going to out compete LinkedIn. You're a small community and that's the magic of your community. You're a trusted community, but there's billions of users on LinkedIn. If you put a piece of content on LinkedIn, you're always going to get more likes and engagement than you will in a private community. What you need to think about in a community sense is what's going to ever add value to that community that they're not going to get elsewhere. And that's where I think the magic then happens. So for example, a number of our partners spotlight either businesses once a month or members once a month as a way to, so they do like a newsfeed over takeover. And it's a way to actually help help spotlight super members, but also give them the exposure. But it's something that it actually means that people can then connect with them in the app and chat to them, which is a value that they wouldn't necessarily get on LinkedIn.

Speaker B: Okay, so the question that I was going to ask is a follow on. I'll put that because I really want to get into the ROI that you and those metrics that you've spoken about. But just specifically when adding a uh, digital element to your, your community experience, what are the critical success factors around that? Uh, is there a kind of a golden gradient or a kind of a window of opportunity that you have to kind of things that you have to do to kind of light the spark and get this thing working?

Speaker A: Yeah, definitely. So the metrics that we look at is the percentage of members that download the app and join. So that's more the glory metric. So our average partner download rate is 82%. So 82% of members invited join. But then it's the monthly and weekly that I spoke about. So our monthly partner average is 72% of members that have signed up to the app are coming back on a monthly basis. It's much easier to engage a person from the moment they sign up than re engage them if they didn't get it and they're in the app.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker A: So actually the hardest work for our partners is the lead up to launch. It's not post launch. So lead up to launch is preparing. So what we learned from all of our partners is a, uh, community shows other community members how to use a product. So in the early days of my original community we had like tooltips and getting started emails and all of no one reads everyone closes a newsletter, everyone closes the tool tips, what people do is when they join a community, they emulate the behavior of other community members. So this is how we learned to use Instagram LinkedIn. We saw what other people were posting and we emulated that behavior. So, and this is something that I learned from so House. And actually taking a leaf out of their book is we put together when we launched our first white label, a, ah, founding member community. And this was the most engaged people at Soho Works. That founding member community helped guide what the member needs were. But more importantly, before the product went live, they actually seeded the kind of things that soho Works or they need they were going to get value from so that other members then emulated that value. So people were asking questions like, can you recommend a UX designer? Or I'm thinking of raising investment. How do I do it? And so you suddenly, um, what we find is everyone sort of mimics the behavior of the people before. So suddenly someone was like, oh, I've just started a sustainable fashion business. Anyone else done that? And do you want to go for a coffee? Oh, can we get a restaurant recommendation nearby? And you suddenly get this sort of behavior. And it's really fascinating watching the completely different discussions on our app. So we power an investment network and it's all like, what's the implications of Deep Seek? And they're discussing deals and so they emulate. So back to your original question. Yes, that foundational bit is the more important bit and it's also then empowering the teams within an organization to take an active role. We definitely recommend people to put together a content schedule, but we have a rule that you have to have at least 20 posts of community members before you ever post content. And we actually work almost as advisors saying, well, is this content really m going to add value in a private community that isn't. They're not going to get on say, LinkedIn. So yeah, that first three months prior to launch is really fundamental. After launch, we advise that our, uh, community managers are actually called community curators. The best ones I see are not their managing per se. They're looking at the data. Who's really engaged, who can we empower to do events for us? Who can we empower to do groups for us? They can spot kind of trends in terms of what are discussions going on. Oh, our community's discussing AI. Maybe we should lean into who's the most proficient person in our community to actually lead an AI event and have an AI group chat. And so yes, it's that pre bit that's important and I literally just ripped off house. Our house. Built new houses, but in the digital.

Speaker B: Well, you know, that works. Yeah, that works. It's not a bad thing to base it on. Um, okay, so let's get into, if you're happy to talk about it, let's get into some of those metrics because you, I suppose it's a truism that for a commercial organization community is a long term play.

Speaker A: Yeah.

