You know, what is it called like when you work there just to get experience?
Internship? Internship? You were in an internship, a corporate job as a student.
Yeah. And after that, you know, it didn't work out so well for me. I ended up working
at the airport, which was quite a lot of stress going on. And it was just very fast paced.
That didn't work out as well. I ended up being in the hospital because I had some sort of
panic attack. Yeah, it was quite a day. You know, at first I thought I was having some
sort of heart attack, but it was just all because of stress. And then I tried again
going after a corporate job after what I started studying, which was, you know, work development
and stuff. That didn't work out as well. You know, it was a crazy environment. My boss
was just, you know, he wasn't the boss you would have.
He was the nicest guy in the world.
Yeah, yeah, exactly. And then, yeah, I started and failed as a kid growing up about size
seven businesses, MLM, car flipping, whatever you can imagine. I even started, you know,
growing health products for men, health styling products and whatnot. And I didn't go nowhere
with this. And I just one day I started questioning myself, you know, what's going on? Why I'm
not succeeding on anything. And that's where I got the answer. And it was like I was not
good at sales or marketing. So I started watching a bunch of YouTube videos, all of these well
known American gurus that are out there, you know, some names. And then the next thing
I knew was I joined the copywriting course, learned a bunch of things, started working
under many US agencies, got a ton of experience. And then after I decided just to go on my
own journey, learn what I mean, apply what I learned. Yeah, that's long story short.
That's where I am right now.
Wow. That's awesome. And now, so who's who are the favorite three gurus? Favorite three?
Favorite three gurus. I don't know if he likes to be called a guru, but I would say a guy
is called Troy Erickson. Okay. And then there's another one. Sorry. That's one. Yeah. I would
say Ian Stanley is another one. And all right. Welcome in to Vision Pros Live with Jackson
Calame. I'm your show host. We will be doing interviews for visionary entrepreneurs and
guest leaders who are building fantastic visions out there. Welcome into Vision Pros Live. I'm
your host, Jackson Calame, founder and CEO of First Class Business. I'm excited for so
many different reasons. One of the many at the top is that I've got Alex Gregoriales
on our call. Now I say that with a Spanish accent, so forgive me. It's a gringo Spanish
accent. Let's be real here. But Alex is the owner of Email Bounty Hunter. And what a humble
story he just shared with us right before we dove into the intro. And he's a good dude.
Like he cares a lot about people. And I've seen that. I mean, I got to get this kind
of show. We're going to be talking about community growth through email marketing because selfish
endeavor. I want to know more about email marketing myself. Last year, there was an
article that came out about trends. What trend do you focus on? They asked a bunch of gurus
and Ryan Dice of Digital Marketers answer was email. It's not going anywhere. Everybody
still has one. Stay focused on the apps that are working super, super well. So if you have
a massive email list, this could be a fantastic episode. If you are building an email list,
you're interested in that too. This could also be an important episode. I'll let Alex
guide us on which of those is truest. Before we dive in with Alex, so another special announcement.
We are expanding. We have Paul Murphy on our team now as an executive advisor. And we also,
in addition to Paul, have Chris Chambers, who just came on as CEO of Media Productions.
And he has taken off like a rocket with my other show, The Power Take. So make sure to
tune into Chris, see what he's up to. His brain, his heart, like I don't know if there's
a continent that they would fit on. He's amazing. So make sure to check out Chris, support him
in his endeavors. And you will be so shocked with the amount of things you can learn from
him. Sponsorships, ColdClick. We use ColdClick for our own LinkedIn automation. I love the
tool. I love the founder. Art Hoffman has become a good friend of mine, somebody who
has my back at every corner. And I can go to him and we talk shop about what's going
on in a LinkedIn automation space and how can we optimize what we're up to to distribute
our voice. That is the most important. It's a top layer of your funnel. It's supposed
to be the largest. I see so many business owners not distributing their voice. They
go on Facebook and post to your own audience that 90% of them have probably already unfollowed
your post if you're posting about business. In addition to that, you may have an Instagram
channel. You're not on Twitter. You're probably not. You might be going out to networking
events, but it's just you. You got to get your voice out there so you can find people
who are like, wow, I want to engage with that person. The more people you come across, the
more likely you are going to end up with a treasure trove of people who come towards
you and say, I really want to be involved in that. It has led to on a single Friday,
50 applications for our show. And we've got a steady flow of about 30 to 50 right now
with some of those cinched down because we don't have as much capacity right now with
the holidays. In addition to that, there's this other sponsor, Simply Fast websites.
