43. Why Communities Matter. A Conversation With PeerBoard

[00:00:00] Burhaan Pattel: Welcome to the marketing stack podcast and on this podcast, if you haven't been here before, if you haven't listened to before, I normally cover marketing topics, digital marketing, which covers all about growing your audience, building communities, building your business online so that you can actually live the life that you want.

[00:00:16] Burhaan Pattel: And basically, just have the life of your dreams. Today we're specifically talking about communities, and I've got Mikhail and Tarek with me. They ,are well, I'll leave them to introduce themselves in a second, but they are basically the founders of the peer board, which is a community platform.

[00:00:34] Burhaan Pattel: We're going to go into the platform a little bit here, and we're going to be covering all things marketing related to community. So if that's something you're interested in, definitely stick around. Mikhail and Tarek, welcome, Mikhail you want to say hi and introduce yourself a little bit.

[00:00:50] Mikhail Larionov: Sure, and thanks Burhaan for this event..

[00:00:53] Mikhail Larionov: Hi, everybody very pleased to be here. My background is kind of mixed. I am a product engineering person and I worked for a [00:01:00] bunch of years at Facebook. I was helping I've been helping to build in the messenger platform. And while doing that, I actually built one of the first Facebook groups for messenger platform for the developers.

[00:01:10] Mikhail Larionov: And that experience taught me a lot about running the community. Now this Facebook group has about a hundred thousand people, and it was much smaller when I started, like from the first few years. And yeah, like just like, and efficiencies of Facebook and the limitations of the products prompted me to build something better.

[00:01:25] Mikhail Larionov: And when I left Facebook and spent some time thinking about what to do next, I realize that I actually may want to try to build a better version of a Facebook group for the businesses focused on white label on a much more native experience, being within the business website and all of that. We are going to talk more about that, but yeah, that's pretty much the beginning of beautiful story.

[00:01:48] Mikhail Larionov: And it was almost two and a half years ago when we started it. And since then, we have been very focused on can bring in that to the reality and building the product around that.

[00:01:58] Burhaan Pattel: I'm really excited to ask [00:02:00] you questions around some of the stuff at Facebook and what prompted you, because there must've been a really like heavy burning desire there.

[00:02:07] Burhaan Pattel: Tarek how about you? Give us a little bit about yourself.

[00:02:10] Tarek Mehio: Sure happy to. So my background is also mixed. I started off in economics and finance, and I was working in that space for awhile. And sometime around 2016, I made the shift and started helping in front of mine out with the startup. And that's kind of how I got thrust into this world of online I guess business development is mainly my background.

[00:02:30] Tarek Mehio: And over the course of a few years, you know, you learn a little bit more about the space. You get more in touch with people. And ironically enough, Mikhail and I met through a community called "growth mentor" about, I don't know, eight months ago or something like that. And so we got to talking, and we had a quick call, just a feedback call.

[00:02:46] Tarek Mehio: It wasn't even supposed to be a higher call and we realized that we had sort of the same idea about, you know, how we want to work and the importance of community. And so Mikhail brought me on board, and I've been with the team for around six months now and [00:03:00] my focus here is really I'm also exploring the space for the very first time.

[00:03:04] Tarek Mehio: So I'm trying to understand a little bit more about community and its role in business. And I think we're at a very interesting sort of a transition point with how businesses deal with their customers. And I that's why I'm pretty excited to be here and excited to be talking to you.

[00:03:19] Tarek Mehio: I'd love to hear also what you think about community and see if we can riff a little.

[00:03:25] Burhaan Pattel: Yeah, the riffing is cool, especially in communities. As we all know, some Facebook communities that are toxic as hell, just the same as discord groups. It's, it's kind of nutty. But I'm really curious, Mikhail, like from the inside of Facebook, obviously, Facebook groups have dominated communities for since forever since Facebook started with Facebook groups, and it's taken everybody a long time. No criticism on your part, but it's taken people a long time to create private networks where we can build our own communities. Why do you think that is? [00:04:00]

[00:04:02] Mikhail Larionov: Well, let's be honest.

[00:04:04] Mikhail Larionov: Facebook built a great product for the people and for the groups right and I think the pool they created through those years is just so massive. That it's very hard to escape it. So, when somebody wants to start something like some smaller space, they now either create the group chat, which doesn't scale well we all know that right.

[00:04:23] Mikhail Larionov: Or they go to Facebook and just start the Facebook group and when you do that, it's very hard to get out of it at that point, just because of the nature of the product, the nature of the networks right and we've seen that with the partners we work with, they should all want to leave Facebook at that point for multiple reasons, we can talk about the two, but it's very hard to leave because of how strong the pool is.

[00:04:44] Mikhail Larionov: All your members are there. Now you need to move the whole network of Facebook to a different product. That's why I think it was kind of slow for all of us to pick up. I mean, like given the biggest players in the space, not just a very small fraction of the actual Facebook size in groups, [00:05:00] I think the last number I heard was something like one and a half billion people use Facebook groups monthly.

[00:05:05] Mikhail Larionov: So there's a massive, number that nobody was even able to get close to, like give them the 1% of the number. And I think that will probably be the case. And I think that's fine. I mean, you don't need to get to this number to build a viable business and to build a good product. But yeah, it's definitely creating some troubles for us and for other people in the space to bring the customers on board.

[00:05:26] Burhaan Pattel: Yeah, I mean, yes. Again, it's like native to the platform. Facebook was very smart in building all of these things inside of the own platform without having it separate. I think at one point it was separated and then they brought it in very quickly realizing that people were not adopting the other app.

[00:05:41] Burhaan Pattel: That's just my memory of like years and years ago. But yeah, it's a very curious and interesting thing even though people are complaining, they're not necessarily moving and even members of groups are not easy to move. But [00:06:00] having said that in specific niches or in, you know, products that are very sort of closed and private where they know, and they start their memberships of inside of private networks.

[00:06:14] Burhaan Pattel: I think that's like the perfect place to be, and obviously, if we have this conversation in two or three or five years time, it's going to be totally different. But where do you see it going? Like how's growth been on your end? Obviously new platform you've guys are out for two years. How things going?

[00:06:31] Mikhail Larionov: Well, it's just so far so good and I want to touch it right away. Since, we're talking about Facebook and for Facebook groups on the why we feel we are different. It was the key differentiator and why we actually are different from the other platforms. And I think the key thing here is that, while most of the other folks in the space, we really trying to build another Facebook, just better.

[00:06:50] Mikhail Larionov: We actually had a bit of a different approach from the beginning. The idea was how do we lower the friction and lower the engine better. It's very hard to compete with facebook, but you actually can still lower the [00:07:00] entry barrier. And the key idea was that what if we don't create another tool that you need to use somewhere else like another third-party tool on your sub-domain or something, but build a way to plug the community right into your existing product or website. Like, how about just being with the community where your members are right on your website already? And that actually was the key focus for us from the beginning, that it kind of informed how we build the product.

[00:07:26] Mikhail Larionov: And there are some of the key decisions. And now we have kind of the way to plug the community by Peer board right into your website. If you're running it on WordPress, Shopify, or Thinkific, and we also have a like and there's decay that allows you to plug it into any custom built website and this, the key direction for us, we've covered this kind of stand a long way of using peer board as all the other tools and Facebook.

[00:07:46] Mikhail Larionov: But we actually see the strongest part in it that we can live right next to your audience, and that lowers the friction to use Peer Board but also it kind of help to cross-pollinate the community with your audience from your website and [00:08:00] vice versa. So it kind of helps to build this more tight, organic experience. And that's pretty much where we've been going so far and that this the key vectors of our adoption, those platforms, as I mentioned, and the custom builder.

[00:08:12] Mikhail Larionov: So it's a bit of a different market for us, but so far was pretty good. Yeah, we have a lot of people actually think that's the right way to be doing that.

[00:08:22] Burhaan Pattel: Yeah, I agree and funny enough, I launched my community today, literally like 30 minutes before this podcast. Which is why I was a few minutes late.

[00:08:30] Burhaan Pattel: So I apologize. But yeah, very simple, very easy to use, super fast and super responsive. Obviously, this is not a sales podcast episode, but it is a good tool. And I'm attesting to the fact that it is a good tool. Tarek I want to ask you the question, because you said you're new to this world.

[00:08:50] Burhaan Pattel: What do you see as important when it comes to communities? Obviously, like we spoke about access. We spoke about making it easy for people to log in and [00:09:00] use. But what are the, what's the driver like why a community?

[00:09:05] Tarek Mehio: Well, Okay, I'm going to get a little philosophical on you because that's kind of how I sort of look at the whole thing, and I think that communities are sort of fundamental to how we are as people.