Speaker B: Right. And particularly at the moment a lot of commercial decision making inside organizations and is being driven by short termism. Yeah. Right. So there's a, you know, there's a moment in time issue but, but businesses forever have asked the question what's, what's the payback here? What you know, and um, they, they always want it to be now rather than in the future. Right. So tell me about the metrics. The, the ways in which you track and demonstrate the value that uh, a community is creating for an organization. And if you can, it'd be great to get some examples in there.

Speaker A: Yeah. So I mean on our side our job is to deliver an engaged community. So uh, we help businesses track that engagement. So the metrics I mentioned earlier, monthly active, weekly active, how much they're engaging with each other. I think the challenge that businesses have had to date with existing um, products is they can't plug in their revenue streams into those products. So it's actually very hard. So something like mighty, you mentioned earlier, the circle you can't put in your revenue stream. So really it's very hard for community curators or managers to then go back to management. There will be a halo effect but it's very hard to measure that. I think the joy of what we've built is because you can basically integrate your revenue streams directly into the app. So you could integrate your E commerce site or booking engine or the upsell to a paid membership. We can literally draw a direct line for our partners of this is how much your engagement is. So our uh, average partner monthly engagement is 72%, LinkedIn's only 35% but from that line they can see the uplift in revenue because they're in app and then they can make a purchase, they can make a booking, they can be a uh, genuine sales inquiry or a lead. So for example with Apple we are a sales lead to their business team. So uh, Apple identified that uh, if a founder starts using Apple products they roll it out to the whole team. I am definitely one of those massive Apple fan and you know my poor engineers who weren't necessarily on Apple all had to use Max now. So for them, it was about leads to the business team who will help and support founders on that journey. And so we 2x the leads that they had. So that is literally because they had a direct line to that community. You know, something like with Soho Works, they make money through people booking meeting rooms. Massive increase in meeting room bookings. So because we can integrate, it's so much easier for us to help a community manager, or community curator, as I like to call them, measure that ROI. It's so hard if you've got a community on WhatsApp or Facebook and actually those platforms are designed to make Mark Zuckerberg richer.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker A: I mean, you build a community, he

Speaker B: knows what the ROI is, he knows

Speaker A: what they are, he can measure the ROI. Yeah. I mean, everyone's in a WhatsApp group. You get a notification about a WhatsApp group, the next thing you look at is your family WhatsApp group or your friends WhatsApp group. You're just delivering engagement for meta. Uh, you're not.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker A: That's not then going into a sale or revenue.

Speaker B: Yeah. As you've touched on, you know, the meta platforms or LinkedIn we've spoken about before, or I mentioned Slack as well, is there a, uh, what's the connection between those public platforms and a private network like a white labeled dots? Is there a kind of a. Is there a journey from one to the other? Is there a sort of hybrid approach? What do you recommend with your clients?

Speaker A: I think, I mean, you know, LinkedIn is brilliant for acquisition of. It's brilliant for building a brand and it's brilliant, brilliant for reaching people you haven't reached before. Where we come in is when you have reached them and you want to actually convert them into revenue. That's where we come in. So we come in at the funnel where you've reached them, you've engaged with them, but instead of them starting to just be engaging on, continuing to engage there, you then own the engagement. So we're definitely down that funnel. Slack's slightly different because Slack is really an employee network. We are, um, not an employee network. We look after. I think Slack does that very well. Carl Henderson, who's the CTO and co founder, is actually one of my mentors and has helped me on this whole journey. But we are a community of people that don't know each other or know each other, but only through kind of events. So we're not an employee network. I think Slack has done a very good job on an employee network. We're built around building communities, around interests, areas, locations, um, anything where it's more, you know, the people you're trying to tap into from a business perspective and the employee.

Speaker B: I mean you'll look at all the things you've said, location based communities, interest based, passion based communities, you know, I mean obviously all working for the same organization is another literal community. Is that something you, you just wouldn't touch that or.

