# Zach Hawtof: B2B-style Community Building in the Age of AI! 🏟️ by [kirupa](https://www.kirupa.com/me/index.htm) | filed under [Interviews with Creative People](https://www.kirupa.com/podcast/index.htm) [Zach Hawtof](https://tightknit.ai/) explores what community building looks like when attention is scarce, platforms are fragmented, and AI can answer the easy questions for everyone. The conversation covers his path through product and startups, why Slack can work as a practical home base, and why trusted human relationships may matter even more as generic content gets cheaper. Watch the interview: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5FnbOLLpmUc A conversation with **Zach Hawtof** | 1h 10m ## About this conversation Zach Hawtof makes an argument that feels very current: audience and community are not the same thing, and confusing them leads companies into the wrong work. Reach matters, but community is about repeated trust, identity, and members getting value from one another without the brand standing in the middle of every exchange. That idea runs through the whole conversation and gives it a clear point of view. The B2B angle keeps the discussion grounded. Zach talks about product roles, customer proximity, and the importance of learning from the people already using your software. In that context, community is not a decorative marketing extra. It becomes part research loop, part support system, and part relationship layer. That is a much more demanding definition, but it is also the one that survives past launch week. Tightknit's Slack-native model follows naturally from that thinking. Instead of asking people to join one more empty destination, build on top of a place where they already talk. Events, onboarding, forums, gamification, and search become extensions of existing behavior rather than a separate town that has to be populated from scratch. Zach's day-zero framing is especially useful here: context is easier to grow when it already exists. The AI section lands well because it avoids panic. If machines get better at producing generic answers, then human recommendation, founder voice, and credible lived context become more valuable, not less. That turns community into long-term infrastructure. It is where a company proves that it listens, remembers, and can foster conversations people cannot get from a search result or a synthetic summary alone. ## What you'll hear about - Audience growth and community building are related, but they are not the same job. - In B2B, community works best when it stays close to actual customer problems. - Building where people already gather can beat asking them to join another empty platform. - A strong community lowers friction by carrying context, identity, and continuity forward. - As AI answers more generic questions, trusted human perspective becomes more valuable. ## Jump to a topic - [0:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5FnbOLLpmUc&t=0s) **Why community still matters**: Kirupa introduces Zach, Tightknit, and the challenge of building real community on today's internet. - [7:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5FnbOLLpmUc&t=420s) **Old web habits and internet nostalgia**: They look back at the early web and how older online spaces shaped their instincts about community. - [14:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5FnbOLLpmUc&t=840s) **Staying close to customers**: Zach explains why good B2B product work depends on hearing real customer problems up close. - [21:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5FnbOLLpmUc&t=1260s) **Why build on Slack**: Tightknit's Slack-native approach comes into focus as a way to meet people where they already are. - [28:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5FnbOLLpmUc&t=1680s) **Audience versus community**: This section separates broad reach from the deeper trust and member-to-member value of community. - [35:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5FnbOLLpmUc&t=2100s) **The day-zero problem**: Zach talks about activation, existing context, and why empty new spaces are so hard to energize. - [49:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5FnbOLLpmUc&t=2940s) **AI, search, and recommendations**: The conversation shifts to how AI changes discovery while leaving room for human guidance and taste. - [56:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5FnbOLLpmUc&t=3360s) **Authenticity under pressure**: Founder voice, honest usefulness, and credibility become central topics once polished content gets cheap. - [1:03:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5FnbOLLpmUc&t=3780s) **Community as infrastructure**: The closing chapter treats community as a long-term business capability rather than a side project. ## To learn more - [Zach's Tightknit](https://tightknit.ai/) - [Zach's LinkedIn](https://www.linkedin.com/in/zhawtof/) ## Transcript The automatically generated captions have been organized by speaker, lightly edited for clarity, and broken into paragraphs for readability. Names and wording may still contain errors. ### [0:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5FnbOLLpmUc&t=0s) - Kirupa Hi everybody. Today I chat with Zach Hawtof, co-founder and CEO of Tightknit, a platform that takes