Hi there and welcome back to the community podcast. My name is Deb Schell, I'm a creator turned community builder. After launching my online community in 2020 I have a passion for online events and bringing people together. I now consult business owners and leaders just like yourself who have a message, their life's work or a vision for helping others transform through their online courses, cohorts or memberships on this interview style podcast, you'll hear conversations with community leaders, passion for bringing people together online. Our goal is to provide you with interesting conversations to inspire you to build, launch and grow an online community with energy, confidence and purpose. Let's get started. Hi there and welcome back to the community strategy podcast. I'm Deb Schell the host here and we talk all things intentional community strategy today. I've got Benji, he's the founder of disciple media, Welcome Benji to the community strategy podcast, it's great to be here.

Deb thanks very much for inviting me, I am so excited to dig in to talk about all the things community and let's start with your entrance in which we talked a little bit just before we hopped on here of what got you into wanting to build community online. Sure, so, um my passion throughout my life has been music, I started becoming obsessed with it when I was a teenager and I'm actually behind me. This blood background is my little home studio and it's what I did from like my teenage years until starting disciple whenever that was 56 years ago and so I did it professionally, I produced records, I made records myself, I toured the world, I set up a record label. Um and for me, the cornerstone of an artist's life is producing great music, the love of music and then the community, you build up around people who respond and get something out of what you're doing and so often what happens with an artist.

I saw this with my own music and some of the artists were released on the record label was that those fans become, they come together the kind of catalyst that brings them together as the artists and music kind of all every time they then figure out there's a load of other stuff that they share in common with each other. So music is like the attractor, but once they get together they realize they've got the same taste in like some tv where they like to travel in the world, what festivals, what they want to go to their cultural and political views and you, it becomes this great opportunity to build something way more kind of connected and important to that fan base than just the music. And I felt this, I've seen some of the bands, one of my favorite bands ever as an american band. Um uh let me just put on sleep called the Grateful Dead and they're like the ultimate and the prototype and then nobody will ever be better than them at combining music with community.

You know, they were the first ones to give all of their music away for free because they were like, hey, we'll figure out how to make some money later, but just take the music record the shows, do whatever you like guys, you're our fans, we love you, We just wanted to have a good time and like 60 years later that community is bigger and thriving and more important and more of a way of life than it's ever been, which is just phenomenal. And I used to look at that thinking, man, that's the kind of artist that's kind of relationship. I want to have my fans. My, I want the artists on my label to have with their fans. So that's what I wanted to build. And I kind of initially when facebook appeared in like whenever it was 2006, I thought, okay, here it is. Here's a way we can really, our fans are connect together with them and build some kind of connective tissue between everyone so that we can really help fans have amazing life together more than just listening to our music. Um, and Facebook was kind of like that I guess until about 2011, And then I started thinking, Hey, this just doesn't work anymore.

This is more like a just to kind of load of noise. I don't know who the fans are. They find it really hard to connect with each other properly. So I started thinking how can I take some of the learnings from social media experience really in terms of platform and product and create something where artists can create really cool private social networks for their fans to come together and build really strong communities and that was how disciple originally started. I did the original beta product for my own band, the fans loved it, it was great, we charged a subscription to be a member of The fan club and you got all your music first, you could have groups around things like where you want to go like festivals, you want to go to sharing rides to festivals. This kind of stuff works really well, fans paid like $4 a month. They could give us feedback on merch, they can create their own merch and share on the merch wall and if we like something we'd turn that into merchandise, it was really cool. That was the prototype. We then started, I then started disciple and originally disciples all around music.