Speaker A: And I just think other people are doing it better. I think we're doing it the best in our space. I think Slack is doing the employee networks really well. I would never say never. There might be use cases where we would work uh, over Slack, but Slack is designed for teams to collaborate on things together, an employee team. We are designed to augment the real world experience and help people who don't necessarily know each other but have a shared interest to connect and then actually um, engaged in the real world. So I think what's interesting for us is how many brands are now trying to build these private kind of clubs or loyalty clubs around them. Um, that's where we come in. Yeah, but yeah, I'd say I never say never.

Speaker B: Well, I mean look, sure there's in, in the market that you are focused on, there's clearly you know, huge further potential. Right. You know, I guess the question around internal or employee based communities or networks is just because we're obviously a really interesting time for what it means to work for a company. Right. In terms of, you know, what that feels like on a day to day basis where it happens, you know, and the investment in a more kind of holistic approach to you know, employee well being and what um, have you is just such an interesting sort of point in space and time.

Speaker A: Where it could come into play is because we work with a lot of partners who had loads of apps, for example. So say if we work with a property it was like access the building and accessing different things across the app. You could actually technically integrate Slack into us as well. So it could be that all in one holistic. But I think actually that is the beauty of what we do because we can take partners, very complex tech stacks and bring it all in one space. I'm a big believer in having one place as well. So yeah, maybe one day I'll ask Cal if he wants to integrate Slack into us. But

Speaker B: um, okay, let's talk about the future. Actually this has been a fascinating conversation thus far. You know, it goes without saying but I sort of feel like we've got quite a lot of depth out of uh, you know, the last 40 minutes or, or so. So let's maybe think about what comes next. Feels like we've been seeing this forever. Right. You know, the, you know, I'm very conscious that, oh, you know, the future's going to be different and you know, change has never been happening faster than blah, blah. I sort of think that's always been the case. Right. But all we know is that things are going to be different and probably more different in the next five years. Particularly because of what's happening already with agentic AI in particular. Looking at it through a community lens though, you must be thinking about this. How do you see things ruling out, panning out, uh, particularly within your sector and your sort of field of focus maybe over the next five years.

Speaker A: I uh, must admit we talk about this as a senior team all the time. I mean we serendipitously walked into this sort of white labeling business. But then all of the talk online and AI forums is, you know, the future is AI and then community.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker A: Because you're not going to buy from an AI. You're not, you know, it's, you need trust and people will trust people. And so where I, you know, we're, I mean, you know, our um, white label product and you went out of stuff what, you know, well really now. But it's been live for a couple of years. It's insane to see the amount of businesses that uh, are now moving into this space. And I think people will trust people, but people are also getting savvier of their time. Right. So you know, what are the ones that actually going to deliver you value? And we're all part of trusted networks that deliver us value and we just augment that experience. So I believe the future is smaller trusted community offerings and whether those are on us or whether they're on groups or meta or whatever, but that is you still need the people to trust the people and meet the people and do the deals with the people and trust the brand to buy from the brand. And so yeah, I just love that now I'm in a space that uh, you know, you're not going to be able to replace the people. I mean we use a lot of AI, but in the back end we'd never use it on the front end of the business.

Speaker B: I don't know if you saw, but in the last 24 hours LinkedIn's published a list of, based on LinkedIn Institute research, the, I think the 15 sort of growth areas in terms of job function or specialism or whatever that they expect to Grow and obviously, you know, AI capability or, or what have you is top of the, the list. But also prominent on that list, I think Influencer is definitely on there and I think connected to is community. So there's that, that mix of very technologically driven rules and then the complete opposite as you say, and for the, the reasons that you, that you say. So, so can you say confidently that we're not going to experience engagement with a, a virtual community member on uh, a Dots app in any.

Speaker A: Definitely not online. It's really interesting. A couple of community products tried it and their engagement plummeted because as soon as people thought they were chatting to bots, they stopped engaging with the platform. So their metrics actually went down. So no, we're not going to automate on the front end at all.

Speaker B: It's really interesting.

