Now, what does that even mean? What does that even mean? They operate in a posture of generosity.
Each of these companies of varying degrees. Right.
And in different industries, they provide free content and information and ask for nothing in return.
And they seek to connect with people of like mind, whether they spend money with them or not.
Because they recognise. And this is why this is the most important key here.
Why? Because they recognise that our attention is more valuable than our wallets.
Now does Wolf three as a magazine, do we have 28,000 subscribers to our magazine?
[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,
are our greatest advocates, our greatest marketers and our greatest salespeople.
They are the reason why we're on shelves in eight countries.
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.
And our little magazine has become a beacon for the maker and artist movement in the in the Midwest with
veritably zero financial investment just an investment in community and content in this one channel.
Now. Does Buffer actually have 700,000 customers.
No, of course, they don't have 700,000 customers.
They have 28,000 paid customers, which is a fraction of the readership of their blog.
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.
They have become a $4 million company in three years, and the founders routinely credit their blog,
their blog as the primary source and the primary reason that they have become so successful as a business over the last two years.
Today, even as large as buffers become, with 25 employees scattered throughout the globe,
they only have two people full time on their content team that manage a community of 700,000 readers.
Now. They wrote a blog post recently talking about the correlation between community and return on investment.
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.
Assuming that content and community operates something like this, we may content humans.
Humans, click them, buy me get money when it actually looks a little bit more like this.
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.
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,
all these companies that are using free content creation as a way to collect
community and in the end convert to converting patterns are much more complicated.
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.
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,
although it's not on on one button click. The basic tenets of this are generosity.
They create useful, helpful, entertaining content. They share it freely without expecting something in return.
They build trust.
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.
Here's an example that's a bit closer to home. So this is my blog.
It's called The Pursuit of Everything. This is for us.
Basically, it missed it. What has become our community hub? It's it's my blog.
It's what was my personal blog. I basically started out by writing letters to a younger version of myself.
The essays that I publish are usually long form 1 to 2000,
sometimes 4000 word essays about living life with intention, doing work that actually matters and changing the world.
Now I'm sharing ideologies and philosophies on my blog that have helped me.
Grow a business and build a business and live a life on my terms.
But I don't actually talk that much about what I do.
I don't there's not a bunch of click through buttons that you can buy that misfit does.
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.
And on the back of this blog atmosphere and only this blog.
We've launched misfit product lines. We've invited our readers to help us build a windmill.
Last summer for a village called Gambella, where our readers got involved,
we actually did raise the $30,000 for this project, and Melissa and I flew out to Kenya and did video calls,
live video calls from the field showing our blog readers the windmill that they had built,
that they had built for these amazing villagers in Gambella who needed this.
We launched an annual conference which we produce in Fargo, North Dakota.
Yes. Called Mystic Conference. Over 1500 people applied.
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.
I wanted it to be something intimate. We had 12 countries represented, 20 different states.
We had everybody from venture capitalists, software engineers, artists, designers, iOS developers to beekeepers, lawyers,
farmers, all in the same room around a central ethos of defiance and nonconformity that misfit represents in the world.
And we launched, as I mentioned before, our own craft publishing house.
We have two creative arts journals now, one a biannual one, an annual creative arts journal,
where I published one book in next year of publishing a biography on Sam Wanamaker and our very own Shakespeare series.
So we'll be we'll be publishing our own our own version of Shakespeare.
Now, the reason I'm telling you this,
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.
98% of the people who engage with us don't actually buy anything from us.
But without them, none of this would have been possible for a small company with no investors.
No office, no board of directors, and not a solitary employee that I have focusing on marketing.