community building inside Slack to a whole new level. We cover how he got started in the world of B2B and the path he took toward becoming an entrepreneur. This is a great conversation about community building at a time when online communities are either too fragmented, too siloed behind walled gardens, or, in some cases, made obsolete by AI. It's a fun chat that covers a lot of interesting topics, so let's get started. Zach, it's great to chat with you. For those of you watching or listening, Zach and I crossed paths at Salesforce many years ago, and Zach has been doing a lot of interesting things around community since then. That's partly why I wanted to pick his brain and chat about all the fun stuff that's going on. Thank you, Zach, for joining. As always, I like to start by asking: what do you do? Who are you? ### [0:58](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5FnbOLLpmUc&t=58s) - Zach Hawtof Yeah, no, thanks, Kirupa. Thanks for having me. It's exciting to catch up with you. My name is Zach Hawtof. I am the CEO, co-founder, and community manager for a company called Tightknit, and we help build community platforms for Slack. We primarily serve B2B companies that want to build customer communities inside Slack, whether it's gamification, events, forums, SEO, AI agents, or all the things you need to build a great unified community experience. It's a long story how I got here, and I think we'll cover a little bit of that. Kirupa and I met when I was at Salesforce years ago. I started as an engineer and left as director of product for what was called Experience Cloud. Before that it was called Community Cloud. So I've been in the community space for a very long time. I'm excited to chat more about that, and also about anything going on in your world too. I definitely want to touch on the community angle a bit. ### [2:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5FnbOLLpmUc&t=120s) - Kirupa That's something I care about a lot, and I've had to fight all the various systems that make community building so difficult in this new world where you have limited attention, a lot of products competing for it, and the definition of community has shifted a lot from back then as well. But before we get there, I like to start at the very beginning. You're working in tech, you're working in community building, and all that. What was the motivation? How did you get started? What was the first moment where you were like, you know what? I want to work with computers. I want to work with tech and do all these things. ### [2:33](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5FnbOLLpmUc&t=153s) - Zach Hawtof Yeah, I was very lucky that my dad worked at HP in his first real job. He was in tech sales. He started as an electrical engineer and kind of missed the computer science wave and where it was going, but he moved into tech sales at HP. He always worked at tech-adjacent businesses. Funny enough, Kirupa, my dad attended Dreamforce way back in the day, well before you and I probably would have been able to go to one. We had a computer at home, and I was always using it. I was one of those 90s kids who saw it and thought, wow, there's so much going on. The internet was just getting started. I can still make jokes about reading through Encarta. Simply being able to access content at scale and search for things was huge for me. I stayed fascinated by it throughout my childhood. Then I got excited about websites. The first time I remember really trying to build websites, I used Dreamweaver. I don't know whether you ever used Dreamweaver back in the day. I still used it then. ### [3:44](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5FnbOLLpmUc&t=224s) - Kirupa Dreamweaver, by the way. I used Dreamweaver too. ### [3:46](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5FnbOLLpmUc&t=226s) - Zach Hawtof I love hearing that. I don't even know what Dreamweaver looks like now, but back then they hadn't updated it, you know? ### [3:52](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5FnbOLLpmUc&t=232s) - Kirupa It still says 2021 or something. So every New Year I'm like, you know, the core part of my tech stack is going to go away at some point in the future from an OS update or something that changes. But yeah, as you'll find out later, Zach, I live a very dangerous life, where all my danger is in the tech tools I build everything on. ### [4:14](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5FnbOLLpmUc&t=254s) - Zach Hawtof Wait, you're telling me you still have sites built on Dreamweaver today? ### [4:19](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5FnbOLLpmUc&t=259s) - Kirupa Yeah, absolutely. I started off using the free browser tools, Netscape Composer and FrontPage Express, which came with Internet Explorer and Netscape. I started off using that. Then I switched over to FrontPage because they had this thing called server extensions, which meant that on your server they could automatically do, before PHP, and CGI was part of it, but it was all abstracted away. I could just build things without really having any idea how they worked, but it basically locked you into any kind of server plan that had the FrontPage Server Extensions as part of it. That went on happily for a