[00:09:16] Tarek Mehio: So whether, I mean, let's not even look at the scenario of being an online business, let's just look at you as a person living your everyday life. You naturally tend to build this community around yourself, and that's a combination of, you know, the butcher, if you eat meat which is , I guess, controversial in its own right today. But I hear a bit of a South African accent, so I'm guessing that you're okay with the eating of the meat.

[00:09:38] Tarek Mehio: But you know, you can expand that to your grocer and you know to your cafe and you can expand that further to your social group. And, I think we, as humans derive value by interacting, this is kind of a natural part of what it is to be human. And, I think that's the primary driver for why we saw an explosion of social media that, you know, in the early [00:10:00] days of the internet, and that started off as, I guess forums and chat rooms, but then it became more and more sophisticated as the technology became available.

[00:10:07] Tarek Mehio: So the importance of community is very much the fact that it's aligned with human nature. So, if we think about it that way, it kind of, it wasn't inevitable and the more sophisticated and the more immediate online access became, the more naturally we're able to fit our nature into the way we communicate.

[00:10:28] Tarek Mehio: So that's why I think its important.

[00:10:32] Burhaan Pattel: But digital doesn't have that physical touch. It doesn't have it. There's still a few limitations in terms of, you know, video uploads and be like, do all of those things. But yeah, I agree. I mean, yes, I am South African well spotted. Thank you for that. I'm living in Thailand now.

[00:10:50] Burhaan Pattel: Yeah, I guess you could say I have a little community here. It's not big; I don't thrive on being with a lot of people at the same time or in big groups. Most of my people have been [00:11:00] online, so yeah.

[00:11:01] Tarek Mehio: Well, if I may, I think that's another reason why community is so important is because we are spending more and more time in a digital world, like with the pandemic.

[00:11:11] Tarek Mehio: I know that's kind of cliche now to refer to grown on how it changed the world, but it definitely did accelerate the rate of which people were adopting this digital lifestyle. And as a result, we need better and better tools in order to be able to sort of substitute those interactions where we typically would have gone outside of our physical space.

[00:11:30] Tarek Mehio: And so, you know, your grocery becomes Amazon and, you know your cafe becomes a zoom meeting with your friends. And you know that's I guess the natural evolution of the increasingly digitised lifestyle. And yeah, this is why I think like online communities are important. Because the better we get at making tools that serve these needs, the more effectively we're able to make people feel, you know, our rights with being this present online.

[00:11:56] Burhaan Pattel: Yeah, totally agreed. Mikhail, you spoke about [00:12:00] WordPress, and obviously WordPress is one of the largest content management systems out there. There's billions of websites that are built on WordPress, and obviously, buddy press has been around for ages. And I know, like in the community space, everybody's comparing tools to circle and mighty networks.

[00:12:18] Burhaan Pattel: And, but people are not talking about buddy press and I wanted to touch on that a little bit because buddy press has been around for ages. And it seems like they've lost a bit of the edge, if I can put it that way. So what do you, think like how does peer board fit into this ecosystem with WordPress?

[00:12:42] Mikhail Larionov: That's a very good question. You know, they have so mixed feelings about WordPress at that point. On the one hand, we'll love WordPress because it's a huge ecosystem, right? And it's kind of, you listen to music iceberg. Again, hidden behind the neck, the water surface, but it is just massive and a lot of websites use WordPress still.

[00:12:58] Mikhail Larionov: You wouldn't expect the size of it [00:13:00] and love it. And then we are probably so far, I probably wouldn't to bold if I would say that we're probably the best community on WordPress, right? On the best technical you come into platform because yeah, there is the Buddy Press. There is other kind of, there are like other tools, but we've done a very good job of being the part of the purpose of the system, but then on the downside, just because it's an older product and more kind of bloated at that point, I mean like WordPress itself.

[00:13:27] Mikhail Larionov: Right, and it's hard to use. There's just so much work for us to support each customer on WordPress. We always spent a lot of time and working with them to make sure the plugin fits well, it doesn't conflict with other plugins and it's such a simple thing we have built and still there are so many pieces that are moving, so I definitely see why it stops being that relevant just because of how hard is it to use it versus some of the new and the more advanced side builders, like, especially the vertical side builders for different types of business, like for commerce, for course, creators, right? Like I think completely by Shopify. And so I am like, [00:14:00] honestly, I'm a little bit pessimistic about what WordPress future just because of those new players and I think that's the big ship.

[00:14:09] Burhaan Pattel: Yeah, I agree. I moved off of WordPress many years ago after I discovered Webflow. Obviously, I'm using Thinkific for my own courses. I've tried pretty much every tool out there, either for my clients or for myself. I'm very curious. I'm always like clicking sign up buttons and I've got subscriptions to pretty much everything, especially the free stuff, like you know, it's worthwhile going to see what's new. But yeah, WordPress is kind of like on my rate list if a client's using with WordPress, I'm like thinking twice whether to take the job or not, because it's always comes with extra scope and extra headaches.

[00:14:46] Burhaan Pattel: But yeah, I wanted to throw that question at you because might have WordPress, they might have buddy press and so it's obviously, a key component to what they're doing. One question that is obviously on people's minds [00:15:00] like facebook is great. We spoke about how it's a native, the groups are native and growth on Facebook is pretty, I wouldn't say it's easy, but it's easier than if you were outside of the ecosystem.

[00:15:12] Burhaan Pattel: What are your best tips? What are your advice from both of you for growing a community?

[00:15:22] Mikhail Larionov: I can probably start very briefly. My advice is just start doing that. If some people think of it as very hard to do, but I think they don't realize that just by starting to build this adoption center, it feels innovative and it's just getting the field people on board. This is how you start.

[00:15:38] Mikhail Larionov: And then that actually was my experience with the first group I've started for messenger platform. I never thought much about it. I just went ahead and started the group and that actually got some steam and then it just started to grow because there was value in it. Then the value actually was in me being there. That's the initial rail you create doesn't mean being there first and helping people out.

[00:15:56] Mikhail Larionov: And then, as you build this adoption, the other people also started during this [00:16:00] process and help the other people. That was the starting point. I think that's my sense on that. It's easy to start and not very hard to maintain and then the community starts to help you to do that. Tarek, what is your view on that?

[00:16:14] Tarek Mehio: Yeah, I actually totally agree. The only thing that I would add in order, and in addition to sort of this starting energy, you know, what it takes to actually decide you're going to do this thing and commit to it. Is yes, you do have to start it you have to be consistent. But I also think there's a mindset shift that's required as well when it comes to the topic of community.

[00:16:32] Tarek Mehio: And that is you're building this thing because people are there and they want to derive some sort of value from it. And you do too, because you're a member of this community. And I think that the idea is you need to be looking at the things that are important to the people you want to build the community for, and you need, you then need to serve that purpose.

[00:16:51] Tarek Mehio: And if you do that consistently enough, over time, more and more people will become attracted to it. And more people will end up joining it and participating in the way that you [00:17:00] sort of jump-started the whole project. And yeah, so those are the two things I think I would say.

[00:17:06] Burhaan Pattel: Yeah.

[00:17:07] Burhaan Pattel: A couple of weeks ago, they, as the Thinkific had a partner summit and Sumo who's a member in the Thinkific team spoke about the network effect and how in one person tells two and the other, those two, it's kind of like a pyramid scheme for like people without any transactions, but yeah, it's exactly that.

[00:17:25] Burhaan Pattel: And, it starts with having the right focus, having the right goal. And I love the fact that you guys are plugging into existing communities, or existing courses, existing ecosystems like Shopify and Thinkific, because they are already members there who are craving that sort of access to the, not only the owners of the group, but also others in the group.

[00:17:51] Burhaan Pattel: So what if you can talk to what was the strategy behind that? Because obviously now it's like, yeah, that was a really good idea. Like, you [00:18:00] know, let's have a drink on that, but how did that thought come up? Like what prompted that decision?

[00:18:07] Mikhail Larionov: You mean that's making it like embeddable, right? Focusing on the. It took us some time actually to do that.

[00:18:12] Mikhail Larionov: And here, I want to thank WordPress for being the prompt because we've got one of the first customers who had the WordPress website and then they just hated the sub-domain. It just didn't want it to live somewhere else. They actually just really cared about this experience of being in one place and it happened to be a very big customer.

[00:18:29] Mikhail Larionov: And, we actually started to think about that and started talking to the others about that. And that's how we started to build the wordpress plugin. And the first version was going to have to very quickly, and it was working well, but I just liked the experience a lot too. And I thought it just makes so much sense.