We started working with some huge band, like some cult bands like death metal band, like Suicide Silence, We then started doing some huge bands, we did the Rolling Stones, we did luke bryan over there in the US, we still work with um and it was kind of through that slow experience of figuring out what is the community in relationship to music, started transforming into something else and we started getting people coming from different spaces. I didn't even really creator economy isn't as an idea, really haven't come together yet properly where it was much more just about Youtubers, talking about games at that point, we started getting people working in the world of fitness, nutrition, people around social organizations coming to us saying we really respond to what you're talking about music, we love your product for our community, and I was like, this is, it's got like a music player and how are we going to do this? So in 2018 we took the decision like there's something really cool going on here.

There are now, it turns out millions of communities around the world who are really looking to find an independent space that can really reflect their values, the particular culture of their community. So let's create a platform that's kind of like a Swiss Army Pen Knife where you can come and build the platform, make sure it works on mobile, like all the billion dollars social networks do. Um and that's how disciples started, so its roots through music, but today it's, it's serving communities of so many different shapes and sizes around the world. I love so many elements of your story and it's just so interesting if you really break down to like what does it mean to be in the community and what is that community strategy when you're launching look like or developing this idea and you really aligned it and I've been in this, what's called the creator economy basically since inception because I'm an original creator and really interested in how do we, and, and I love music. In fact I had, I had actually at one point considered being a um music um, producer, I don't think the word is producer, but it's like um Uh, publisher, publisher, what's the word I'm looking for, promoter?

Music promoter, yeah, I'm a promoter. So I would go to like local restaurants in the area and I started to like build this whole system of this ecosystem in my local community in Harrisburg Pennsylvania of all the local musicians and I started blogging about their story, their back stories. This is like in, I wanna say 20 10, 22 2000 and 10 between probably 2010 and 2014, I was really working on this, these different ideas of how to build an online business and what does that look like and blogging and stuff. But my focus was really about music and I went to all the local musicians gigs and I was the first person there and the last person to leave. And uh it was really, really passionate about music and I'm so I was so the first, like, I was sitting at a barstool with one of my friends during an open mic night a week before the pandemic, like thinking this is awesome, like I just can't believe I get to hang out with cool musicians all the time because I just quit my corporate job to like become location independent and all these things happen in 2020 and, and then I was like, oh, like the kind of pleased that the pandemic didn't make everyone think, actually you can just do like concerts online, Everything about music is community.

Remember how that was a thing that was like a hot thing for a minute. Like, there was like, there was really a lot of online promotion I want to do about doing online concerts and I was like, no constants are about people in a room doing stuff together. It's a beautiful thing. So I love that you're really, you're really based in and rooted in this, this passion that you have around music and how it can bring so much joy and excitement and pleasure to your life. Like just the way we cope, it's a perennial puzzle and when I get so much pleasure trying to solve is how to create the best. I mean, I'm, you know, I'm passionate about so many different bands, creating the ultimate way for people who are really passionate about something to come together and share that passion and make it a really deep and important part of their lives. I just think is what us humans need and I think as musicians, they, you know, it's hard, especially during the pandemic, they lost their audience.

They didn't know where the audience was because like one of my friends does local gigs and he has a calendar, they do books. He's like a year and advanced booked like all of these different venues. And then when that all stopped, um he's like, okay, well, where are my people, even friends uh From my music life who just, you know, they'd spent the last 20 years on the road and there was nothing like ship, you know, what am I gonna do? Forgetting about the financial side. It was just, they were like, they hadn't been in their house for more than two weeks at a time for like 20 years. Yeah. It's just, it's just so interesting. But I love how you transitioned. So you started with musicians but then realized that um broader audiences such as other creator fields and other other people who are building audiences and they really want to be actually building communities instead of an audience. I think what I picked up on, there was a shift between what it means to build an audience and what it means to build a community and that they're not the same thing.