very long time. There were things like server-side includes, which FrontPage called include page components. I was able to templatize off that. For me, every new page I create is a File > Save As of an existing page, and I change the title and things like that. Except for the header, footer, and common elements, the entire thing is basically a little duplicate copy. I created way too much content over the years, so I can't go back and recreate all of this and modernize it. When FrontPage was killed off, Expression Web became its replacement. I was on the Expression team at Microsoft, right next to the team that built all this, so I was like, okay, I'm right in the middle of working on something that's core to what I'm always interested in. Then that, of course, went away as well, and Dreamweaver is the only one left at this point. I also know full well that the road for that is not never-ending. I can see a cliff at the edge of it. I just don't know where it is. But yeah, it does terrify me every now and then. ### [6:01](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5FnbOLLpmUc&t=361s) - Zach Hawtof That's amazing. I truly think you're one of the only people I know who has probably touched Dreamweaver in the last decade. I'm impressed it's still even running on the operating system. ### [6:16](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5FnbOLLpmUc&t=376s) - Kirupa It barely runs, I'll tell you that, because even simple things like inserting images don't work the way they used to. What used to create a relative path now hardcodes my full hard drive path, so I have to manually tweak those things. All the modern support for things like CSS variables and so on isn't there. When I open a document I created, I actually have to paste in hardcoded values so it knows how to render it. It's not even using a modern browser. It's probably still trying to figure out if Flash is installed. Exactly, it's probably trying to set up a preloader for you. If you're on IE4, you'll get this ActiveX object, and if you're not, you'll get this JavaScript object. ### [6:58](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5FnbOLLpmUc&t=418s) - Zach Hawtof I mean, I love this tangent. That is an amazing thing to learn, that you are still on Dreamweaver, and I am terrified for you, and that you still have to pay for a web host. ### [7:10](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5FnbOLLpmUc&t=430s) - Kirupa I pay for a server. It costs about $8 a month now because all I need is FTP access and Apache installed for server-side includes. That's it. I don't need anything else. If I do need something more, I have PHP and a MySQL database available, but most of that is no longer necessary. You were probably much more technical as a young person than I was. I was still trapped in the HTML and CSS side of everything, which worked out because I became primarily a front-end engineer right after that. Still, I sometimes wish I could go back. After reading Malcolm Gladwell's 10000 hours, you think, dang, if only I'd worked a little harder on those skills. That was how I saw myself at that point in time. ### [7:55](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5FnbOLLpmUc&t=475s) - Zach Hawtof You focused on all the right things here, so I think you're just fine. ### [8:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5FnbOLLpmUc&t=480s) - Kirupa I wouldn't be using Dreamweaver and FrontPage and server extensions and include page components, which are basically a Microsoft-centric wrapper around Apache includes. They could have just said, use Apache, make it portable. Of course Microsoft was like, let's not make it portable. You'll always be tied into this. It wasn't until my web host, Media Temple, emailed me and said, of all our customers, you're the only one using this FrontPage Server Extensions thing we still have for Unix. They asked, is there any way you can get off it so we can save time when migrating? I was like, I didn't know that, but absolutely. Let me see what it's going to take to do this. ### [8:38](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5FnbOLLpmUc&t=518s) - Zach Hawtof Yeah, I'll go look at the code on your site later and just see. ### [8:43](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5FnbOLLpmUc&t=523s) - Kirupa I have a video and an article on exactly how an article gets published on the website, because people keep asking me this all the time. They're like, what do you do here? But I will say that in a world of CDNs, which make it easy not to have a more powerful server, and with my forums now part of my Discord and running on an entirely different instance, that part is on a more modern stack. When it was on vBulletin, it was PHP, MySQL, and all of that. So there are parts of it that are more modern, but the core thing, all the content I create, is still very much old school. ### [9:16](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5FnbOLLpmUc&t=556s) - Zach Hawtof Fascinating. I'm excited to see what becomes of the next transition for you. Anyway, your Dreamweaver was different than mine. At the time I think I was building an alt-music site. That was what I was trying to focus on. Oh, can you still hear