[00:18:44] Mikhail Larionov: And that's what's kind of prompted this whole process. And then we just were methodical about that. We've built the SDK, we moved the plugin from WordPress to those SDK, and then we started to build more. One thing we didn't realize early on is how hard is it to build it that way. [00:19:00] So maybe like a half of the team that was working on the plugins and on the SDK and making sure it works smooth and building more features for that. So, it definitely takes toll, but I think ultimately the end, the experience just so much better.

[00:19:14] Burhaan Pattel: Yeah. Well, I mean, so you mentioned a few terms there, SDK and what not. I know a Peer Board is no code, right? There's this whole no-code community out there. And so when you refer to tools or refer to features like that, it's, that kind of goes over my head.

[00:19:32] Burhaan Pattel: Like I can do a sub domain. I can embed, I embedded the peer board in to my website this afternoon but tell me how technical does one need to be?

[00:19:48] Tarek Mehio: Well, you know, honestly, it really depends on what you want to do. And I guess at the, at the most fundamental level, you don't need to be technical at all. And that means we can take care of a lot [00:20:00] of the sort of heavy lifting, if you will, just by using the plugin and, you know, with that, it's really just a matter of, like you said maybe deciding on a sub domain.

[00:20:09] Tarek Mehio: So, if your website is, you know, Burhaanpatel.com, you can say community.burhaanpatel.com you change the DNS settings and that's, all you need to do. It's done and it's up and I guess you saw that earlier today. With, the plugins, what we tried to achieve was we tried to make it so that you could just launch the application natively the same way you would use any other application in the app store.

[00:20:33] Tarek Mehio: And in those circumstances, again, you don't really need to be a coding proficient. I am certainly not. I'm probably the least technically literate person on our team, which is not something I'm proud of, but it's a fact. And I even, I was able to, you know, set things up on my, you know, a sample of Shopify store or sample WordPress site and all that stuff.

[00:20:54] Tarek Mehio: Sort of the, the next level of this integrated community model is where you start to [00:21:00] need a little bit more technical know-how. Although we do support our clients pretty much A through Z. So we do offer a turn key services. But so, you know, if you want the community to live inside a particular part of your website or application, you want to make it look, feel, act, and then also talk to the other components of your application sort of effectively, so you can use different triggers in order to create different events.

[00:21:23] Tarek Mehio: That's when, you know, you start to need to integrate a little bit on a bit more of a technical level, but again, we're all about support all about treating our customers you know, as if they just walked into our store. And so, we'd help you out, you know, all the across the line.

[00:21:37] Burhaan Pattel: And of course, to get that help.

[00:21:39] Burhaan Pattel: You guys have got your own community on peer board community.peerboard.com. So I've been poking around there just going through and seeing the level of support is great. Mikhail, you're there as well answering questions, which is nice to see. Another question around just some of the technical things.

[00:21:57] Burhaan Pattel: So, how does [00:22:00] one make a decision of which tool to actually choose? Because like I mentioned earlier, there are lots of options, in fact, too many options already. And there's probably going to be more options in the next few years, but how does, how does one actually make that decision? Because the fee structures are more or less the same or they're kind of aligned.

[00:22:18] Burhaan Pattel: What would you say are the other top things that people need to decide on?

[00:22:22] Tarek Mehio: No, honestly, I think I would default to what I usually say, which is you should pick the platform that fits your needs in terms of you know, how complex is it, how simple is it? Are you looking for a specific bell or whistle that you need to have present?

[00:22:35] Tarek Mehio: At the end of the day, I think there's a lot of great products out there and ours is certainly one of them. But again, it's all about what you're looking for. So, we try to focus on this idea of your environment deserves to have its own space. And when we talk about community, I think one of the extractions that people usually gloss over is that is that community is not a single product.

[00:22:56] Tarek Mehio: It's not a single place,it's not a single activity, it's a [00:23:00] multi-channel approach and in my opinion, I think every multi-channel approach needs a central hub. And your decision making process should probably go something along the lines of what do I need these hub to do the most? Well. So for us, we believe It's super important for, complex products and for, you know products that are tied into a specific sales skillset or passion or area of focus.

[00:23:25] Tarek Mehio: It's good to have a clean interface. It's not noisy, that's searchable. That's simple to use and it's I'm going to quote one of our clients. She called Peer Board restful, right? So they have a very chaotic business. They have to deal with a lot of tickets. They have to deal with lots of different things going on in different channels, but when it comes to that, her community interactions is all she needs to do is log into their dashboard, click the central community button.

[00:23:50] Tarek Mehio: And if there's a topic she wants to search for, she types it in and she's already there. So if you play around with our platform at all, you'll see that it's super quick getting to the [00:24:00] topic that you want to talk about. You don't have to fuddle through different, you know click through different pages over and over again.

[00:24:06] Tarek Mehio: You just sort of search or click on a category and you're there. So that's, that's what I would say. The focus should be what is most important to you and then find, the platform that sort of matches the best to your needs.

[00:24:19] Mikhail Larionov: Yeah. That's Tarek said so I just wanted to add to that. That's really true and it like the amount of detail we put into intermittent very simple.

[00:24:26] Mikhail Larionov: It's not visible from the outside, but we actually are constantly revisiting the navigation and the shortcuts, the access to staff and seeing if we can make it simpler and we actually keep polishing the stuff's still to the day we're still changing it because we still feel those small gains can actually create the much better.

[00:24:43] Mikhail Larionov: Kind of experience for you and for the members. So, this is definitely the key that the simplest and the look and feel. I do agree with that again, that you actually need to like the product, right? You just need to like the way the build and the way you use it and it's very subjective. So, you may have your own preference and some other products may, if you do better.

[00:24:59] Mikhail Larionov: So [00:25:00] that's one thing. I think speaking of this key aspect of our product, the fact that you can embed it from what, from what I know, we are the only product doing that now on the market, at least for Shopify, for Thinkific, for brands that are the older players. So if you're looking for that just not my choice, but if you don't care much about that, yeah you can use any of the other tools and just see what fits better and what you like more.

[00:25:24] Burhaan Pattel: Yeah. I played around with a discourse a few years ago. We put that on to my own. So if a at I think it was using DreamHost or something and yeah, it was, it was fun. But then, you know, when those updates come through, then you got to go to the command line and you've got to hit some code.

[00:25:41] Burhaan Pattel: And then you see the scrolling things, like, you know, like the matrix code going through the screen and, then you get an error and you're like, Wait, I forgot the comma or shacks. I'm not a coder why am I doing this? And just from a maintenance point of view, that was tricky. And then also it's, kind of, [00:26:00] if you're hosting discourse on your own, it's a monthly fee that you pay the server.

[00:26:03] Burhaan Pattel: So yeah, there's lots of benefits to having it third party, the way that you guys have built it, and obviously other platforms are as well. So tell me, obviously you guys have got a free plan. What was the thinking around that? Obviously we, we want to get people to try it out, but it's unlimited free plan, same as the gift.

[00:26:22] Burhaan Pattel: So that, also fascinated me because, and you can just give a lot, you guys give so much tell us a bit about that, Mikhail.

[00:26:31] Mikhail Larionov: Well that's a good question. Maybe we are stupid to give away that much, but maybe actually , maybe that's a great way to get the communities that are failure for the consistent for us all and for the people and just give them the product they can use.

[00:26:46] Mikhail Larionov: And that was the motivation, which has really wanted to unblock people to benefit from the product. It's that simple. And the thinking was that, yeah, we'll just give away everything they need to build the community and we won't stop them from doing that. [00:27:00] That was the key thing, right. And yes, it took away some of them in position, if things work out in the workshop still, pretty much of the day we move some of the features from paid plans to free so, there's the constant price. We just keep adding stuff to the free plan. It's not the other way around and people don't see that often. But we just felt we can build more and we can add those new features to the paid plans and move some of the older ones to the free plan and just keep adding standard people may benefited from.

[00:27:27] Mikhail Larionov: Do I enable those large communities that don't have enough money or they are not non-profit or something like that to build the right thing. That's why, like I will do the love to see more free, huge communities on platform. That's was the idea and I think there are so many use cases.

[00:27:44] Mikhail Larionov: We just don't have money to pay for.

[00:27:46] Burhaan Pattel: I guess it gets back up on my stuff. Taught you something while you were at Facebook, but just giving things away for free. I don't know. Maybe it comes from there. Tarek you wanted to say something about that as well.

[00:27:59] Tarek Mehio: Well, no, I think, [00:28:00] one of the things is if you talk to anybody at the team here at peer board, we're all kind of passionate about helping our customers you know, find the ability to do what they want and we don't want to get in their way. And so we actually have a product feedback section on our community and I personally get something like 20 to 30 emails a day from our customers demanding different things.