They are 100% not the same thing. And that's kind of, that's absolutely like what it's all about. And that was the realization that made me start on this, this journey was going into the music. Well, I thought the value of what I did as an artist was like the copyright I created, you know, the the piece is amazing and everything kept getting disrupted with the rise of streaming etcetera. And then I realized actually no it's not the value in what we do as artists is the communities we create. Um and the importance that has in fans lives and anyway we can serve that the better. And that made me start focusing on on music and community. And then when I started seeing these, speaking to these other community hosts coming to disciple, when we were starting, um I realize it's exactly the same thing as music. They have people who are really passionate about the thing that that host does that knowledge, that expertise, that art, that experience they have and they want to come together and they want access to that that host and their expertise, but equally or more importantly they want access to other people who share that passion point.

Um and that has that's relevant to like almost anything in life because humans are able to become passionate about weird and wonderful things not just music. And our I love that it's so interesting that you know, I don't know, I grew up in the U. S. So that I just that's the perspective I have but like there's boxes that people trying to put you in that I've been people trying to put me in all my life about you know this or that and what I've really learned is that I'm a generalist, which in the community world is like the best thing and also in the journalism world, it's the best thing because that means you're super flexible to being able to modify what your skills are and you learn on the go and and I never like was able to express that on resumes and stuff. But what you're talking about is really just this idea that we can have more than one thing in our life. We don't only just have to do a job and maybe we have a side one hobby, we might have multiple things that we're interested in.

But maybe our in real life space, community, people who are in our life don't necessarily have those same values or interests or whatever. And so now we've got this is how I came into the community industry of like the life that I wanted wasn't being represented in my physical space and I had to go find that online. And then I built a community with that in mind of I want to be around people who are doing the life, living the life that I the kind of life that I absolutely and that's one of the big things I have often kind of argued myself about this about um online communities versus real world communities and the kind of conflict between the two and the thing that always makes me realize there is no conflict and we should stop arguing about whether you know, should we will be meeting in person or should we be online?

This is there's a certain community you can have in your real world, that's physical and in your geographical area. But there's a lot of things that people are into that kind of niche and they're not going to find that niche locally. They're not gonna find that niche an hour drive away. Um and they need that global reach. They need a global community so they can find those few 100 a few 1000 people who have that shared passion point because humans are pretty unique and finding people to really share that you need to get online and you need to go global with it. And again, going back to music, you know, we have music fans from places like Iran, they could never go to a show. They're not allowed to go to show that we would never be allowed to go to the Iran and play a show there. Um but they connect to our community online and it's so important to them. We're like, online community is literally a lifeline to a cultural way of life that they're not allowed to follow in the real world. So true. So, so, and we've never, we've never realized it more than in the last few years.

But now I love the way you're talking about like, okay, now that we've stepped, we're not like in the box of like hopefully everybody is in the mindset of post pandemic at this point, but we're kind of in the, in the facing of okay, now what's what's the next and I think that there's been a lot of transition, like you mentioned a little bit about like you had a really niche product with just marketing to specific and specific audience being musicians and now you're expanding what are the other areas that you feel like um disciple really serves and then we can talk maybe about like details on some features and functionality kind of things, so there's kind of the two main, there's one area of our communities which we, which is is we call them coaches and mentors, they are people with an expertise who typically built up an audience on instagram or facebook discord who connect with them because they want access to that knowledge and then at some point that host thinks wow I've got something, I've got a business here, potential business here because I've got this knowledge and there seems to be a lot of people interest in what I do, but I'm really frustrated by the fact that I have to fit my way, my culture, my values, my business model into the kind of pre packed box that's provided by say facebook, so they come to disciples saying look I want to build a community business, we tell this what you want to be building as a community led business community is at the heart of what you do and you've got huge potential through us, we can provide you with a platform which is yours, your data is yours, the branding, the colors, the values, the rules, how you can figure it is all yours, we're just here to serve you on a technological level and hopefully give you some guides and tips on how to build a community led business.

