Unlocking community | Zach Hawtof

[Zach] (0:00 - 0:14)

One of my favorite things is like, this will never be AI. And it shouldn't. Because can you imagine walking into a conference like this, and you're the only human?

Are you really going to feel like you have a shared- Or it's on your headset.

[VO] (0:14 - 0:15)

It would be on a headset.

-: 12:15

And you lack that like, connective experience and that shared experience. Because no matter what, there's not going to be an AI that will have a shared experience that you have. Dude, and if nothing else, how about just getting out of your comfort zone or out of your home?

I have worked from home for five plus years, and I love it to death, except for the days that I don't. I feel the same way. What's up, lifers, and welcome to The Daily Standup Live with Lifetime Value, where we're giving you fresh new customer success ideas every single day.

I got my man, Zach, with me. Zach, can you say hi? Hello, and I am your host.

My name is Dillon Young. That's right. It's just the two of us because we are live here in New York City at the Customer Success Collective Summit.

Zach, thank you so much for being here. Can you please introduce yourself? Yeah, thank you for having me.

So my name is Zach Hawtof. I am CEO, co-founder, and community manager of a company called Tightknit, and we help build customer communities on Slack to help customer marketing teams, support teams manage their customers at scale inside the place where their customers already want to be. So I'm interested.

go to a forum from the early: 2000

Where do you guys meet in the middle? Or tell me what I have wrong. No, you're right, actually.

d, I started at Salesforce in: 2015

And so essentially what we realized is we build SEO, you help with case deflection. And so when you take a Slack community, which has this unbelievable amount of conversational content, and you bring it out into a digital forum, you can actually drive way more awareness about your product, your customers, and what they're actually doing within the space. And just logistically speaking, the internal users of Tightknit are still interacting with Slack, but the front end looks a little bit more like that forum sort of experience?

Yeah. I mean, the way that we think about it is Slack is all about meeting your members where they are, right? You want to meet your customers where they are.

You don't want to put them through other logins, other tools, push them back in their email. And so when we kicked off this company, we realized, all right, we've got to build the next community platform. The future of enterprise communities.

Do we either pull people out of where they want to be and force them into kind of this onboarding flow, or do we build the tools around them inside of Slack? Do we put gamification in Slack? Do we put events in Slack?

Do we build a digital white label forum around it? I'm assuming you went with the latter. We went with the latter.

You're good. You're right between the lines. Yeah.

I'm no dummy. All right. Now let's actually get to the meat of this conversation.

Zach, we do one thing here and one thing only. We ask, what is on your mind when it comes to, typically it's customer success. Well, feel free to expand that out because you are here on the customer marketing track.

So if you want to talk about that, let's do it. But why don't you tell me what's on your mind? That's a great call out.

One of the funny things about showing up here is that community lifts all boats, right? I had to choose which of these tracks I'm a part of, but the thing that I get most excited about in the community space is how do the world that we're moving towards, we're moving to a place where AI is starting to take up so much of the other parts of our business, whether it's outreach, outbound, all of the elements of sales, commerce, marketing, support. But the one place where I just genuinely feel we're going to live as B2B operators is going to be in the community.

You're going to want to be as close to your customer as possible. And you're going to not just use AI to eliminate the tedious work. You're going to use AI to be able to build super personalized experiences where your customer actually is going to be.

So that's the thing that I get so excited about coming to these conferences. I agree. I think we could distill this down to AI has the potential and maybe should take everything except the human to human connection away.

If you look at that glass half empty, you might be like, oh crap. Well then it's only a matter of time before we don't need each other at all. But glass half full is more what you were talking about.

These more meaningful connections. Well, if that's all you have to do is have conversations like this and you don't have to turn around and fill out cells in a spreadsheet. You could just think more about Zach and what he cares about and how he's going to accomplish what he needs to accomplish in his business and how your product can help with that.

Then that's a beautiful world where all we do is have those communications and that connection and AI can do everything else. I mean, but isn't that is the world we want to live in, right? A world where you and I sit in a room and think about a business that we want to build and outside of us, there's an AI that actually goes and does the things that we need it to do.

It solves the problems that we need it to solve. It writes the code we need it to write. And we can actually just sit there and go, what are the problems that we as humans face that no computer is going to be able to figure that out?

Because I mean, I don't want to say never, because unfortunately it doesn't ring my mind soon, but you get the idea. And I think like, I get this question a lot. It's like, okay, but you're building a digital community platform.

Like what about IRL? What about all the stuff that we do like these conferences? And I go, if anything, I think this is actually what I wanted to aim to achieve.

What a digital community platform does is it opens the world up globally. So you can access your niche people around the globe to organize, to meet people that you would never have met at like localized events. And I get excited about the accessibility that community provides for people to go and learn, to educate, to kind of actually build their own careers inside of the businesses that they care about.

I love that. It may not be in-person and I don't think anybody is saying a digital community will ever replace that, but it's a fantastic compliment. And in many ways, it broadens your horizons of possibilities for in-person.

Like in many ways, I found the customer success collective digitally, but where I found the most value is in those in-person engagements, but I never would have had access to them or known about the opportunity of them if I hadn't first learned about them digitally. And it's the same with meeting people. Yeah.