[00:28:23] Tarek Mehio: And, and we actually have these long form discussions internally about, Hey, should we shift this particular feature? Should we bring themes down to the freeboard so that free customers can, you know, for users can have more flexibility, grounding their communities. And, and I think that's pretty much it, the goal is to support the ecosystem.

[00:28:43] Tarek Mehio: Rather than to monetize every single last one of them. And you know, I think at some point you do enough good. Then you allow great things to happen. Then eventually, somehow we all benefit so, I think that's the philosophy. We're all a little bit happy in that sense.[00:29:00]

[00:29:02] Burhaan Pattel: One of the things that I saw today while working with the Peer board I integrated Thinkific the app through the app store, pretty straightforward, easy set it all up. And then, like I said, I had the custom domain. So, I did that and then I realized that there was a difference between what I saw on the custom domain versus what I saw inside of the Thinkific pages. And then I realized that I could actually have a free community where people could interact with me and we could have discussions around general digital marketing concepts or any of that. So some of the community would be able to, or some of the lessons on the podcast would be able to join me at the community as well.

[00:29:43] Burhaan Pattel: But then for members of the course they would have their own space and they would log in natively to think of it. And that completely surprised me. I thought there was a bug in the system initially, and I was like wait, hold on. This is actually a really [00:30:00] cool thing. So talk to me about, about that obviously, because of the embedding, it is that way, but yeah was that a strategic decision that you guys made when building it?

[00:30:13] Tarek Mehio: Absolutely, I mean, it's purpose-built tool. So, when we're talking about education, you know, the ability to sort of foster meaningful discussions is so crucial to the learning process. And I feel like this is kind of one of the things that arose as a challenge of shifting to, again, a more digitized learning environment.

[00:30:33] Tarek Mehio: You know, if you're in a, if you're in a classroom the teacher has very much has their, their finger on the pulse of the class. They understand when their students are engaged, they understand when their students are misunderstanding a point that's been made already so on. And if you look at, you know, our behavior, when we shift to sort of a digital medium, remember we're absorbing information either from a television or from a podcast ,a lot of people tend to default to this sort of passive learning state, [00:31:00] which I'm pretty sure is the biggest pet peeve for most educators.

[00:31:05] Tarek Mehio: They don't want their students to become passive, they want them to be engaged, they want them to critically analyze the material being presented. And so the discussion space becomes. And so one of the things that you do need to do in a discussion space, especially when people are learning and they feel vulnerable is you need to be able to make that space.

[00:31:24] Tarek Mehio: They need to be safe and know that they're not going to come under ridicule for asking quote unquote, a stupid question. Even though my high school teacher, Ms. Paracas used to say, there's no such thing as a stupid question. And then I will finish the rest of that quotation because it's not very nice.

[00:31:41] Tarek Mehio: But, yeah, and I feel like that's true. I think a learner needs to be safe to ask potentially a stupid questions. And that's, you can't do that in a public forum. You get, unless you have, you know, my kind of confidence, I'm totally kidding, but yeah, you can't do it. So, it makes sense to have that, that, that [00:32:00] space you know, encapsulated within the course, but at the same time, you know, course creators are business people. They're not, sitting there and just, you know, making these courses for no reason, they're passionate, but they're business people and they need to use the community to attract potential new students. They may want to stay in touch for their students after those students leave their classes.

[00:32:19] Tarek Mehio: So if there's very relevant information that they want to present to their alumni, for example, you want to be able to do that through a public forum. So having that inter mingling between public and private access is kind of core to the Thinkific plugin.

[00:32:32] Burhaan Pattel: Mikhail have something to add.

[00:32:36] Mikhail Larionov: 100%. Yeah. Now one of the things that we moved to the free plan, we actually had the privacy being on the pay plan initially. But again, it was just seen how good are the use cases that we didn't want to block people for doing that, there's like 100% of what Tarek said. That was the idea.

[00:32:52] Burhaan Pattel: Cool. So, yeah free plan on peer board.

[00:32:56] Burhaan Pattel: How can people reach out? What's the best ways to [00:33:00] get in touch with you guys? Ask questions? Any of those things?

[00:33:03] Mikhail Larionov: I would say, just give it a shot. Just check the plugin, checking the product. It shouldn't be at that point, it's very easy to use and activate the plugin and use it as a stand alone.

[00:33:12] Mikhail Larionov: But if you have any questions, use our community and get our help. We're here to help plus you have the support channel and you have this success channels as you start to use the product. Tarek actually will get in touch with you and Tarek you can talk more about that and help you out.

[00:33:27] Tarek Mehio: Well, whether they like it or not, I inevitably ended up reaching out to every single one of our customers platform agnostic.

[00:33:34] Tarek Mehio: So one way or another, I'm always, bothering our customers. I say bothering, but I'm really just checking in to see how things are going. But yeah, honestly, I agree 100% of that we have a free plugin it's sorry, a free platform, so you can sign it up, try it out.

[00:33:49] Tarek Mehio: If you want to and at that point, you'll have access to all of our contact information as well. And you can also just ping us in the community where you know, you've already seen our [00:34:00] community online and Mikhail is probably the most active community member in our public community. So yeah, there's always ways to reach us.

[00:34:08] Mikhail Larionov: And by the way, one minor thing. If the listeners of the podcast would love to try it and they wouldn't like peer board. Can you guys please tell us why? Because it's so hard to get from the people who don't really like it, it's easy to get it from people who like it, but we are struggling to learn what's the problem with the people who don't like it.

[00:34:25] Mikhail Larionov: So please send us any negative feedback would be much appreciated. We'll love it a lot, please do it.

[00:34:31] Tarek Mehio: I don't know Mikhail maybe confirmation bias, but I'm pretty sure nobody doesn't like our product. All the feedback we get is positive,

[00:34:38] Burhaan Pattel: But ,when people are using it and they start making YouTube videos complaining about it, then you'll know about it.

[00:34:47] Burhaan Pattel: But yeah, I mean, if you're listening to the podcast or if you're listening or watching this episode on YouTube, go to peerboard.com, sign up for free account. It's an unlimited free account, add as many users, as [00:35:00] many moderators it's and unbelievable that it's just so cool that you can do all of these things and play around with it for as long as you want.

[00:35:09] Burhaan Pattel: I'm recommending it because, well, one, I'm a partner with peer board. So Mikhail again, thank you for accepting me into the program. But I am a user of the system as well. And so, you know, If you are listening to the podcast, come to community.peerboard.com. Join us there. Let's have a chat around the podcast, feed me some ideas.

[00:35:28] Burhaan Pattel: Give me some people that you want to talk to Mikhail and Tarek thank you so much for joining me and Mikhail I wanted to make one comment Tarek mentioned that you are one of the most active people on your community. I wanted to thank you personally for doing the episode with me. I wasn't expecting you to get on the podcast today.

[00:35:47] Burhaan Pattel: You weren't on the invite list, so thank you for showing up. I really appreciate it. And it just shows the level of commitment you have not only for your product, but also for the people that are using it. So I appreciate that.

[00:35:58] Mikhail Larionov: Big pleasure and thank you [00:36:00] for being with us and being a part of the platform and just working with us together on that and to all the customers.

[00:36:04] Burhaan Pattel: Cool. Tarek, any last

[00:36:05] Tarek Mehio: no, I just want to say thank you so much. It's been a real pleasure talking to you and we look forward to seeing what you build with your community as well.

[00:36:12] Burhaan Pattel: Yeah, me too. Thank you. All right. The links will be below the video and also below the episode, full transcript, as well as all the contact details to peer board will also be below.

[00:36:25] Burhaan Pattel: Thank you so much.

[00:36:26] Tarek Mehio: Thanks Burhaan. Take Care

[00:36:31] Burhaan Pattel: okie dokie.

[00:36:32] Burhaan Pattel:

[00:36:32] Burhaan Pattel: Welcome to the marketing stack podcast. And on this podcast, if you haven't been here before, if you haven't listened to, before I normally cover marketing topics, digital marketing, which covers all about growing your audience, building communities. Your business online so that you can actually live the life that you want.

[00:36:56] Burhaan Pattel: And basically just have the life of your dreams [00:37:00] today. We're specifically talking about communities and I've got Mikhail and Tarik with me. They are well I'll, I'll leave them to introduce themselves in a second, but they are basically the founders or they were. Pure board, which is a community platform.

[00:37:14] Burhaan Pattel: We're going to go into the platform a little bit here and we're going to be covering all things marketing related to community. So if that's something you're interested in, definitely stick around Kyle and Tarik. Welcome because you want to say hi and introduce yourself a little bit. Sure.