Speaker A: I mean don't get me wrong, like you know, AI now does my code reviews and it writes our test scripts absolutely behind the scenes. Like we use a huge amount of AI for the technology. I mean we have a language model that screens out offensive language on the platform. So you can't actually publish a uh, really offensive word in, even in DMs. We can't read the DMs and we don't know what's in the DMs, but it will just. The system absolutely takes it out. So yes, so much AI. I mean our connection engine is based on an AI model, but in terms of ever making it so that bots are talking to bots, no, it will be just the end of my business. And that will never happen because that is the magic of our business because people still want to connect and meet and do business together, either with the organization or with each other.

Speaker B: It's so interesting that. And I, you know, I get you completely. I think it's, it's all about context, isn't it? There is some data, I uh, can't remember the numbers that show that any uh, kind of problem solving or kind of customer service experience that people actually feel more confident that they're going to get a solution when they know that it's a bot rather than a real person because they know that bot is basically designed to get to, you know, whereas what you're talking about in terms of community experience, all that thing about engagement and trust and you spoke about peer to peer, uh, earlier on, you know, it just shows that context is everything with, you know, as has always been the case, but particularly when it comes to the adoption of some artificial intelligence.

Speaker A: I mean we, for example, we Power, a private ah, member club called Adorium, which are a member club without a member club. So they're a business networking club. They all believe in the chemistry of connection. You know one of the posts yesterday was could you connect me with CEOs across um, the TV industry? And everyone knew that was a real person. So everyone got back and said, you know, I know Alex who runs Channel 4, I'm happy to do that. And you saw the community and suddenly like they've got introduct introductions to all the CEOs. You're not going to like a bot's not going to be able to introduce you to Alex Malloy at Channel four. So I think that's the really important thing is that you know, we're actually leaning into what is that human behavior that a bot can't replicate. Do everything else on AI. I mean I love it but just yeah, that networking, that community building, you know, we're not going to have machines turning up to networking events. It's just not going to happen.

Speaker B: Well, as well as um, our alongside community being one of the areas that we focus on at volume one of the, the growth areas, particularly in B2B is influencers. Influencers and creators, you know, whether that's external experts partnering with businesses or indeed finding and enabling the talent inside the organization. So our radar is quite attuned to what's going on in the world of uh, influencers. I read something last week about, and it's, and I see it now in my LinkedIn feed, you know, people posting about the virtual influencers they've created. Uh, you know, it's just, you know, it makes you kind of recoil, right? In fact the only sort of cogent argument I, I, I, I heard in favor of a virtual influencer is you could at least guarantee brand safety. And they're being on message, they're not going to go rogue. I mean I think that's placing quite a lot of trust in the, in the tech. You know, we've seen Terminator. We know that, you know, it's not always, it's not always going to play ball.

Speaker A: And it's funny about influencers because you know, influencers play such a brilliant role in terms of reaching new community members. Funnily enough, we don't recommend engaging with influencers in our uh, private communities. And so for example, when we put together founding member cohorts, one of the, our recommendations is not an influencer. And the reason being actually is that uh, influencers are getting so much value from saying being a TikTok influencer. If they're actually in a smaller private network, they're not going to reply to people that get in touch. So we're looking for those more grassroots people within communities that can are the ones replying to questions, are the ones getting involved as opposed to the top level influencers. And there's different ways to define influence. Obviously we're looking for the silent influencers, not the TikTok star sister.

Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, yeah. The influencers of merit.

Speaker A: The influencers of merit, yes.

Speaker B: Well, you know that actually campaigns or partnerships that are based on working with multiple smaller influencers deliver a higher ROI than, you know, working with a, you know, a kind of a rock star. For one of a better phrase, you know, slightly different question. We, we often, this often naturally comes out in some of the problems that we talk about on this podcast. And it's the sort of the generational shift, you know, and the, the idea that again, lazy phrases. But millennial or Gen Z leaders, managers within businesses, you know, have a different, you know, formative experience to us Gen Xers or you know, or even older. So do you have any observations or any examples, you know, where there's been a generational consideration with, with any of the, the Dots products or do you see different behaviors in there by, by different sort of groups?