me, K? ### [9:38](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5FnbOLLpmUc&t=578s) - Kirupa Well, I can hear you just fine. ### [9:41](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5FnbOLLpmUc&t=581s) - Zach Hawtof I was just talking to my daughter. No worries. I had no plans to be in computer science. I went to Berkeley headed in as an econ major. But you're already hearing the word Berkeley and thinking, how did that guy not go into computer science? Well, that was obviously what happened. I got there and thought, all right, clearly these kids know something that I don't, and I saw all these incredible engineers thinking about the future. I got hooked. So basically, on day one, I swapped from being an econ major into a computer science major, and it kicked my ass. It's a very hard program. But it's funny, because after about a year at Berkeley you learn enough that you can be pretty dangerous on the web. Through internships, the first company I worked at was Cloud Elements, which later got acquired by UiPath. Then I worked at another company in San Francisco called Practice Fusion, which later had its own story, but it was an EHR system. After that was Salesforce, and that was really the start of my career. I was one of the few kids who, before age 18, had even heard of Salesforce, only because of my dad. I actually had some understanding of it. I had offers from Salesforce and Apple, and I didn't want to live on the Peninsula. One of the biggest reasons I went with Salesforce was that if I chose Salesforce, living in the city was so much easier. I didn't have to commute. Looking back on it, I love that, because now we live in a world where a commute over an hour and a half is exactly the thing we're all trying to avoid. It really worked out, and that's kind of how I ended up at Salesforce and working with you. ### [11:41](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5FnbOLLpmUc&t=701s) - Kirupa I mean, it wasn't just a geographic decision like, I want to live here and not there. Somewhere along the way you were also like, I want to work in enterprise B2B. That's what my future looks like. Not consumers, not hardware, not cool tech. I want to work where the hard problems and the real money are. ### [12:05](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5FnbOLLpmUc&t=725s) - Zach Hawtof You know how I describe it? You'd almost think the opposite, but I see consumer tech as lonelier, if that makes sense. Your job is to create technology for potentially millions of people. You can't really connect with those individuals the way you can in B2B technology, where some businesses have fewer than 100 customers. You can connect with a customer in a way you can't with B2C tech. I'm very much a people person. The idea of building technology like Mark Zuckerberg, with two billion people using the product, wasn't exactly what I wanted to do. I wanted to meet people. Ironically, people call B2B boring, but I think it's far more people-driven than B2C tech. That's where I thrive. That personal relationship matters to me because I wanted the work itself to involve meeting and understanding actual customers. ### [13:06](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5FnbOLLpmUc&t=786s) - Kirupa That's actually a great way of describing it. You're right. The high-touch connection is great if you're a people person, which you are, and B2B is the place for that. ### [13:19](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5FnbOLLpmUc&t=799s) - Zach Hawtof Yeah, if you're an analytics brain, which I am not, go B2C. One of my pieces of advice to B2C PMs versus B2B PMs is that B2C PMs have to be good at data. You have to understand analytics, A/B testing, and experimentation. You're making decisions based on massive numbers of individuals, and experimentation becomes part of the job. B2B is kind of funny, because if you just go talk to 25 or 30 customers, you end up discovering a majority of the problems in the business just by speaking to them. So I tell a lot of people, if you want to be a B2B PM, you have to be speaking to your customers all the time. Especially nowadays, with AI changing the product management space, you have to be thinking about marketing, problems, sales, all of that as a product manager. You either go that direction or you're developing more tech faster, or both, because we're running into a world where we're all getting squeezed because now we can all scale. Ten X. ### [14:37](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5FnbOLLpmUc&t=877s) - Kirupa So how did you make that decision to go down this path? Part of me is like, you graduated from Berkeley and already had it all well defined. You knew exactly what you were going to do and had the same articulated point of view on why you wanted to do these things. ### [14:53](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5FnbOLLpmUc&t=893s) - Zach Hawtof Yeah. I always knew I was going to join a startup, so you might ask why someone who wanted that would join Salesforce, which clearly wasn't a startup. I received an interesting piece of advice: this was an opportunity to join a big-name business that had done things right for a long time, and it would be a great logo on my resume. That advice has actually proved meaningful. I can always say, look, I