But we're all about saying to our host, you come to us and create an independent business and that really resonates in the world of online coaching and mentoring, whether that's somebody coaching at a B two B level, coaching you to be a better online marketer or a better sales rep or whether it's a consumer level on how to be fitter, how to um, we've got a great community around how to build model railways and so it's all of those passion points where there is an expert, we call those mentor or coach based businesses. We then have this other side, which we call flat communities where there is no specific figurehead or host to the community, there's an in skate who's created the community but really it's a network, a great example that would be, we work with a network of lawyers in the US who kind of keep Congress to account on legal matters and there is no figurehead there, it's just a way for them to come to come together and talk and about legal matters going on us in a way in their own space, protected space.

Um so those are the two fundamental kind of communities we talked to black communities and Figurehead or mental based communities and within those two buckets, I mean there's just everything from human rights groups on the flat communities, wellness communities around every different area of health and fitness, nutrition based communities. We we sell a lot of communities around healthcare. So mothers coming together, they might have a child with something like diabetes and they want to come together and talk with other moms. They don't, they get access to information from health care providers. But the main thing that's bringing them together is they've got they want to, you know, in their local area, they might not know a lot of moms whose kids have got severe diabetes and they need that place where they can go and just have a chat with another mom and figure out how they can better look after their kids. But also just share some of the pain and difficulty it is bringing up a kid with a severe ailment. Mm Yeah, because they there's there's so many great things there.

There's they're finding people who can relate to their specific challenge. They're also getting, you know, maybe some solutions around it or ways to work through and move through it, you know, and then they're also getting to be heard because maybe they just don't have um friends or family or people in their life that they can really feel confident or I feel safe with that they could talk with somebody. That's what so many communities seem to be come down to having that place where you feel safe, you know, you know, you're with people who who share your some of your life experience and some of your beliefs and on social media we're seeing some really big shifts right now. Um as we're recording this, it's the middle of november and Elon musk buying twitter, like all the things that happened with twitter recently and facebook um what do you think that that's going to mean for community platforms like yours in the next year?

Um I mean this story of of social media going from the potential kind of connector of humanity To the disconnect er and the conflict creator has really been going on since, I don't know, 2014, now and I just hear it escalating its you can't put the whole of humanity into one room and expect them to get on really work like that. We're not like that. We're we're challenge the good news. Good news is us, humans are hugely varied. We've got a ton of points of view but we don't necessarily want to be in a room together all the time because we'll end up butting heads with each other and they become places of toxicity and generally, you know, the algorithms, not behind them not wanting one thing they're wanting engagement to sell advertising and you as the, as the user, not the customer, you're the product, the intentions, any product or service whose intention is to simply engage you to sell that engagement to somebody else is never going to lead to a good outcome in my belief because the actual fundamental alignment is totally out of whack and you're being used and that anger, that that vitriol, that argument is used because it sells, it sells advertising.

Um and this has just been going, you know, the saga at twitter is just the latest, you know, we've had it um in England, we had the business that Cambridge Analytica whenever that was four or five years ago when the whole elections have been swayed in the UK by um basically facebook giving data to companies to then farm and sell to politicians. I don't think it's, it's, I don't think it needs to, it's always gonna be there and it serves some of it serves a great purpose and it's, it's, but it, I think it's not the turnkey solution. Everyone thought for any form of online connectivity, communication and community. It's not that. Um, and I think it's just one the, which is just one more step in, in um, in communities dispersing and going back to a place where there is, yes, there's centralized communities, but there's way more variety.

Way more color in the community landscape than there was maybe seven or eight years ago. Oh yes, if I can say like yes and to that and you know as in my improv back saying yes and uh yeah because honestly I noticed recently the the facebook groups that I'm in like how many, I can't even tell you and they are now doing this at everyone thing and I've been saying, I've been saying for for a while like if you want to talk to everyone, that's what facebook is. So we already have that, it exists, it's called facebook, it's where everyone is, but do you want to be where everyone is? Yeah, I mean when when host that we were the disciple ask me or ask one of our team about um social media, sometimes it comes, I just want to get off facebook and shut it all down and put my whole community in with you guys.