Shane, I just got a special feeling about Shane, to be honest with you guys. Part of
that was seeing that he had launched websites at starting $179 a month and he just got this
nurturing nature about him. I was like, man, if I was starting over from scratch right
now, I would totally pay him 179 bucks, submit the form and have him launch a, I don't know
how raw it would be on how amazing it would be. I don't know. You'd have to see for yourself,
but I don't know any other web developers and web strategists who are offering websites
at that price point. If you are, don't hesitate to drop a comment and defend yourself and
say like, Hey, I do that too. We're looking to help entry level entrepreneurs pave their
path forward faster so that they have a better chance of winning. Too many get stuck playing
the online marketer role and keeping that hat on tight in their head. And then they
never end up moving their businesses forward. I don't have my water bottle with me, but
it is in the other room. The water project is next. If you're in a position to give back,
please do. And please go to the water project and give there. Somebody emailed me just yesterday
showing me their contribution to the water project. And I was so stoked. And I think
some people would look at that and be like, Oh, they're just show budding. They're inspiring
me. They're elevating all of us by having done that. Now, if you're not in a position
to give back and you're like, well, I can't do that, Jack. So I don't have the money to
me. Do us all a favor. Just share it, share it with your audience who will not see this
episode. You never know what type of good can come out of sharing goodwill. What's cool
about the water project. They show you the communities they're affecting. You get to
see the outcome of the results of where your dollar goes. I just think that's super extra
special. And if you have a cause you'd like to see us support, promote a campaign for
talk about just drop the link in the comments and share it with us. We will check it out.
And we're all about trying to find new ways to give back. There's billions of people in
this world who need a lot of help. And those of us who are in a fortunate position enough
to listen to podcasts, I think we have an amazing opportunity to be a part of that.
So without further ado, Alex, Greg already added. Thank you so much for being on the
show today. Welcome to vision pros live. I'm glad to be here, man. Thanks for having me.
Absolutely. Let me get this banner rolling. That's here's a little secret for all you
podcast listeners right now. When this banner goes up at the bottom of the screen, that's
my signal to my production assistant to start sharing screen. And so now some of you guys
know the secret Easter egg behind behind our one of our production strategies. So Alex,
as we as a look, there we are. LinkedIn just started doing this for our lives are now as
your header. Isn't that cool? Yeah, that's that's cool. I think it's funny. Absolutely.
So Alex, you talked to us a little bit about your background. As we get ready to talk about
email marketing and and you know what what things you're doing over with email bounty
hunter. I'd like to know from you, who do you think should be listening right now? And
why do you feel they should be listening to you?
Well, any business that wants to grow their revenue, because email marketing starts at
day one, right? So you grow your audience, you have to have your own list, which comes
part of, you know, the asset of the business, if at some point you want to exit that business,
then the list you have is going to be part of how much you're going to sell that business.
So yeah, it's quite essential. And any business owner who has a community should also think
that anyone can can have at their disposal. Absolutely. Now I'm going to put a quote on
the screen here. This quote came from you as you submitted your form for your vision.
Let's go back to that comma. There we are. It says, I'm aiming to help people achieve
this future by helping them build the business of their dreams and grow their communities.
So I'm a big fan as well of the community concept. People want to belong to something.
They want to belong in an environment with people that are like-minded. And so community
growth is, I can see how massive that is and why you key in on that. I honor you for that.
So what's your vision for those that you serve? When I say that, right, there's the path to
the vision. But once they've gotten to that other side, what's life look like? What's
that vision look like for them? Alex, you still there? We got the car. Yep. There we
go. There we are. So what's your vision for those that you serve? I mean, you know, my
vision is first of all, because I'm interacting with the list that's not my own, right? It's
the business list. So I have to make sure that everything I do is on point for that
business. So if I'm interacting with that and that...
Oh no, we're having some technical difficulty with Alex's answers. Alex, the internet keeps,
the internet demons are cutting you off and making sure that the gold does not come through
today. If there's a program or two that you can shut down in the background, it might
help. But let's see how it does again. Go ahead, try to pick up where you were.