Speaker A: Yeah, I mean, much faster adoption by the younger generation. I mean we, I mean we, we power a Gen Alpha community which is basically Days Media's Days club. And oh my gosh, like, you know, we also find that they're just not on email anymore. Right. So uh, the younger generation are just not reachable by email anymore. Like so. Yeah, I mean that's the power of push notifications is you can actually start reaching this younger generation. Do you know, we were so worried when we were sort of starting that the older generation would get frustrated because it is an app essentially. But actually they all use WhatsApp now and we're pretty simple to do it. So we, we. But I would say, yeah, uh, it's a sort of younger ones who are uh, definitely the posters. You can see a demographic shift in. Yeah, they're much more willing to put themselves out there, ask questions, I'm sure. Collaborate actually which is, is kind of like brilliant. They sort of can feel a lot that's going on.

Speaker B: Yeah, they're like an engine of success, aren't they? Yeah. Um, slightly different question then. When we're developing community strategy, there's often kind of three things that a brand is looking for at the highest level in terms of The ROI to return to what we're talking about here. One is, can doing this, can investing in this help me reduce my customer acquisition cost? Yeah. And there's that sort of idea that you move from a funnel where you lose lots of people on the way down to creating more of a cylinder where you've got a real sticky experience where people hang around and you know you've got more customers dropping through and so therefore your average CAC is lower. The other side, the coin to that is that because they're there and they, you've, you've got them, you're delivering value to them. And that could be, as you've just said there because you enable them to connect peer to peer, you've made that happen, that's valuable, they associate that with you. And so there's a lifetime value benefit as well. That's the second one. And the third one is really interesting because it's perhaps less tangible, but it is the benefit that comes from having that instant ready made fast at least potential feedback loop where you can find out uh, stuff, you know, that in the past you might have had to pay another organization to go out and talk to the people that are actually your members, customers, etc. And then tell you what the answer is. And now you've got effectively a direct line into that. Does that factor into the DOTS experience as well? Do the, the organizations that, what you work with are uh, they using it to get that kind of insight?

Speaker A: Yeah, it's interesting. It's back to the exercise that we do. When we make them list out their business objectives, we actually make them choose one.

Speaker B: Okay.

Speaker A: And the reason being is it then impacts who you should let into a community and so it doesn't mean you can't get halo on all of them.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker A: So there's different strategies. If it's kind of more retention, engagement, like keeping them, you should actually let in only your core community. If it's more growth led, you can actually invite people that are on the wider funnel in who aren't customers yet, for example. So you know, it's very different strategies in terms of which business objective you're trying to fulfill. Over time you can grow that, but we very much say choose one.

Speaker B: Mhm.

Speaker A: There will be halos effect and that one determines who you let in. So for example, you know with Soho Works, when we started working with soho Works at uh, the beginning they had capacity, I don't know if you remember, but there was desk space everywhere. So they let sohaus members in. But now you can't move in there. So. So house members are no longer in the app because they were using it as a waiter up. Um, so really the business objective is why we make them choose that one first. Because that then determines are you just inviting your customers? Are you inviting your customers and warm leads? Are you writing your whole funnel? You know, and it then also determines sometimes the business objective they choose is around the business need is actually going to be requires curation of that community first. So it really that's why we make them choose that one uh, business objective.

Speaker B: And on that third point that I was talking about those feedback loops, you know, so what, what kind of data, what kind of, you know, I mean how are DOTs clients using that to kind of get closer to find out more about their, their members?

Speaker A: Yeah, if, if they had chosen that my first recommendation was get as many people in there as humanly possible. Right. Because that is like to get the really sort of and I'm an ex economist to get that really statistically significant feedback that you really need. You want as many people in there as possible. If that's the business objective within it really what we're just making sure that they engage with however you're wanting to collect that data. So on a very basic level it can be integrating whatever kind of survey forms you have within the product. People just send out typeforms. You can actually send DMs to everyone in the app with one click as an admin. So you can send all of that through. So yeah, there's ways to do that if you're looking for kind of feedback. If you're brave enough and don't mind getting a lot of feedback that's public, you could post it to the forum. But obviously you're gonna have to remember your.