[00:37:31] Mikhail Larionov: And things were gone for this, for this.

[00:37:34] Mikhail Larionov: Hi, everybody, very pleased to be here. My background is kind of mixed. I am a product engineering person and I worked for a bunch of years at Facebook. I was helping I've been helping to build in the messenger platform. And while doing that, I actually built one of the first Facebook groups for messenger platform for the develop.

[00:37:51] Mikhail Larionov: And that, that experience taught me a lot about running the community. Now this Facebook group has about a hundred thousand people and it was much smaller when I started, like from the first few years. [00:38:00] And yeah, like just like, and efficiencies of Facebook and the limitations of the products can promise me to build something better.

[00:38:06] Mikhail Larionov: And when I left Facebook and spent some time thinking about what to do. I realize that I actually may want to try to build a better version of a Facebook group for the businesses focused on white label on a much more native experience being within the business website and all of that. We were going to talk more about that, but yeah, that's pretty much the beginning of beautiful story.

[00:38:29] Mikhail Larionov: And it was almost two and a half years ago when we started it. And since then, Very focused on, on, on, on can bring in that, to the reality and building the product around that.

[00:38:39] Burhaan Pattel: I'm, I'm really excited to ask you questions around some of the stuff at Facebook and what prompted you because they must've been a really like heavy burning desire there.

[00:38:48] Burhaan Pattel: Tonic. How about you? Give us a little bit about.

[00:38:51] Tarek Mehio: Sure happy to. So my background was also mixed. I started off in economics and finance and I was working in that space for awhile. And sometime around [00:39:00] 2016, I made the shift and started helping in front of mine, out with the startup. And that's kind of how I got thrust into this world of online, I guess business development is, is, is mainly my, my background.

[00:39:11] Tarek Mehio: And over the course of a few years, you know, you, you learn a little bit more about the space. You get more in touch with people. And, and ironically enough Kyle and I met, met through a community called growth mentor about, I don't know, eight months ago or something like that. And so we got to talking and we had a quick call, just a feedback call.

[00:39:27] Tarek Mehio: It wasn't even supposed to be a higher call. And we, we realized that we had sort of the same idea about, you know, how we want to work and the importance of community. And so Mahalia brought me on board and I've been with the team for, for around six months. And my focus here is, is really I'm also exploring the space for the very first time.

[00:39:45] Tarek Mehio: So I'm trying to understand a little bit more about community and its role in business. And I think we're, we're at a very interesting sort of transition point with, with how businesses deal with their customers. And I, that's why I'm pretty excited to be here and excited to be talking to [00:40:00] you.

[00:40:00] Tarek Mehio: I'd love to hear also what you think about community and see if we can refer a little.

[00:40:05] Burhaan Pattel: Yeah. Yeah. The roughing is cool, especially in communities. As we all know, some Facebook communities that are toxic as hell just the same as discord groups. It's, it's kind of nutty. But I'm really curious Mika, like from the inside of Facebook obviously Facebook groups have dominated communities.

[00:40:26] Burhaan Pattel: Since forever, since Facebook started with Facebook groups and it's, it's taken, it's taken everybody a long time. No, no criticism on your part, but it's taken people a long time to create private networks where, where we can build our own communities. Why do you think that is?

[00:40:43] Mikhail Larionov: Well, let's be honest.

[00:40:46] Mikhail Larionov: Facebook built a great product for, for the people and for the groups. Right. And I think. The pool they created through those years is just so massive. That it's very hard to escape it. So when somebody wants to start [00:41:00] something like some smaller space, they now either create the group chat, which doesn't scale well will know that.

[00:41:05] Mikhail Larionov: Right. Or they go to. And just start the Facebook group. And when you do that, it's very hard to get out of it at that point, just because of the nature of the product, the nature of the networks. Right. And we've seen that with the partners we work with, they should all want to leave Facebook at that point for multiple reasons, we can talk about the two, but it's very hard to leave because of how strong the pool is.

[00:41:26] Mikhail Larionov: All your members are there. Now you need to move the whole network of Facebook to a different. That's why I think it was kind of slow for all of us to pick up. I mean, like given the biggest players in the space, not just a very small fraction of the actual Facebook size in groups, I think, I think the last number I heard was something like one and a half billion people use Facebook groups monthly.

[00:41:47] Mikhail Larionov: So there's a massive, massive number that nobody was even able to get close to, like give them the 1% of the number. And the, I think that will probably be, be the case. And I think that. I mean, you don't need to get to this number to build a [00:42:00] viable business and to build a good product. But yeah, it's definitely, it's definitely creating some, some tribals for us and for other people in the space to bring the customers on word.

[00:42:08] Burhaan Pattel: Yeah. I mean, yes. Again, it's like native to the platform. Facebook was very smart in building all of these things inside of the own platform without having it separate. I think at one point it was separated and then they, they brought it in very quickly realizing that people were not adopting the other app.

[00:42:24] Burhaan Pattel: That that's just my memory of like years and years ago. But yeah, it's, it's, it's a very, very curious and interesting thing, even though people are complaining, they're not necessarily moving and even members of groups are not easy to move. Having said that in specific niches or in, you know, products that are very, very sort of closed and private where they know, and they start their memberships off inside of private networks.

[00:42:56] Burhaan Pattel: I think that's. The perfect place to be. And obviously if we [00:43:00] have this conversation in two or three or five years time, it's going to be totally different. But where, where do you see it going? Like how's how's growth been on your end? Obviously new platform you've guys are out for two years. How things going.

[00:43:13] Mikhail Larionov: Well, it's just so far so good. And I want to touch it right away. Since we're talking about Facebook and for Facebook groups on the why, why we feel we are different. It was the key differentiator and why we actually are different from the other platforms. And I think the key thing here is that while most of the other folks in the space, we really trying to build another Facebook just better.

[00:43:33] Mikhail Larionov: We actually had a bit of a different approach from the beginning of. The idea was how do we lower the friction and lower the engine better? It's very hard to compete with Fayetteville, but you actually can still lower the entry barrier. And the key idea was that what if we don't create another tool that you need to use somewhere else?

[00:43:48] Mikhail Larionov: Like another third-party tool on your sub domain or something, but, but build a way to plug the community right into your existing product or website. Like how, how, how about just being [00:44:00] with the community where your members are right on your website already? And that, that actually was the key focus for us from the beginning of that, that it kind of informed how we build the product.

[00:44:09] Mikhail Larionov: And there are some of the key decisions. And now we have kind of the way to, to plug the community by bureau board, right into your website. If you're running it on WordPress, Shopify or Thinkific, and w Wells have a lake and there's decay that allows you to plug it into any custom built website and this, the key direction for us, we've covered this kind of standalone way of using pure board as all the other tools and Facebook.

[00:44:29] Mikhail Larionov: But we actually see the. Pardon in, in, in that we can live right next to your audience and that lowers the friction to use , but also it kind of help to cross-pollinate the community with your audience, from your website and vice versa. So it kind of helps to build this more tight, organic experience. And that's pretty much where we've been going so far and that this the key vectors of our adoption, those blood from, as I mentioned, and the custom builder.

[00:44:55] Mikhail Larionov: So it's a bit of a different market for us, but so far was, was pretty good. Yeah. We have a [00:45:00] lot of people actually think that's the right way to be.

[00:45:05] Burhaan Pattel: Yeah, I agree. And, and funnily enough, I launched my community today, literally like 30 minutes before this podcast. Which is why I was a few minutes late.

[00:45:13] Burhaan Pattel: So I apologize. But yeah very, very simple, very easy to use super fast and super responsive. Obviously this is not a. Podcast episode, but it is a good tool. And I'm attesting to the fact that it is a good tool. Tarik. I want to ask you the question, because you said you're new to this world.

[00:45:33] Burhaan Pattel: What do you see as important when it comes to communities? Obviously, like we spoke about access. We spoke about making it easy for people to to log in and use. But what are the, what's the driver like why their community,

[00:45:48] Tarek Mehio: well, Okay, I'm going to get a little philosophical on you because, because that's kind of how I, I sort of look at the whole thing and I think that that communities are sort of fundamental to how we are as people.

[00:45:59] Tarek Mehio: [00:46:00] So whether, I mean, let's not even look at the scenario of, of being an online business. Let's just look at you as a person living your everyday life. You, you naturally tend to build this community around yourself and that's, and that's a combination of, you know, the, the, the butcher, if you're, if you're.

[00:46:14] Tarek Mehio: Which is, I guess, controversial in its own right today. But I, I hear a bit of a south African accent, so I'm guessing that you're okay with the eating of the meeting.