Yeah. I mean, if I'm interacting with a business list, I have to make sure that the brand's
voice is on point. And I want to make sure that everything I do is a hundred percent
where it needs to be. For example, I have to be sending emails that, you know, people
like to read, they'll be entertained. And the momentum going so they keep opening the
emails in... We're losing... We lost you again. But there's
that, you know, you got to get people to read the emails. They got to be entertained by
the emails. One of the other quotes that you shared was, I like to inspire other people
who also might be interested in building their own agencies. And so you've worked with a
number of agencies and I can see how it goes hand in hand with email marketing. Alex, are
you there again? I think I lost Alex completely. One of the things I was going to ask Alex
about next was about which is his first language, because I know English is his second language.
And he... I think it's tremendous that, you know, I know how hard it is to speak in Spanish
and I know how there's so many opportunities to accidentally misconvey what it is you want
to talk about. The difference, for instance, between the thought process of, hey, you should
do that and hey, I want you to do that. And hey, why don't you do that? Hey, you could
do that. All of those little bitty words that seem so insignificant once you're fluent in
a language, those are the things that can really trip up and ruin a relationship when
you had the intent of saying the right terminology. So when I come across people like Alex who've
put in the due diligence to understand their craft in their own language and in addition
to that, be able to learn and serve other communities in different languages, I'm always
like, I just... It gives me a reverence. And what I've seen in his submission forms as
well and in our conversations behind the scenes too, we had a good 30 minute call before this
one about three weeks ago. It's just that heart of gold service. So hopefully the internet
is back in just a minute for Alex. Let's check one more time and see if it's good to go.
Alex, are you there? Can you hear me okay? It's going to be one of those days, folks.
Let's... Oh, maybe. Maybe you're back. Are you there, Alex?
Hello. Can you hear me?
Hey, there you are. All right. I'll tell you what. So if we have another internet mishap,
what we'll do, we'll give all bridge the gap. I'll talk about some email marketing and what
we have going on and I'll actually give our audience access to our deadline sequence framework
because I want to make sure people get as much out of this as possible. If it cuts you
off again, go ahead and reset your router and modem and we'll have you back on in a few
minutes while I bridge the gap. So Alex, let's give it one more shot. What's your worst leadership
experience ever? Let's dive into that. Oh, it's still not hitting. That internet is just
frustrating.
What's your experience like from a...
Yeah, but Alex, we're going to have to wait because your internet's still cutting out.
So do us a favor, reset the router and modem. We'll bring you back on. We'll have you add
into the flavor of the conversation. I'm going to dive right into email marketing for people
from my perspective and that will help people and also community growth. So a couple of
things. One thing I learned from FlowChat regarding community growth and Sean Malone
and what they were up to that I don't see practice a lot in the Facebook group growth
market is when you have new members coming in, there's those forms that you want to ask
those strategic questions, of course, that's all baked in there. But one of the other big
things is I see people do these welcome posts where it's like, hey, welcome. And it's got
a thousand people on there and nobody feels welcome. It's like, you just welcomed a thousand
people and nobody really actually reached out to me. Facebook now pretty much automates
that. And what FlowChat does instead is I saw them start taking people individually
and they have a very cool system for copy and paste. It makes this very easy by the
way. But they go to the most relevant new post or post that they want to rise to the
top. They tag the person in that post as a comment and ask for their thoughts on that
post or they ask them to introduce themselves within the conversation of the community
itself. That's kind of like showing up to a university and not just being told, okay,
everybody welcome. Here's a big welcome sign. Just walk through and find your own way. That's
kind of like being taken, asked, hey, what is it that you want? And then assessing based
on your profile and then dropping you in the subject that means the most to you and introducing
you to a smaller clan or tribe within the community that gets them jumpstarted and helps
them feel welcome. I thought it was absolutely brilliant. And again, I don't see very many
companies out there practicing that in their Facebook community building. That same principle
can apply to LinkedIn communities as well, for instance. So then we have this resource
call. And I think we can draw, I'm pretty sure we can drop the resource into the landing
page notes for this episode. Cynthia and I will find a way to do that. But basically
we have a framework for a deadline email sequence that is so powerful and helpful. And we hope
you use it ethically. The idea behind an urgency sequence or creating a deadline sequence is
not to box people in, it's to help people understand that you truly do have a limited
supply of whatever it is you have and you're trying to inspire them to take advantage of
it before you actually run out. Again, we all know there's companies out there who utilize
that for bad. It doesn't mean we shouldn't utilize the same approach, but please do so
with ethics. And here's also why, if you need a reason to be ethical, the reason would be
you're going to torture reputation if you ever use that in a way that's not ethical.