And I mean, one of the fun parts about community and almost like you're saying is it's not exclusive to any industry. So I know a community builder who only builds communities for podcasters. That's his only job.

That's his entire thing. He goes and he builds communities for podcasters because when you stop listening to us, you want to actually start collaborating with people that like care about what you're talking about. And so it's those points in between live events, in between podcasts, in between product life cycles where your customers have real viable questions that cover the 90% of things that they don't hear about in the content in which they're exploring.

And so I think that's the huge momentum that's starting to build that you're seeing with LinkedIn and Reddit where we're actually going to these, yes, they're social networks, which is, we could talk about that for days, but a large community. And they're trying to find the things that they care about that they want to explore themselves. I already mentioned this idea of human to human connection, but I do honestly believe in the older I get, I never used to care about this when I was younger, but the older I get, the only thing I care about and crave is human connection.

And anything that can get me there, that's great. There's a lot of tools that help me get there. Like LinkedIn has its pros and its cons.

Something like this has its pros and its cons. Like this sort of environment is super exhausting for me because of whatever it does to my brain, but you just don't have this sort of opportunity elsewhere. So it's that human to human connection in whatever capacity you want to find it.

I think they all compliment each other. Some of them are unique, but I think that's why something like Tighten It has a place in the world because I think a lot also about reducing friction. How do you reduce the friction in the tasks you're trying to accomplish or the desires or the outcomes you're trying to drive towards?

And something, I mean, digitally is unmatched for that. It's digitally unmatched. And I think at the same time, we get so nervous about our customers meeting our customers and we try to keep it as like an audience where it's us speaking to them.

But one of the greatest things that you'll see as like an early business is when you get to see one of your customers either help the other customer or like even tell them like why a feature might or might not help them and like guide them as someone who might be more experienced in the space. It's just one of those moments where you go, I can't believe this worked out because if it had just come to you directly, you would have gone and built that feature, you would have tried to solve that problem. But hearing it from another customer is one of the greatest ways to dissolve that experience into the ethos of your business.

A champion. I'm just having this realization. I wonder if you agree.

A champion in a community like the one you just described where they can talk to each other is like the original AI agent. It kind of is, right? I mean, so this is actually something I tell all of our, mostly our customer support buyers.

So there's a difference between transactional conversations and non-transactional conversations. For sure, yeah. And I think we so often forget what the difference is between those.

But a non-transactional conversation is I need to solve this problem and I need it now and I do not care if it's a human that solves it for me. That's transactional. That's a transactional conversation.

Whereas a non-transactional conversation is I want to explore best practice. I want to learn about something from another customer. I want to meet someone new who might be able to help better my career.

You said it from the very beginning. You said explore. Explore.

And that's what it is. It's open-ended. Yes.

It's like you don't have necessarily an outcome that you're looking for, except maybe like personal fulfillment. Right. Right.

Versus the other one, it's like, it's very much a task and it's time-bound. Yeah. How often are you on the phone going, I wish I could have just solved this problem on my computer?

Whereas when you're actually showing up to an event, one of my favorite things is like, this will never be AI. And it shouldn't. Because can you imagine walking into a conference like this and you're the only human?

Are you really going to Or it's on your headset.

[VO] (: 12:16

It would be on a headset.

[Zach] (: 12:17

Or it's on your headset and you lack that like connective experience and that shared experience. Because no matter what, there's not going to be an AI that will have a shared experience that you have. Dude.

And if nothing else, how about just getting out of your comfort zone or like out of your home? I have worked from home for five plus years and I love it to death, except for the days that I don't. I feel the same way.

[VO] (: 12:44

Same exact way.

[Zach] (: 12:46

And so this is a fantastic way to kill so many birds with one stone of meeting people, but also breaking your routine and maybe getting away from your crazy toddlers. I don't think you could ever get rid of it because part of it is, it's not supposed to be easier necessarily, which is much of what AI is trying to solve for these days. Right.

I mean, I think that obviously the utopian view of AI is that we eliminate the tedious parts of our lives so we can be more strategic, we can be more creative, we can start to think about the problems and the dreams that we could not solve because the capital wouldn't allow us to do it. And that I think is where like the future workspace, the future community platforms, if you bring enough people together, those collective visions become real. And I think that's what I want every business to think about is your business's only moat is the vision of your community around it.

You want people to come to you and go, look, even though this product just built something better and cooler, I don't know who's behind it. I don't know why they're building it. And people want to be part of a story, right?

I was going to say story. There's a bit of experience to it all. Zach, we could keep going, but that is our time.

[VO] (: 14:02

I love it.

[Zach] (: 14:03

You should come back. We should continue this conversation because I love this idea. And your vision sounds incredible.

Tight knit dot AI. Tight knit dot AI until one day I can make enough money to buy that dot com.

[Dillon] (: 14:22

You've been listening to The Daily Standout by Lifetime Value. Please note that the views expressed in these conversations are attributed only to those individuals on this recording and do not necessarily reflect the views and opinions of their respective employers. For all general inquiries, please reach out via email to hello at LifetimeValueMedia.com.

To learn more about advertising on The Daily Standout and the Lifetime Value Media Network, please reach out via email to advertising at LifetimeValueMedia.com. Find us on YouTube at Lifetime Value and find us on the socials at Lifetime Value Media. Until next time.