I'm I generally push back a little bit and say, look, build your community with us, will create a great platform with you, we'll give you the learnings and the service, you need to give you every chance of creating an amazing community led business, but you still need somewhere to get the message out and there's a marketing platform, there's never been a better, better tool, you know if there was no facebook, there was no twitter, there was no linked in getting the word out about your, your community, getting your community off the ground would be really hard, you just got to use it, don't let facebook use you or don't let social media use you use it, like companies use it as a marketing platform to bring people to your own place where you can build your own independent business, where your members are your I. P. They are your asset of your business and not facebook or twitter's. Yeah. Yeah such powerful points, such powerful points of like don't let the software you use, you use use it to your advantage, don't let it use you, it's a great term um do you feel like disciple is going, so what's next for disciple, where, where are you looking at?

I know there's some changes happening um with the collective and so I was, I was curious on like what you'd be able to share about the future of disciple media, a platform for building communities on that we're super proud of, you got thousands of communities on there that seemed doing amazing stuff and millions of members in those communities doing amazing stuff every day, we're super proud of it, we're super proud of the businesses we support um it keeps gets all of us up in the morning to work in an excited mood but we really want to start thinking now kind of how can we expand this out and help them with some of the other things the community led business does, so when they can always be doubling down and improving the community platform, how can we start helping them communicate with the outside world with the Facebooks with twitter with links to help them do their marketing. So we think of our product in terms of grow engage and convert, we've really worked on the engagement so far, that's the community, the convert pieces, how you convert that community, whatever value outcome you're looking for, whether that's financial data analytics, we really start to focus on the growth peace.

How can you grow that? How can we help you run amazing marketing campaigns into social media to bring your members across? How can we help you identify key advocates within your community? You can go out and evangelize about what you're doing. So that disciple really becomes a full stack business platform to run a complete community led business on, including, we're just doing some initial pilots are building a resource for community managers to hire other community managers and marketing resources, so kind of linked in for all you might need to help you run your community led business, so that's hiring other team members etcetera. So you really want to cycle to become that one place that you can build your business. That's amazing and it's such a, it's a really great insight, just in the aspect of it takes time to build a community, it takes a lot of work and it takes time. So you know, if people come to me and say, hey like can we get a community up in two weeks, I'm like, well technically you might be able to do that, but humans are humans and we can't control them, like we can, I can set up time and I can, you know, create this system in your place, you know, we can build it out, but then it's up to humans to come in and we can make them calm.

I'm going to be speaking about this at the end of the month, I'm actually just um valentina just posted up on linkedin about the conversation we're gonna have at the end of november here about onboarding, she's amazing, but talking about teams of like, support, you just brought up, that's the hardest thing that's going, you know, now we've been, when we launched our product, we launched it beginning in 2019, it's clear that the biggest pain point, there's a bunch of pain points, anyone has, who's who's trying to build a community led business and there are millions of them out there potential to build really strong businesses that not only generated a really great income for them, but make people's lives better because there's going to be in a community under duress. They do it because they love it. The obviously the community platform is the first pain point because kind of before we came along and others like the networks, that was just felt like there was just social media, but what's become really clear is the biggest pain point to solve at this point for the community managed host, we already worked with is giving them access to people who can help them on the journey.

Um, and you know, whether it's, I need somebody for three hours a week to help me with marketing and marketing collateral, I need somebody for an hour a day just to help with community management, giving them access to a pool of people who, who can support them, we think is going to be a game changer for the industry. Yeah, I think so too. Talent networks and, and, and just bringing all of these amazing human beings into a space and, and building community with other people is so fun is so fun. It's a lot more fun than building a community alone and then like spending a lot of time and hours building out of course, or cohort or a program, you know, developing all the systems, doing all the tech work. But then, you know, writing up the copy, there's a lot that goes into it and then, you know, it can and this is why I'm writing a book called creator to community builder. It's about, you know, it does take work, but it's worth it if you want this outcome of being creating this amazing space for these people to thrive.