Unfortunately, we see it all the time in the market. And so what do I mean by an unethical
approach to using a deadline sequence? If you say that hurry supplies only last, you
know, for only last for willing to have three more in stock, but you actually have like
300 more, that is a flat out lie. You are manipulating the market. You are torching
your reputation. There is bad karma and juju that will come after you for doing things
like that too. Don't do it. Only use deadline sequences with ethics. But in the case of
the first class business, for instance, we are right now at our own, our capacity, we
have that measured. We will bring on two clients per week. That's it. We don't do more than
that. And so if somebody's in a position where we're like, well, I don't care. I don't really
want to work with you. That's fine. That's totally cool. At the same time, if we have
a big backlog of people who want to work with us and they see that and they know that they
want to be one of the two because they need in the launch now, not later, helping them
understand our thresholds and bandwidth helps them prioritize taking action and saying,
you know what, I don't want to have to get help from them in three quarters from now
or next week or the week after that. And as we continue to build out our demand, that
reservation list gets longer. The greatest instance that I've seen in that was Elon Musk
selling the Tesla Model 3, now probably trumped by Taylor Swift and her concert tickets and
how that went. But going back to the Elon Musk example, he sold a car from stage and
180,000 people put a thousand dollar reservation down on a car they wouldn't get for two to
three years. They didn't even have the timeline nailed down specifically, but people were
so excited about it. They bought into it. Everybody said he was going to fail. And as
we all know, he's become one of the most successful business owners of all time. And that wasn't
the only reason or the exact reason why that happened. There's a lot of things that he's
done, but what we can do is we can look at that perspective of how did he do what he's
done in different capacities and say, how do I model this with my own brand? And how
do I make sure to make good on my delivery if I decide to drive high demand for my brand?
So that deadline email sequence will absolutely be sharing it in the comments and it will
give you the 10 emails, the frameworks that we use when we put together an email sequence
for deadline purposes. And it's basically a fill in the blank coloring book that you
don't have to color. You just replace your logos with it. So with that said, let's see
if Alex is back on the internet. You good to go, Alex?
I believe so, but you sound good. Technology.
Right. Never. I agree with you on that. Technology is, oh man, we got to have fun in our tech
world, don't we? All right, Alex. So let's dive into that worst leadership experience
ever. What's that look like? You already talked about one really nice guy boss. That could
have been it, but go ahead and elaborate or give us a new one.
I think I'll bring up the job that I had at the airport where there was a lot of pressure
and a lot of stress, especially at some, it was one day where all the airplanes were rerouted
to our airport because the other one that we have in our country was closed. So we were
getting twice as much airplanes at our airport. So it was chaotic. And then that affected
me a lot. Like I ended up having a panic attack. And the next day, my boss told me, you know,
maybe Alex, you're not able to handle pressure, you know, just why don't you look at something
else or you might not be able to achieve anything in your life. So.
What? Yeah. I would say that was the worst leadership experience.
He got the trophy. He got hit over the head with that trophy. That's wow. Way to make
it personal, you know, and really try to attack the character of the individual rather than
understanding the event itself. And he probably, you know, wasn't dealing with the same things
you were on that day either. So, yeah, that's a pretty big worst leadership. Let's talk
about the best. Switching to the opposite end of the spectrum, what's the best leadership
experience? The best. Let's save a question.
I guess I would say I haven't been able to. It could be one you've seen too. It could
be one that you've been like, man, I would love to have a leader like that or see a leader
do that. That's another good question. I mean, what
would I say here? I guess someone like Elon Musk is someone that always brings the best
out of the team because whatever business he has built, it has always been successful
and we have to give credits to the team as well. So whatever, doesn't matter what industry
he joins, he just is able to extract the best out of any team. So I guess that's the best
leadership experience that I've seen so far. Dude, I'll double down on that against popular
demand on mainstream media. He took over Twitter. There's a whole bunch of fuss about how bad
he was doing, how unfit he was for it and blah, blah, blah. One, the news loves drama.
