Boom! Shake the room, Fire Nation! JLD here and welcome to Entrepreneurs on Fire. Brought to you by the HubSpot podcast network with great shows like Gain, Grow, Retain.

Today we'll be sharing the story of how after five failed community platforms, this one works.

To drop these value bombs, I brought Josh Little and Tim Schmoyer into EO Fire Studios. Josh is a teacher-turned serial entrepreneur with four successful tech companies, multiple exits and hundreds of millions of users.

He's currently on a mission to bring more connection and community into the world with his latest products, Vali, a video messaging app.

Tim's company Video Creators helps creators, brands and businesses reach a new audience on YouTube. So far, their clients have grown by over 18 billion views and 81 million subscribers.

And today, Fire Nation, we'll talk about why it's so hard to build community and get engagement and how to fix that.

We'll talk about tips on how to get people engaged specifically on Vali and so much more when we get back from thanking our sponsors.

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Tim, say what's up to Fire Nation and share something that you believe about becoming successful that most people disagree with.

What's up Fire Nation could to be here, you know, I don't know if those people disagree with this, but it's been in my experience that most successful people, most of the conversations to see online around success revolve around getting more money, feeling more popular.

And I feel like those are actually could make as terrible goals, like we pursue those things those things could ruin your life money and popularity, but I think that they make for amazing tools that we get to use to reach more people and change their lives with the businesses that we're growing.

I feel like money is not like the standard of success is more of like a result of success if success is actually about reaching people and changing lives and not just about how much money we make and how proud we feel about ourselves.

So I don't know if those are fighting words for most people, but that's something I feel like I believe pretty deeply when it comes up feeling and becoming successful.

So I think that's just some Fire Nation as I said in the introduction, Tim's a pro, you're going to continue to get pro value bombs from this guy, but I do want to kind of change the subject a little bit here and talk about building community because Tim building community, it's flipping hard.

So in the last 10 years, you've tried pretty much every imaginable way to engage your clients in both group coaching communities and frankly you've kind of had mediocre results. Why has it been so gosh dang hard to build community, even with some of the most motivated creators on YouTube.

I've been trying to crack this code for a while when I started on YouTube in 2006, there was this idea like YouTube was a community and then it's time continued to go on and it was more like, oh, each of these channels is developing its own community and things.

And on one hand, I'm like, oh, okay, community should be easy because people want to connect with that's why they're online, right? That's like one of the reasons they're online and what they're what they're here for.

But the more I was digging into it, the more I was like, okay, all right, here's this new program, what it's all I'm going to start this membership program started one was like built in my website and launch this thing and I got some success, you know, but it kind of hit this peak.

I told and then it started to decline and there's seemed like nothing I could do to turn it around.

And so I tried it again with a different platform and I've used most of the ones that are out there and and I got kept thinking like, you know what, I'm probably going to crack this code, but I kept bumping into the same thing over and over again, which is that people wanted access, they kept telling me they wanted access to community.

But, but what I was didn't understand is that the way they have community makes a really big difference. I kept bumping into this, this issue where it would launch with this big bang, it's really successful.

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