[00:46:22] Tarek Mehio: But you know, you can expand that to your grocer and, and you know, to your cafe. And you can expand that further to your, to your social group. And, and I think we, as humans derive value by interacting, this is kind of a natural. Part of what it is to be human. And I think that that's the primary driver for why we saw an explosion of social media that, you know, in the early days of the internet, and that started off as I guess, forums and chat rooms, but then it became more and more sophisticated as, as the technology became available.

[00:46:51] Tarek Mehio: So the importance of community is, is very much the fact that it's aligned with human nature. So if we think about it that way, it kind of, [00:47:00] it wasn't inevitable and the more sophisticated and the more immediate. Online access became the more naturally we're able to fit our nature into the way we communicate.

[00:47:12] Tarek Mehio: So that's why I think.

[00:47:16] Burhaan Pattel: But digital doesn't have that physical touch. It doesn't have it. There's still a few limitations in terms of, you know, video uploads and, and be like, do all of those things. But yeah, I agree. I mean, yes, I am south African world spotted. Thank you for that. I'm living in Thailand now.

[00:47:34] Burhaan Pattel: Yeah, I guess you could say I have a little community here. It's own big. I don't thrive on, on being with a lot of people at the same time or in big groups. Most of my, most of my people have been online, so yeah.

[00:47:45] Tarek Mehio: Well, if I, if I may, I think that's, that's, that's another reason why community is so important is because we are spending more and more time in a digital world, like with the pandemic.

[00:47:55] Tarek Mehio: I know that's kind of cliche now to refer, to, to grown on how it changed the world, but it definitely. [00:48:00] Accelerate the rate of which people were adopting this digital lifestyle. And as a result, we need better and better tools in order to be able to sort of substitute those, those interactions where we typically would have gone outside of our physical space.

[00:48:13] Tarek Mehio: And so, you know, your grocery becomes Amazon and, you know, your cafe, your cafe becomes a zoom meeting with your, with your friends. And you know, that's, that's, I guess the natural evolution of the increasingly digitized lifestyle And yeah, this is why I think like online communities are important because the better we get at making tools that serve these needs, the more effectively we're able to make people feel, you know, our rights with, with being this this present

[00:48:40] Burhaan Pattel: online.

[00:48:41] Burhaan Pattel: Yeah. Yeah, totally, totally agreed. Michelle, you spoke about WordPress and obviously WordPress is one of the largest. Content management systems out there. There's billions of websites that are built on WordPress. And obviously buddy press has been around for ages. And I know like in the community space, [00:49:00] everybody's comparing tools to circle and mighty networks.

[00:49:03] Burhaan Pattel: And, but people are not talking about buddy press. And I, and I wanted to touch on that a little bit because buddy price press has been around for ages. And it seems like they've lost. A bit of the edge, if I can put it that way. So what do you, what do you think like w how does, how does peer board fit into this ecosystem with WordPress?

[00:49:27] Burhaan Pattel: That's

[00:49:27] Mikhail Larionov: a very good question. You know, they have so mixed feelings about WordPress at that point on the one hand, we'll love WordPress because it's a huge ecosystem, right? And it's, it's kind of, you listen to music. Again, hidden behind the neck, the water surface, but it is just massive. And a lot of websites use WordPress still.

[00:49:43] Mikhail Larionov: You wouldn't expect the size of it and love it. And then we are probably so far, I probably wouldn't have. Two bolts. If I would say that we're probably the best community on WordPress, right? On the best technical you come into platform because yeah, there is the body breaths. There is other [00:50:00] kind of, there are like other tools, but we've done a very good job of being the part of the purpose of the system, but then on the downside, just because it's an older product and more kind of bloated at that point, I mean like WordPress itself.

[00:50:13] Mikhail Larionov: Right. And it's hard to use. There's just so much. Worked for us to support each customer on WordPress. We always spent a lot of time and working with them to make sure the plugin fits well. It doesn't conflict with other plugins. And it's such a simple thing. We have built instilled. There are so many pieces that are moving, so I definitely see why it stops being that relevant just because of how hard is it to use it versus some of the.

[00:50:34] Mikhail Larionov: And the more advanced side builders, like, especially the vertical side builders for different types of business, like for commerce, for course, creators, right? Like Shopify. And so I am like, honestly, I'm a little bit pessimistic about what WordPress future just because of those new players. And I think that's the big ship.

[00:50:55] Burhaan Pattel: Yeah, I agree. I, I moved off of WordPress many years ago after I [00:51:00] discovered Webflow. Obviously I'm using Thinkific for my own courses. I've tried pretty much every tool out there, either for my clients or for myself. I'm very curious. I'm always like clicking sign up buttons and I've got subscriptions to.

[00:51:13] Burhaan Pattel: Everything, especially the free stuff, like you know, it's worthwhile going to see what's new. But yeah, WordPress is kind of like on my rate list if a client's using with WordPress, I'm like thinking twice whether to take the job or not, because it's always comes with extra scope and extra headaches.

[00:51:31] Burhaan Pattel: But yeah, I wanted to throw that question at you because Might have WordPress, they might have by press. And so it's obviously a key component to, to what they're doing. One question that is obviously on people's minds. Facebook is, is great. We spoke about how it's a native, the groups are native and growth on Facebook is pretty, I wouldn't say it's easy, but it's easier than if you were outside of the ecosystem.

[00:51:57] Burhaan Pattel: What are you, what are your best tips? What [00:52:00] are your, what is your advice from both of you for growing a communal.

[00:52:08] Mikhail Larionov: I can probably start very briefly. My advice is just, just start doing it. Some people think of it as very hard to do, but I think they don't realize that just by starting, starting to build this adoption center, it feels innovative and it's just getting the field people on board. This is how you start.

[00:52:24] Mikhail Larionov: And then that actually was my experience with the first group I've started for messenger. I never thought much about it. I just went ahead and started the group and that actually got some steam and then it just started to grow because there was value in it. Then the value actually was in me being there, that's the initial rail you create doesn't mean being there first and helping people out.

[00:52:41] Mikhail Larionov: And then as you build this adoption, the other people also started during this process and help the other people. That was the starting point. I think that that's my 2 cents on that. It's easy to start and not very hard to maintain. And then th the community starts to help you to.

[00:52:59] Tarek Mehio: Yeah, I [00:53:00] actually totally agree. The only, the only thing that I would add in order, and in addition to sort of this starting energy, you know, what it takes to actually decide you're going to do this thing and commit to it is yes, you do have to start it. You have to be consistent. But I also think there's a, there's a mindset shift that's required as well when it comes to the topic of community.

[00:53:18] Tarek Mehio: And that is you're building this thing because people are there and they want to derive some sort of. From it. And you do too, because you're a member of this community. And I think that the idea is you need to be looking at the things that are important to the people you want to build the community for, and you need, you then need to serve that purpose.

[00:53:36] Tarek Mehio: And if you do that consistently enough, over time, more and more people will become attracted to it. And more, more people will, will end up joining it and participating in the way that you sort of jump-started the whole, the whole project. And yeah, so those are the two things I think I would.

[00:53:52] Burhaan Pattel: Yeah.

[00:53:52] Burhaan Pattel: A couple of weeks ago, they, as the Thinkific had a partner summit and Sumo who's a member in the Thinkific team [00:54:00] spoke about the network effect and how in one person tells two and the other, those two, it's kind of like a pyramid scheme for like people without any transactions, but yeah, it's exactly that.

[00:54:11] Burhaan Pattel: And, and it starts with. Having the right focus, having the right goal. And I love the fact that you guys are plugging into. Existing communities or existing courses, existing ecosystems like Shopify and Thinkific, because they are already members there who are craving that sort of access to the, not only the owners of the group, but also others in the group.

[00:54:37] Burhaan Pattel: So what what's, if you can talk to. What was the strategy behind that? Because obviously now it's like, yeah, that was a really good idea. Like, you know, let's have a drink on that, but how did that thought come up? Like what prompted that decision?

[00:54:52] Mikhail Larionov: You mean that's making it like embeddable, right? Focusing. It took us some time actually to do that.

[00:54:58] Mikhail Larionov: And here, I want to thank [00:55:00] WordPress for being the problem because we've got one of the first customers who had the WordPress website and then they just hated the symptom. It just didn't want it to live somewhere else. They actually just really cared about this experience of being in one place. And it happened to be a very big customer.

[00:55:14] Mikhail Larionov: And we actually started to think about. That and started talking to the others about that. And that's how we started to build the work of plugin. And the first version was going to have to very quickly, and it was working well, but I just liked the experience a lot too. And I thought it just makes so much sense.