So they're going to focus. It's just like when people burnt LeBron's Jersey in Cleveland
and set it on fire. There was like one or two people who did that out of a city of millions
and millions and millions of fans beyond that. So news loves to focus in on the drama. And
so there's, of course, then you got all the Twitter employees and of course some of them
are going to be upset about change and all that. But if you're on the chopping block,
if you're one of the people who's not producing, but you're super highly paid, of course you're
going to come back against him and try to create a revolt. Why would you not if you've
been there riding the coattail of the company the entire time? I don't know who was and
who wasn't. I'm not trying to put judgment on any specific person, but what I have seen
and heard from people who are much closer to Elon Musk is exactly what you said. That
he shows up, that he cares about them, that he wants them to win, that he empowers them
tremendously. So I love that you use that example. Anything else you want to add before
we move on to the most powerful lesson? Yeah, and now that you mentioned LeBron James, I
mean, he brought up the greatest example in the sports, I guess, with Michael Jordan,
where I watched the documentary last year. He was saying that his team was a bit lazy
and he just was able to bring the best out of them every single time, push them harder,
keep going, keep winning, no matter how many trophies they had, it was just hungry for
more and the team saw that. So yeah, that was another good leader in that space.
Hey, absolutely. Absolutely. We'll have our goat debate later. I'm a big fan of both.
Absolutely. So what powerful lesson can other visionaries learn from your experience? If
this was the last lesson you could gift us, what would it be?
I guess it all comes down to being a human being. Some people just don't understand that.
Maybe they see you as a number, maybe you see you as a dollar sign. We're all human
beings in this place. We're going to leave at some point, so we have to leave some sort
of legacy behind us. What are people going to remember us for? So I would say be a good
person, add value to other people's lives. It's not all about the money at the end of
the day. Yeah, sure. We want to put money on the table, but money, we can't take it
with us when we're going to die. So I would say just do as much as possible for other
human beings, bring value, build connections. Yeah, that's how you, I mean, that's how
I've seen many successful entrepreneurs grow their business at the end of the day is you
don't come as needy. You don't become someone who takes advantage of other people. As soon
as you add value and you just give as much as you give, the more you're going to get
back. So I guess that's part of the law of attraction as well, the law of the universe.
So yeah. Wow. It is, man. That was a beautiful answer. I cannot count on one hand out of
more than probably more than 2000 email marketing companies that have tried to approach us for
what they could do for us and how they can help us expand our lists, et cetera, over
the years. I cannot count on one hand the amount of people in email marketing who said
what you just said and who believe that. And if we could just get the email marketers in
the world, the marketers in general in the world to make that shift, to say, how can
I be a valuable human to others? Right? How can I serve? How can I give? How can I stand
for something that means more? All these copywriting frameworks wouldn't matter so much. All these
templates and stuff, because if we're doing the right thing for the right reason, because
we care about others, then the result can come. That's the type of person that I want
helping me on my email marketing strategies. Let's go right into that. So when it comes
to the world of community growth through email marketing, what are some of the... Let's start
on the elite side. What are some of the things people are overlooking at the highest levels
for email marketing that they should be doing? And then we'll circle back to somebody who's
getting started. I guess the number one thing is email automation. That's the most thing
that people overlook because they don't pay much attention to it. They might have the
least amount of automations in place or either the emails inside that sequence aren't enough.
For example, an abandoned card sequence should have at least five emails. And I've seen other
businesses that just maybe have one or two. And in that case, they're leaving money on
the table. And if you can imagine that these automations are running 24-7 every single
day, then that money accumulates. That's on the table. So yeah, email automations play
a big role. Doesn't matter the size of the business, to be honest. As soon as you start
getting traffic and you start growing the list, the number one thing you should do is
have the email automations in place. Yeah. Okay. So getting the email automations in
place, the time is now ultimately. So one of the big challenges that I've had with email
marketing is finding somebody I can trust to make sure that they know how to protect
my domain. So in addition to getting into people's inboxes, I also want to make sure
I'm getting into it in a way where we're not getting marked as spam and we're not potentially
being thrown in Gmail dungeon. What would you say about that? What do you need to do
to make sure that you're not ruining your reputation or accidentally marked as all time
spammer? I could be talking about this topic forever, but not easy. Yeah. I guess the most
important thing is all things are basically quality of the leads. So as soon as someone
joins the list, first of all, you have to make sure that that's someone who genuinely
wants to read from you. And it's not someone that's going to just get whatever freebie
you have and just jump off. So you have to, let's say after a week of someone joining
the list, you have to track the data and see if that person is actually opening any emails.
If that's not the case, then they can go straight out of the door and unsubscribe them because
that's going to harm your reputation. If you have inactive people on the list. That's brilliant.
The next thing is, it all comes down to content. So is your content something that actually
helps people? That's something that makes people want to read whatever you're sending
them to. Do people look forward to reading your emails every day? If not, and you're
just spamming people and just selling every single time, it's not going to help at all.