Speaker B: Yeah, everyone's gonna see the answer.

Speaker A: Everyone see it. So it's basically, you know, we'd recommend DMs is a great way to do that if you want privately super confident. Unless you're very confident.

Speaker B: Okay, I wanted also to ask you about this kind of build or buy question. What's the case for investing in and building your own community compared to perhaps finding a way to partner with or indeed acquire a community that already exists or has already organized around something that's relevant to your brand or your business? How should businesses evaluate what's the right approach for them?

Speaker A: I don't think there's necessarily a right or wrong. It's actually almost maybe speed to market. So if you only have a database and you're still trying to work out what your community is, but you have a very clear idea of who you're trying to reach. There are communities that exist out there that service, that ideal customer profile. And so I think what I find really interesting is that uh, you know you, you do need to invest in community building but it's not going to happen overnight because you should listen to the community and it should all you need to let it bed in, empower the community leads. You're looking at 12 year cycle and as you said earlier, no one's really thinking like that but your ideal customer profile, there is a community that is already out there. And so what we find and we've got, as I said, We've got 900 people on our wait list. We have a lot of communities that don't have the commercial firepower to be able to have their own app. So I think partnering up with a community that already exists and making uh, a collab, I think at that point obviously it is around only engagement. So there has to be you know, a proper agreement in place with that community around data sharing and joint controllership of that data. Because there's no point just, I'm not talking about just sponsoring a community, I'm talking about a proper collab where you go into a joint controller and that then requires a really authentic link between you and that community. But the more we can power or empower brilliant communities and commercialized communities, the better for everyone I think. So I think it is actually just a speed to market thing is the most important thing. And then just be very careful that there is proper alignment between you and them. Be very clear on what your ideal customer profile is. And, and make sure you come into a really good agreement on joint. You just don't want a logo at the top of an app. You want a proper joint. Joint relationship. And I signed that deal for about three years plus.

Speaker B: Well, you'll be pleased to hear that we are rapidly getting towards the end of this conversation. There's a few things just to finish with. The first is a uh, question we normally ask in one shape or form and that is what's the one thing that you would say or that you would recommend to a cmo, you know, a CEO who is thinking about making a bigger investment in community as part of their business growth plan.

Speaker A: Yeah, I think it's do it like such a simple thing to say but um, you can pilot it on a smaller cohort and start measuring the roi.

Speaker B: Mhm.

Speaker A: Obviously join our wait list when you go over 500 or get in Touch with you. But I think beyond that the most important thing is actually the person that curates that community. Mhm. And I think the mistake I see brands making is they hire someone who does social media to do the community curation.

Speaker B: Okay.

Speaker A: It's a very different skill set. Social media is all about feeding content and getting likes and getting replies and mass engagement. The best community curators we see are actually the people that are engaging with your community in the real world. So they're running the events for you. They're the ones on help desk. They're the ones who are there understanding their problems, understanding their needs. Those are the best community curators, not social media managers.

Speaker B: So that would be my advice that is really interesting. If you, if you study some of the, the big B2B customer or client communities and often they are tech businesses, you know. So say Salesforce is the one that lots of people look at. Uh, if you study its genesis as a uh, um and how it became so important to that uh, business. It was powered mainly by customer service way more than any other business aspect or element of the firm. It certainly wasn't. You're right. It's not the same as a social media role.

Speaker A: No. You have to care deeply m about the community and you have to understand that community. And actually Apple did that really well with their developer community which we don't power yet but it became such a powerful tool for the developers helping each other troubleshoot instead of the business having to do it all themselves. And so that's where it gets really exciting.

Speaker B: I just thought of another question actually in light of this conversation. You've obviously explained very very clearly where the dots focus is and why you focus. Where you focus. We haven't really spoken about other than your personal experience the kind of the startup community and obviously community is a big certainly potential route for startup and smaller businesses as part of their go to market strategy. We've seen that very successfully where you tend to get early users who are very enthusiastic about um, any given. It could be a DTC product, it could be a B2B tech solution. But some of these businesses, these startup businesses are kind of characterized as having been built on community. Now you don't play there but could you see a role for the dots in those kind of fast growing start up?