[00:55:29] Mikhail Larionov: And that's, that's, what's kind of prompted this whole process. And then we just were methodical about that. We've built the SDK, we moved the plugin from WordPress to those biggie, and then we started to build. One thing we didn't realize early on is how hard is it to build it that way. So maybe like a half of the team that was working on the plugins and on the, on the SDK and making sure it works smooth and building more features for that.

[00:55:52] Mikhail Larionov: So it definitely takes toll, but I think ultimately the end, the experience just so much better.

[00:55:58] Burhaan Pattel: Yeah. Yeah. [00:56:00] Well, I mean, so you mentioned a few, a few terms there, SDK and whatnot, whatnot. I know a PFO is no code, right? There's this whole no-code community out there. And so when you refer to tools or refer to features like that, it's, that kind of goes over my head.

[00:56:17] Burhaan Pattel: Like I can do a sub domain. I can, I can embed, I embedded the peer board in to my website this afternoon. Tell me how technical does one need?

[00:56:34] Tarek Mehio: W well, you know, honestly it really depends on what you want to do. And I guess at the, at the most fundamental level, you don't need to be technical at all. And that means we can take care of a lot, a lot of the sort of heavy lifting, if you will, just by using the plugin. And, and you know, with that, it's really just a matter of, like you said maybe deciding on a sub domain.

[00:56:55] Tarek Mehio: So if your, if your website is, you know, Burhan patel.com, you can say [00:57:00] community Dr. hahn.com, you change the, the DNS settings and, and that's, that's all you need to do. It's it's done and it's up. And I guess you saw that earlier. With, with the plugins, what we tried to achieve was we tried to make it so that you could just launch the application natively the same way you would use any other application in, in the app store.

[00:57:18] Tarek Mehio: And in those circumstances, again, you don't really need to be a coding proficient. I am certainly not. I'm probably the least technically literate person on our team, which is not something I'm proud of, but it's. And I even, I was able to, you know, set things up on my, you know, a sample of Shopify store or sample WordPress site and all that stuff.

[00:57:39] Tarek Mehio: Sort of the, the next level of, of this integrated community model is, is where you start to need a little bit more technical know-how. Although we do support our clients pretty much a through Z. So we do offer a turnkey. But so, you know, if you want the community to live inside a particular part of your website or application, you want to make it look, [00:58:00] feel, act, and then also talk to the other components of your application sort of effectively, so you can use different triggers in order to create different.

[00:58:08] Tarek Mehio: That's when, you know, you start to need to integrate a little bit on a bit more of a technical level, but again, we're all about support all about treating our customers you know, as if they just walked into, into our store. And so, so we we'd help you out, you know, all the crystals.

[00:58:23] Burhaan Pattel: And of course, to get that help.

[00:58:24] Burhaan Pattel: You guys have got your own community on peer board dot com. So I I've been poking around there just going through and, and, and seeing the level of support is great. Miguel, you're there as well answering questions, which is nice to see. Another question around just some of the technical things.

[00:58:44] Burhaan Pattel: How, how does one make a decision of which tool to actually choose? Because like I mentioned earlier, there are lots of options, in fact, too many options already. And there's probably going to be more options in the next few years, but how does, how does one actually [00:59:00] make that decision? Because the fee structures are more or less the same or they're kind of aligned.

[00:59:04] Burhaan Pattel: What would you say are the other, other top things that people need to decide on?

[00:59:08] Tarek Mehio: No, honestly, I think I would default to, to what I usually say, which is you should pick the platform that fits, fits your needs in terms of you know, how complex is it, how simple is it? Are you looking for a specific bell or whistle that you need, need to have present?

[00:59:20] Tarek Mehio: At the end of the day, I think, I think there's a lot of great products out there and ours is certainly one of them. But again, it's, it's all about what you're looking for. So, so we try to focus on this idea of your environment deserves to have its own space. And when we talk about community, I think one of the extractions that people usually gloss over is that is that community is not a single product.

[00:59:42] Tarek Mehio: It's not a single place. It's not a single activity, it's a multi-channel approach. And in my opinion, I think every multi-channel approach needs a central hub. And, and your decision making process should probably go something along the lines of what do I need these hub to do the most? Well. So [01:00:00] for us, It's super important for, for complex products and for, you know products that are tied into a specific sales skillset or passion or area of focus.

[01:00:10] Tarek Mehio: It's, it's good to have a clean interface. It's not noisy, that's searchable. That's simple to use and it's I'm going to quote one of our clients. She called keyboard restful, right? So they have a very chaotic business. They have to deal with a lot of tickets. They have to deal with. Different things going on in different channels, but when it comes to that, her community interactions is all she needs to do is log into their dashboard, click the central community button.

[01:00:36] Tarek Mehio: And if there's a topic she wants to search for, she types it in and she's already there. So if you play around with our platform at all, you'll see that it's super quick getting to the topic that you want to talk about. You don't have to fuddle through different, you know click through different pages over and over again.

[01:00:52] Tarek Mehio: You just sort of search or click on a, on a category of. So that's, that's what I would say. The focus should be. What is most important to you [01:01:00] and then find, find the platform that sort of matches the best.

[01:01:04] Mikhail Larionov: Yeah. That's so I just wanted to add to that. That's really true. And it like the amount of detail we put into intermittent, very simple.

[01:01:12] Mikhail Larionov: It's not visible from the outside, but we actually are constantly revisiting the navigation and the short cars, the access to staff and, and seeing if we can make it simpler and we actually keep polishing the stuff's still to the day we're still changing it because we still feel those small gains can actually create the money.

[01:01:29] Mikhail Larionov: Kind of experience for you and for the members. So this is definitely the key that the simplest and the look and feel. I do agree with that again, that you actually need to like the product, right? You just need to like the, the way the build and the way you use it. And it's very subjective. So you may have your own preference and some other products may, if you do better.

[01:01:45] Mikhail Larionov: So that's one thing. Speaking of this this key aspect of our product, the fact that you can embed it from what, from what I know, we are the only product doing that now on the market, at least for Shopify, for Thinkific, for brands that are the older players. [01:02:00] So if you're looking for that, that's just not my choice, but if you don't care much about that, yeah.

[01:02:05] Mikhail Larionov: You can use any of the other tools and just see what fits better and what you like more.

[01:02:10] Burhaan Pattel: Yeah. I, I played around with a discourse a few years ago. We put that onto my own. So if a at, at, I think it was using DreamHost or something and yeah, it was, it was fun. But then, you know, when those updates come through, then you got to go to the command line and you've got to hit some code.

[01:02:27] Burhaan Pattel: And then you see the scrolling things, like, you know, you know, like the matrix code going through the screen and, and then you get an error and you're like, Wait, I forgot the comma or shacks. I'm not a coder. Why am I doing this? And just from a maintenance point of view, that was tricky. And then, and then also it's, it's kind of, if you're hosting discourse on your own, it's a monthly fee that you pay the server.

[01:02:49] Burhaan Pattel: So yeah, there's, there's lots of benefits to having it. Third party, the way that you guys have built it, and obviously other platforms are as well. So Tell me, [01:03:00] obviously you guys have got a free plan. What was the, what was the thinking around that? Obviously we, we want to get people to try it out, but it's unlimited free plan, same as the gift.

[01:03:08] Burhaan Pattel: So that, that also fascinated me because, and you can just give a lot, you guys give so much tell us a bit about that, Miguel. Well,

[01:03:19] Mikhail Larionov: that's a good question. Maybe we are stupid to give away that much, but maybe actually Maybe that's, maybe that's a great way to get the communities that are failure for the consistent for us all and for the people and just give them the product they can use.

[01:03:33] Mikhail Larionov: And that was the motivation, which has really wanted to. People to benefit from the product. It's that simple. And the thinking was that, yeah, we'll just give away everything. They need to build the community and we won't stop them from doing that. That was the key thing. Right. And yes, it took away some of them in position, if things work out in the workshop, Bridget most of the day we move some of the features from paid plans to free.

[01:03:57] Mikhail Larionov: So there's the constant price. We just keep adding [01:04:00] stuff to the free plan. It's not the other way around. And people don't see that often. But we just felt we can build more and we can add those new features to the paid plans and move some of the older ones to the free plan and just keep adding standard people may have benefited.

[01:04:13] Mikhail Larionov: Do I enable those large communities that don't have enough money or they are not non-profit or something like that to build the right the right thing. That's why, like I will do the laugh to see more free, huge communities on platform. That's that was the idea. And I think there are so many use cases.

[01:04:30] Mikhail Larionov: We just don't have money to pay for.

[01:04:33] Burhaan Pattel: I guess it gets back up on my stuff. Taught you something while you were at Facebook, but just giving things away for free. I don't know. Maybe it comes from there. Derek. You wanted to say something about that as well.