At some point you will start getting people marking your emails as spam, which is going
to help your reputation and your domain. So I guess those are the two biggest things.
And you have to also pay attention at some point to your spam rates and your unsubscribe
rates. If they are increasing, maybe you just have to change a few things. Maybe decrease
the email frequency that you have every week. Try and see if that works or change your content.
Start sending valuable things, tips, hacks, whatever valuable thing you have, free content
that's going to help people and not just straight sell them every single day. So those are the
biggest things that I see.
Wow. Yeah. Those are huge. Those are good elements of audit checkpoints for anybody
in the process of the email marketing. I want to dive into what I call my labels folder
of courses and funnels and just have you dissect it with me and have some fun with that. I
don't think we have the time today, but I'm thinking that maybe we get you on with Chris
Chambers and we do something similar to that where we start dissecting like what's working
and what's not. Should we do this? Should we not based on what we see in my filtered
inbox of campaigns. But anyway, going back to the community growth side of things. So
if you're going to be using email marketing for community growth, what does that look
like? How do you do that?
So a good starting point is basically segmenting the people that you have based on where they
are in their customer journey. For example, you want to be treating the customer of yours
differently than a non-customer. You have to be treating the customer that's buying
from you every single month, let's say, or if they have bought multiple times from you
differently than just the customer that's bought from you once. So that's a good starting
point. And then of course, building a community is basically rewarding your subscribers with
anything you may have. You might want to build a community, let's say offline or maybe a
Facebook group or whatever, just have them, everyone in there, or maybe just have a Discord
group. So when you start sending emails and just tell them to join that community, then
that's going to help grow a community at the end of the day. And emails play a big role
into communicating with those people because email is king. Everyone checks their emails.
So that's a good way to grow a community, I believe.
Absolutely. Email is still king. There's channels that are on the rise that challenge it. And
that's a good thing. That's a healthy thing for the market to have options. One such option
that I was very impressed with in the last couple of months was the reality of having
your own app in addition. And when I say in addition, again, kind of like king and queen,
right? They go hand in hand. You don't have to just put all your eggs in one basket. But
one of the points of the gentleman who is selling the app building platform at a super
low rate, we'll talk about that if he ever comes on the show, is that with every other
form of marketing, whether it's email, SMS, Facebook, et cetera, you are filtered tremendously.
Whether you're going to a spam folder or you're putting that promotions label or on Facebook,
they just limit who sees your post based on how popular you are. And if you're driving
people off of Facebook, like to a link, then you talked about how you're less likely to
get exposure on that post because Facebook doesn't want you to leave the platform. So
I was like, wow, they're interesting points. He said with an app, when you have your own
personalized app, nothing can filter you except the user who has the app. You have full control
over that communication. I was like, whoa. I was like, and so he showed some case studies
about conversion rates and open rates and how it's just astronomical once you have an
app that is functioning really well. So I'd add that on as well as part of community.
You talked about different platforms with which you can host a community. There's the
offline communities where you might go and meet at a banquet hall weekly for mastermind,
for instance, or a networking opportunity. Then you've got online where you've got Facebook
groups. You mentioned Discord. Discord being like Slack. If you don't know what either
one of those are, we'll try to drop those in the show notes. And what platform do you
prefer for building communities, Alex?
I mean, there are a bunch of different ones. There's school, there's Kajabi, Facebook groups,
LinkedIn groups, Discord. You can't even build a group for Messenger or WhatsApp or Telegram.
It's there are many different ways you can build a group. At the end of the day, it just
comes down to a personal choice, I think. And what's the reason behind building the
group?
Yeah, absolutely. And I'll add some color comments to that though, because I am a little
bit worried for people in the community building space. There's a lot of companies that are
using this tactic. It's cool. Where they talk about how you don't want to build your community
on Facebook because Facebook has control over that audience, that data, that community.
And what happens if Facebook switches gears? Okay, hold on there. Facebook's mission is
now built around communities. They changed the mission several years ago to where that's
what it's all built around. It's a free platform, which means it has an unfair advantage over
school and other community building platforms like that. And three, which one's more likely
to go out of business? I'm just curious. What do you think, Facebook or school? Which one's
more likely to go out of business? Any startup is much more likely to go out of business than
Facebook. So I don't like the manipulation tactics. I can't stand that for any market.