Speaker A: Yeah, I mean we're seeing m, we're seeing more and more inquiries from fan bases based communities. Absolutely. Because you have got those super fans who then can help you build a business or build a product. And so that's a really interesting space that would work really well because people are super fans, and that's great. I mean, I don't power this, and I wish I did, but LEGO is the master of this.

Speaker B: Right.

Speaker A: You know, they've got the superfan community all sharing.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker A: Making their Lego, we are the perfect solution for something like that. Except they'd already built it, so that breaks my heart.

Speaker B: It's Lego. You can rebuild it. Right.

Speaker A: But that super fandom, um, of people that love your product and want to see it succeed. Yeah, that. That we are. You know, that is actually the Days club community. They are Days media super fans, um, who are all getting together. We just went live with the Sheerlux community, the same. They're Sheerlux super fans.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker A: And that, I think, is such an exciting space because superfans, you can absolutely own that engagement because they love your brand. Uh, why on earth would you ever build that and give that engagement to Meta? It's crazy.

Speaker B: Well, I'm smiling here because I started my career in magazines. And what you've just been describing is a bit like what we used to say about magazines. Right? Not just because you're talking about days, but. Yeah. Okay, two final questions, then. Two final questions. We always ask these. What advice would you give to somebody starting out there in their career who wants to kind of do what you do?

Speaker A: Oh, uh, run a tech business.

Speaker B: You're gonna say, don't do it, aren't you?

Speaker A: Oh, God, I am. For an app? Yes. Don't start an app.

Speaker B: Okay.

Speaker A: All the apps have been built. Now, I know that's such an overgeneralization, but it breaks my heart when I meet founders and they're like, I've got this great idea for an app, and I'm like. And that has been built about a hundred times.

Speaker B: Uh-huh.

Speaker A: So if you're thinking of an app, don't build an app. Like, license it. If you're. If you're thinking about building a community license. If you're thinking about building E Comm Use, Shopify. If you're like, the basic software products, I hate to say, have been built where the opportunity is in tech. And if I was now, I would not build an app, because I have one. So luckily I can license it. But if I was starting right now, I think where the opportunities in tech are very much in the AI space and the enviro space, you know, that's where the opportunities are. Uh, do not waste your time on building an app because someone's already built it. Spent years making all the mistakes and is licensing it. Yeah, it's. And engineers are so expensive. If you want to go into tech, hire engineers to solve problems around AI. I am desperate for an AI solution that will read all my emails and um, basically recommend potential replies that I can then read and respond. So if there's anyone listening wanting to get into tech, please build that for me and get in touch. But I think there's lots of opportunities in AI at the moment. Focus your space that way.

Speaker B: Yeah, I mean that's the. Yeah, uh, I think we all want that, uh, uh, which leads me on to the final question, which you might already have answered it then. You know this. We always, we're here talking about problems and happily solutions to that and thank you, you've certainly shared lots of those with us. What's the problem that you'd like us uh, to perhaps ask uh, somebody else about?

Speaker A: Oh, I think I'm very obsessed with the AI space at the moment just because, I mean I've had to rewrite my whole business model because business team members I thought I needed, I no longer need because of the efficiency. So I think the problem is how do we vet the best AI solutions for our uh, business would be a brilliant one for me to know because there's so many things flying around at the moment and I'm, you know, I don't have necessarily time to trial and error actually. I just need to ask uh, the private member communities that I power their favorite ones are and then I can trust them. And there we go. I just asked the community. I just solved my own problem.

Speaker B: Right, well, I'd like to know the answer to that question as well. So I'm sure we will make that happen. Pip, thank you so much for your time and for sharing so much of your personal experience and the detail around the dots and the business. It's been really, really fascinating. So thank you.

Speaker A: Absolutely loved it. Thank you for having great.