[01:04:45] Tarek Mehio: Well, no, I think, I think one of the things is, is if you talk to anybody at the team here at peer board, we're all kind of passionate about.

[01:04:51] Tarek Mehio: Helping our customers you know, find, find the ability to do what they want and we don't want to get we don't want to get in their way. And so we [01:05:00] actually have a product feedback section on our, on our on our community and. I personally get something like 20 to 30 emails a day from our, from our customers demanding different things.

[01:05:10] Tarek Mehio: And, and we actually have these, these long form discussions internally about, Hey, should we shift this particular feature? Should we bring themes down to the freeboard so that free customers can, you know, for users can have more flexibility, grounding their communities. And, and I think that's, that's pretty much it, the goal is to support the ecosystem.

[01:05:29] Tarek Mehio: Rather than to monetize every single last one of them. And you know, I think at some point you do enough good. Then you allow great things to happen. Then eventually, somehow we all benefit. So I think that's the philosophy. We're all a little bit hippy in that sense.

[01:05:49] Burhaan Pattel: One of the things that I I saw today while working with the PA board I integrated Thinkific the app through the app store, pretty straightforward, easy set it all up. [01:06:00] And then, like I said, I had the custom domain. So, so, so I did that. And then I realized that there was a difference between.

[01:06:07] Burhaan Pattel: What, what, what I saw on the custom domain versus what I saw inside of the Thinkific pages. And then I realized that I could actually have a free community where people could interact with me and we could have discussions around general digital marketing concepts or any of that. So some of the community would be able to, or some of the lessons on the podcast would be able to join me at the community as well.

[01:06:29] Burhaan Pattel: But then for members of the course. They would have their own space and they would log in natively to think of it. And that completely surprised me. I thought there was a bug in the system initially, and I was like, ah, wait, hold on. This is actually a really, really cool thing. So talk to me about, about that obviously, because of the embedding, it is that way, but yeah.

[01:06:54] Burhaan Pattel: Was that a strategic decision that you guys made when building it?[01:07:00]

[01:07:00] Tarek Mehio: I mean, it's, it's, it's a purpose-built tool. So, so when we're talking about education, you know, the ability to sort of foster meaningful discussions is so crucial to the learning process. And I feel like this is kind of one of the things that arose as a challenge of, of shifting to, again, a more digitized learning environment.

[01:07:19] Tarek Mehio: You know, if you're in a, if you're in a classroom the teacher has very much has their, their finger on the pulse of the class. They understand when their students are engaged, they understand when their students are misunderstanding a point that's been made already. So on. And if you, if you look at, you know, our behavior, when we shift to sort of a digital medium, remember we're, we're absorbing information either from a television or from a podcast a lot, a lot of people tend to default to this sort of passive learning state, which I'm pretty sure is the biggest pet peeve for most educators.

[01:07:51] Tarek Mehio: They don't want their, their, their students to become passive. They want them to be engaged. They want them to critically analyze the material being presented. And so the [01:08:00] discussion space becomes. And so one of the things that you do need to do in a discussion space, especially when people are learning and they feel vulnerable is you need to be able to make that space.

[01:08:10] Tarek Mehio: They need to be safe and know that they're not going to come under ridicule for asking quote unquote, a stupid question. Even though my, my high school teacher, Ms. Paracas used to say, there's no such thing as a stupid question. And then I will finish the rest of that quotation because it's not very nice.

[01:08:27] Tarek Mehio: But, but yeah, and I feel like that's true. I think a learner needs to be safe to ask potentially a stupid. And that's, you can't do that in a public forum. You get, unless you have, you know, my kind of confidence, I'm totally kidding, but, but yeah, you can't do it. So it makes sense to have that, that, that space you know, encapsulated within the course, but at the same time, you know, course creators are business people.

[01:08:51] Tarek Mehio: They're not, they're not sitting there and just, you know, making these courses for no reason, they're passionate, but they're business people and they need to use the community [01:09:00] to attract potential new students. They may want to stay in touch for their students after those students leave their classes.

[01:09:05] Tarek Mehio: So if there's very relevant information that they want to present to their alumni, for example, you want to be able to do that through a public forum. So having that inter mingling between public and private access is kind of core to the Thinkific plugin.

[01:09:20] Burhaan Pattel: We have something to add, oh,

[01:09:22] Mikhail Larionov: 100%. Yeah. Now they should.

[01:09:24] Mikhail Larionov: One of the things that we moved to the free plan, we actually had the privacy being on the pay plan initially. But again, it was just seen. How good are the use cases that we didn't want to block people for doing that, there's like 100% of what tonic said. That was the idea.

[01:09:39] Burhaan Pattel: Cool. So, yeah. Free plan on, on peer board.

[01:09:43] Burhaan Pattel: How can people reach out? What's what's the best ways to get in touch with you guys? Ask questions? Any of those

[01:09:49] Mikhail Larionov: things? I would say, just give it a shot. Just check the plugin, checking the product. It shouldn't be at that point, it's very easy to use and activate the plugin and use it as a standalone.

[01:09:59] Mikhail Larionov: [01:10:00] But if you have any questions, use our community and get our help. We're here to help. Plus you have the. That's not support channel and you have this success channels as you start to use the product. Derogation, we'll, we'll get in touch with you. And if you can talk more about that and the.

[01:10:15] Tarek Mehio: Well, whether they like it or not, I inevitably ended up reaching out to every single one of our customers platform agnostic.

[01:10:21] Tarek Mehio: So one way or another, I'm always, I'm always bothering our customers. I say bothering, but I'm really just checking in to see how things are going. But yeah, honestly, I, I agree 100% of the cattle that we have, we have a free plugin it's sorry, a F a free platform, so you can sign it up, sign up, try it out.

[01:10:37] Tarek Mehio: If you want to. And at that point, you'll have access to all of our contact information as well. And you can also just ping us in the community where you know, you've, you've already seen our community online and Mikala is probably the most active community member in our public community. So yeah, there's always ways to make.

[01:10:55] Mikhail Larionov: And by the way, 1, 1, 1 minor thing. If I'm the listeners of the [01:11:00] podcast would love to try it and they wouldn't, wouldn't like billboard. Can you guys please tell us why? Because it's so hard to get from the people who don't really like it, it's easy to get it from people who like it, but we are struggling to learn what, what, what's the problem with the people who don't like it.

[01:11:13] Mikhail Larionov: So please send us any net negative feedback would be much appreciated. We'll have it a lot.

[01:11:18] Tarek Mehio: I don't know and maybe confirmation bias, but I'm pretty sure nobody doesn't like our product. All the feedback we get is positive,

[01:11:25] Burhaan Pattel: but. W when, when people are using it and they start making YouTube videos complaining about it, then you'll know about it.

[01:11:34] Burhaan Pattel: But yeah, I mean, if you're listening to the podcast or if you're listening or watching this episode on YouTube go to paypal.com, sign up for free account. It's an unlimited free account, add as many users, as many moderators it's and unbelievable that it's just so cool that you can do all of these things and play around with it for as long as you want.

[01:11:56] Burhaan Pattel: I'm recommending it because, well, one, I'm a partner with peer board. So [01:12:00] Michelle, again, thank you for accepting me into the program. But I am a user of the system as well. And so, you know, If you are listening to the podcast, come to community.bridget.com. Join us there. Let's have a chat around the podcast, feed me some ideas.

[01:12:15] Burhaan Pattel: Give me some people that you want to talk to Miguel entirely. Thank you so much for, for joining me and Miguel. I wanted to make one. Tarik mentioned that you are one of the most active people on your community. I wanted to thank you personally for doing the episode with me. I wasn't expecting you to get on the podcast today.

[01:12:35] Burhaan Pattel: You weren't on the invite list, so thank you for showing up. I really appreciate it. And it just shows the level of commitment you have not only for your product, but also for the people that are using it. So I appreciate that

[01:12:46] Mikhail Larionov: pleasure, glitter and thank you for being with us and being a part of the platform and just working with us together.

[01:12:51] Mikhail Larionov: And told the customers. Don't

[01:12:53] Burhaan Pattel: cool. Start again the last

[01:12:54] Tarek Mehio: bit. No, I just want to say thank you so much. It's been a real pleasure talking to you and we look forward to seeing what you [01:13:00] build with your community as well.

[01:13:01] Burhaan Pattel: Yeah, me too. Thank you. All right. The links will be below below the video and also below the episode, full transcript, as well as all the contact details to peer board will also be below.

[01:13:14] Burhaan Pattel: Thank you so much.

[01:13:16] Tarek Mehio: Thanks for hon.

[01:13:20] Burhaan Pattel: Okie dokie.

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