We noticed this with every community we work with that the beginning is by far the hardest, you've gotta pushing the boulder up the hill, the community has come and they have an audience relationship, you as the creator, they're all sitting back there waiting for you to do everything. And if you don't do everything, they're gonna walk away as the community evolves. And as you plan and you really think your strategy, you create the right content, you create the right connections between the members. Eventually you'll start feeling this like tailwind where the community is starting to do the work for you, the community is starting to generate engagement and you start seeing this shift where on day one today to say six months in 90% of the engagement is on the host content. Three years later, 10% is the host content and 90% is the community making their own content and engaging with each other and you're just there to facilitate and kind of moving in the right direction that suits your business, but it takes time and it's, that's one of the things is is we find that the site was really letting community managers host of community led businesses understand this is like, this is not a sprint and if you Sprint, it will most likely fail.

It is definitely a marathon. You've got to keep your stamina up. We saw it when we started working with bands right back at the beginning bands have a mentality that's built around releasing an album. So there are getting is like Big Bang is the record, Everyone go out and buy the record and they would launch their community in the same way. So we take something like the Rolling Stones, they go bang, big announcements all over the place. The Rolling Stones community is love, we got like 100 and 50,000 people joined on day one, but there's no community, there just go in, they are lucky they did, but it takes time, they would be like after day one, they were just waiting for content from the band now, whatever. Five years later, the band doesn't have to do anything, it's just 100 thousands of stones fans connecting with content, they learn about the band, the band's team does nothing. So that's, that's, that's, you know, any community host who's beginning their journey.

That would be to me, the most important advice is, is it's a, it's a marathon, not a sprint and don't make you think that's something you shouldn't therefore do. It's hugely rewarding. Once you get to the point where you feel the community is behind you and it's pushing your business forward, that's the best it is, right, it's exciting, it's exciting when, when two people meet and build a relationship and maybe do a collaboration or project and that whole inception of that meeting was because they came to your community where they use your app or whatever and it's just, it's a magical thing and that, that I think that I'm glad to be a part of and I'm excited for our partnership going forward with uh with me being more involved on the disciple media community and, and really engaging and learning more about how to cultivate this sense of um community and, and space and, and be able to like, you know, charge for it, you know, but in a way that is not iggy, you know, I think a lot of creators out there, a lot of people are like, oh, but we don't want to like, you know that that house need to get that always come.

It's a psychological hurdle. It feels weird because we're used to asking people to pay to consume, not to contribute, but actually humans get more out of contributing than consuming in this world needs a bit more contribution and a bit less consumption and if it's rewarding and giving value to people contributing and being part of something that you created, you should be getting rewarded and I think some of 10 years time, some of the, the biggest businesses in the world are going to be community led businesses and some of the people starting community led businesses now They're gonna have huge businesses in 10 years time. So true, so true. It's so amazing. I was, and just just to let you know, I recently interviewed David Siegel the ceo of meet up last week and he, he and I were talking about this concept of community cost and investment and so what you're talking about is really like we need to tell the world that I don't know if you will agree with this, but I'll just say for me, I feel like there is a moment that we're in here of an opportunity with the community industry to say this is a valuable thing and it is worthy of financial, monetary value.

Um not not just you know, your time is an investment, your attention is an investment, all of those things are investments, but you know this value of the community or what's the R. O. I the KPI s that are going to, you know, keep the community industry afloat in the next few years. Um it really is going to depend on how people set the stage, I think in the next year, so many, if any community host is starting out and is nervous about the concept of charging members to be part of their community. One of my messages to them would be like some of the biggest businesses in the world are moving to being community businesses. So you take media businesses, newspaper businesses. Um they now talk to themselves about being membership community businesses because they're not just about selling a newspaper that somebody reads about information out to their region and then make allowing those member that those readers to come together and discuss that that that news that is a community.

