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Now, what does that even mean? What does that even mean? They operate in a posture of generosity.

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Each of these companies of varying degrees. Right.

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And in different industries, they provide free content and information and ask for nothing in return.

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And they seek to connect with people of like mind, whether they spend money with them or not.

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Because they recognise. And this is why this is the most important key here.

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Why? Because they recognise that our attention is more valuable than our wallets.

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Now does Wolf three as a magazine, do we have 28,000 subscribers to our magazine?

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[INAUDIBLE], no. God, I wish we did. Well, we have a couple thousand, but the members of our community, the people that follow our work,

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are our greatest advocates, our greatest marketers and our greatest salespeople.

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They are the reason why we're on shelves in eight countries.

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They they are the ones who have made the connections and introduced us of their own volition to stores that they dig in their own town.

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And our little magazine has become a beacon for the maker and artist movement in the in the Midwest with

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veritably zero financial investment just an investment in community and content in this one channel.

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Now. Does Buffer actually have 700,000 customers.

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No, of course, they don't have 700,000 customers.

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They have 28,000 paid customers, which is a fraction of the readership of their blog.

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But by investing in content that isn't about them, but improving the lives and the acumen of the community that has collected around them.

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They have become a $4 million company in three years, and the founders routinely credit their blog,

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their blog as the primary source and the primary reason that they have become so successful as a business over the last two years.

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Today, even as large as buffers become, with 25 employees scattered throughout the globe,

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they only have two people full time on their content team that manage a community of 700,000 readers.

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Now. They wrote a blog post recently talking about the correlation between community and return on investment.

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I just want to talk about this just a bit because they poke fun at some companies trying to replicate their success in their blog.

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Assuming that content and community operates something like this, we may content humans.

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Humans, click them, buy me get money when it actually looks a little bit more like this.

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It's not so direct. Right. And old school marketers that might be looking for a direct ROI, they're looking for the actual click there.

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And why don't you talk about yourself more? They don't realise that the world in which we live with the wolf trees and the buffers and all these,

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all these companies that are using free content creation as a way to collect

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community and in the end convert to converting patterns are much more complicated.

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They're much more complicated and they're almost in it's almost inexplicable to be able to actually get it down to what the clip there is.

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But, you know, in the end that the value of a larger and an engaged community is is something that is that that is valuable,

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although it's not on on one button click. The basic tenets of this are generosity.

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They create useful, helpful, entertaining content. They share it freely without expecting something in return.

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They build trust.

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And every now and then, every now and then they talk about something that they're doing and give us an opportunity to convert to buy.

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Here's an example that's a bit closer to home. So this is my blog.

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It's called The Pursuit of Everything. This is for us.

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Basically, it missed it. What has become our community hub? It's it's my blog.

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It's what was my personal blog. I basically started out by writing letters to a younger version of myself.

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The essays that I publish are usually long form 1 to 2000,

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sometimes 4000 word essays about living life with intention, doing work that actually matters and changing the world.

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Now I'm sharing ideologies and philosophies on my blog that have helped me.

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Grow a business and build a business and live a life on my terms.

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But I don't actually talk that much about what I do.

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I don't there's not a bunch of click through buttons that you can buy that misfit does.

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But every now and then we launch a new line of business or a project and we announce it to our community using the blog.

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And on the back of this blog atmosphere and only this blog.

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We've launched misfit product lines. We've invited our readers to help us build a windmill.

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Last summer for a village called Gambella, where our readers got involved,

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we actually did raise the $30,000 for this project, and Melissa and I flew out to Kenya and did video calls,

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live video calls from the field showing our blog readers the windmill that they had built,

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that they had built for these amazing villagers in Gambella who needed this.

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We launched an annual conference which we produce in Fargo, North Dakota.

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Yes. Called Mystic Conference. Over 1500 people applied.

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We can only accept about 200 because we wanted to limit it. I don't want it to be one of those big monolithic conferences.

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I wanted it to be something intimate. We had 12 countries represented, 20 different states.

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We had everybody from venture capitalists, software engineers, artists, designers, iOS developers to beekeepers, lawyers,

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farmers, all in the same room around a central ethos of defiance and nonconformity that misfit represents in the world.

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And we launched, as I mentioned before, our own craft publishing house.

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We have two creative arts journals now, one a biannual one, an annual creative arts journal,

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where I published one book in next year of publishing a biography on Sam Wanamaker and our very own Shakespeare series.

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So we'll be we'll be publishing our own our own version of Shakespeare.

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Now, the reason I'm telling you this,

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the reason I'm telling you this is because this is a real world example of how 98% of our readers and our community are not our customers.

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98% of the people who engage with us don't actually buy anything from us.

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But without them, none of this would have been possible for a small company with no investors.

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No office, no board of directors, and not a solitary employee that I have focusing on marketing.