And do they have additional program growth, et cetera? Will they survive? Probably. I'm
in Sam Ovens as a smart guy. He just sold consulting.com by the way, I believe to the
Flow Research Collective Partners. And so that was interesting. I don't know how much
he sold it for, how much they acquired it for. But I'm not a fan of the mudslinging.
So I'll call people out for mudslinging. It's not me mudslinging. It's just me saying, hey,
this is what's happening. There's Discord. Discord I really like. It is definitely a
really nice style of community where you don't have the distractions of the ads, right? That
Facebook will naturally have along the side and the ability to... It's like a quiet room.
That's what I like about Discord as an environment for building. Plus you have those, the subchannels
are pretty easy to create and stuff like that. It still has an app where you can get access
to it. And if you hate Facebook, if you're like Jackson, whatever, I don't trust Mark
Zuckerberg, et cetera, I get it. So use the platform that you want to. But a newsletter
is not a community. I want to point that out. A lot of people say it is. It's one way communication.
A community is about involvement of two-way communication, empowering and helping that
person. It's also very hard to run a community. What are some of the challenges, Alex, that
you've seen with community management that if somebody is wanting to launch a group,
they should be aware of?
Yeah, I guess customer support. It's one thing. Make sure that there's a person that's not
spamming people. So they might be, they have to be adhering to the rules.
You got to moderate.
Which is another thing. Yeah.
I say having a police team. A very nice police team for your group, your community. Obviously,
your group is a virtual city. You got to have that structure for people to feel safe.
Exactly. Yeah.
Carry on.
Yeah. What else? I mean, overall have a positive vibe in that group. And it's one thing to
join a group. It's another thing to stay in the group for a long time. So ask yourself
where...
And to participate.
Yeah. And to participate as well. So I guess that's the questions that you need to ask
yourself. How can I make this person stay as long as possible in my group and participate
as well? So it's not just to make people join the group.
Yeah. I love that. And that really comes back to treat your group like you're a city manager.
And understanding what your goals are. Some cities want to maintain their local feel.
They're like, we don't really want new people moving in. This is how we like things. But
we want you to come visit. We're a tourist town. And then there's the Vegas, which is
like everybody come and do whatever the heck you want. We're all about that. And then you
got all sorts of different cities in between. You as a city manager get to decide how you
want your group to behave, how you want them to engage, how often, et cetera. And working
with a strategist like Alex, who gets to see that reality is one of the best things that
you can do to mastermind and think tank. How do I want the success of this to unfold?
So Alex, we really appreciate you being here today. We didn't get to dive in as deep as
we want, but like I said, I'd love to have you on the other show, The Power Take as well.
If people want to connect with you, what's the best way to do so if they got follow up
questions about email marketing life? Yeah, sure. I mean, shoot me a message on Facebook,
LinkedIn, whatever. Join my email list, shoot me an email there. By the way, my email list,
the newsletter list is on email bountyhunter.com. So, and my email is alex at email bountyhunter.com.
So there's a bunch of different ways to reach out to me. You will not get into someone who
has a VA or whatever. It's just personally me. So just you for now. Yeah. Feel free to
reach out and I'm trying to maintain that. So I want out. Yeah. I don't want to be. Yeah.
I've seen other very successful business owners out there that I've reached out to and they
reached out to and I could feel that there's a VA behind them. It's not them speaking,
you know, so it's kind of disappointing. So I'm just, I'm trying to keep things a little
bit different. Sure. Absolutely. And it, it definitely depends on, you know, I would never
want my, my VA to send to somebody a personalized birthday message. I mean, it's like words.
It's like, what, you know, why did you automate that to me? I got one new day that said, happy
birthday. Here's my latest lead magnet. And I was like, Oh my gosh, that's the best gift
you they can give you. Right? Right. And it said, share it with others. And I was like,
did you literally just send me a request to share you on my birthday? Wow. That's, that's
epic. Anyway, my friends, vision pros keep being awesome human beings. As Alex talked
about, if you want to connect with them, of course you can. And if you want to show your
vision, don't hesitate to apply for vision pros live. And we look forward to seeing you
on the show. Everybody have a great rest of your day.
Thank you for being here today. I'm really happy that you tuned in to vision pros live.
I'm looking forward to seeing your reactions as these episodes continue to move forward.
This is going to get more and more fun. We'll have more and more engagement as well. We'll
invite people to participate in the show and thank you for giving us your time and attention.
Have an excellent day. Bye.