Um so with the, with without and then like with that with showing their face, I think in the past you're making me think of something that I was thinking about was this forum that we used to have with this newspaper I worked with where people could just say things and like hide behind this like robot face of you know, black circle with no face on it and I think there's a decision like there's a divergence that we're shifting towards that we want to know who you are because we want to, we want to know that there's a real person behind that voice and I'd love it if we had the bandwidth disciple to try and solve this particular puzzle. But I'd love to think that in 5 to 10 years time that the concept of your online identity has been solved. So therefore if you're in a community and somebody isn't who they are, you'd be like, what are you doing? Why are you pretending to be somebody and not what's your name?

Who are you? And like, so online life is like real life. If you meet somebody around life and pretending to be somebody, they're not, you'd be totally weird. But online somehow we think it's normal. Um, and I think for the next one of the big unlocks for global community and community led businesses is the concept of a coherent online identity, which has not been solved yet. Yeah, so, so many things we could dive into but our time is running short here. So I'll just say thank you again so much for sharing all of this insights and, and for sharing a little bit more about you know the foundation and how it got started and now what's exciting about 20 you know into 2023 um in the future is there anything I didn't ask that maybe that you wanted to share with the listeners today? No, other than that, if you're um interested in building the community led business or you're looking to take your community led business to the next step, please check us out disciple, come and check out our community the collective, the collective is not a big sell, it's, it's a place where you can learn about being a community, it is for for how we work with only come over to decide and check it out.

We're not a big push sell, sell business, but if we've got anything that we can, we can any information we can give you to help you take your, your community led business to the next stage, we'd love to do that but come and check this out and the best place for them to do that. Where would that be, disciple media dot com. Wonderful. Uh so great to have you and and get to share your story out with others, thank you so much. Oh well thank you, I'm new to this whole space and I'm loving every minute of it and I've been working 1000 miles an hour trying to just dive through and like see what this is all going to pan out and and and yeah just just being able to like connect with people around the world I think in the past two years it expands your view so much. And that's what I really the best feature of community for me is that of an online community for me is that it's not in person because it connects me to people who I would never meet.

I just had an awesome karaoke call on a saturday with friends in the U. K. Over the lake last weekend. And it was the funniest thing ever. And you know there's just so many experiences and perspectives that you get from talking with different people from all over the globe that this technology and these kinds of things helps us do. So I feel like it's just a great time to to be in the space that we're in and I'm super psyched about the future. So thank you again. Um everybody's listening. If you found value with this episode please share it with one friend uh shoot them a message right now and just share that with them. Because I feel like these are the ways that we share different ideas out podcasting is 111 of the many ways that we can um share how um communities are being built so thanks for listening and for sharing this and until the next time. I hope you're finding calm in this day, evening moments monday or Wednesday, take care until the next time.

Find calm by Hi, this is Deb Shell and I'm super excited to let you know that I'm writing a book. Yes, it might be not be a big deal for you, but it is a big deal for me. Um as I work through writing the creators community builder book, I've decided to launch a crowdfunding campaign and I'm super excited to share with you that this is where I'm asking you for your help. I need to reach $5000 and at this moment we've raised about 100 $1,110. So thank you so much for all of the people who have um supported this project to this point. I wanted to let you know with updating you today that I'm extending this campaign to the end of the year. So by December 31, my goal is to raise $5,000 for this book. The estimates are about Um $10,000 of cost of public publishing, printing a limited, you know, amount of copies and um paying for a designer.

So I've just uh I just started um reconnecting with our book designer. He's going to be getting me some proposals next week and I'm going to start with a new cup. designed for you, hopefully before the end of the year. So um that's my update for today. Thank you for supporting me so far. If you haven't supported this project yet, please go to the show notes and check out the I fund Woman crowdfunding campaign for the new book creator to community builder. I'm super excited. Thanks so much for all who have supported.