helped build communities for Google, Disney, and Home Depot. How many fellow community leaders can say they were part of those platforms? I've seen the peak of what an enterprise community platform looks like. Now, as a small business delivering community platforms, nothing scares me when customers get bigger and larger. We're now SOC 2 Type 2 compliant earlier than most competitors because we understood very early that it would become a requirement. I think you can only learn something like that in a big business, where you see how things end up. It isn't a startup, and you aren't pushing at the same scale, but you can see the destination. You don't get that rhythm when you join a startup. There isn't a strong cadence in startups. You don't have a predictable day-to-day routine. I didn't know whether you allowed cursing on this platform, but since you do, everything changes every freaking day. You're constantly fighting fires. That's part of the lifestyle, and it's exciting, but if you're trying to discover what fits you, it's good to experience both. One isn't more virtuous or moral than the other. They're both good jobs in different ways. That perspective helped as I moved from a massive B2B company to a Series B and then to a small business where I'm at the top of the organization. Those are completely different landscapes. Seeing how businesses operate at each scale teaches you how to build a better business from the ground up. Each move changed my view of scale, process, daily rhythm, and what a company needs before it can grow safely over time. ### [17:29](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5FnbOLLpmUc&t=1049s) - Kirupa You're running a startup right now. In some ways, does that description of startups being spontaneous and unpredictable also apply to you? Or, because you have all this experience working at companies and seeing how well-run organizations operate, are you able to balance out some of the usual high-speed chaos that startups bring with them? ### [17:56](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5FnbOLLpmUc&t=1076s) - Zach Hawtof I think we have a strong understanding of what's next, and that's lucky. If you start at a startup and never get to see what's next, you're guessing the whole time. But we know where we're going to be in five years. I can see what that looks like. We are going to be the number one enterprise B2B community platform on the market. I know what we need to build to get there, and I know who I need to hire to make that happen, because I've been there before. I know what I need to do, and I know where the problems were in the previous job. I know where we went wrong and where we got distracted. We've even built things, Kirupa, where we had solved this problem at Salesforce and later changed it because it didn't match the needs. So we knew up front what we should build and how we should build it so we wouldn't have to migrate in the future. That comes with experience. A lot of new companies don't have a previous example to learn from, so it's very hard. Some of these AI companies are truly innovative, and one of the hardest companies to build is a truly innovative business where there's no incumbent you're beating. You're basically creating a market that didn't previously exist. That's a really hard space to be in because no one can really give you guidance. You're the first mover. But we are not, and I say this proudly, a true AI company. We're an applied AI company. We solve a human problem, and I'm absolutely going to use AI to do it. But AI is not how I pitch our company. We build with AI to solve a problem that couldn't be solved before. I don't care, and neither do my customers, whether I'm an AI company if I can solve the problem better than they had it before. ### [20:06](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5FnbOLLpmUc&t=1206s) - Kirupa So what exactly does your company do? ### [20:09](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5FnbOLLpmUc&t=1209s) - Zach Hawtof Yeah, great question. Let me describe the problem first. Slack is a very popular community platform and has been almost from the beginning. But if you ask anyone on the Slack team or anyone using Slack as a community platform, they'll tell you Slack isn't a community platform. Yet it's the most popular community platform in the market today. 25% Of all communities are built on Slack. When we decided to build the next generation of a community platform, we realized we shouldn't rip people away from the place where their members already wanted to be and collaborate. What if we brought the community platform to them instead? We built Tightknit inside Slack. It's a native Slack application and a web platform powered by Vercel that lets you create forums, events, gamification, onboarding, and AI agents, all within Slack. Now a community doesn't have to sacrifice its presence on Slack to build its own space. That's the big win. You can see customers take a deep breath and say, “Oh, I don't have to leave Slack. I can bring the community to me.” They no longer have to pull all of their 2500-plus members into an unfamiliar system and simply hope everything works out. ### [21:49](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5FnbOLLpmUc&t=1309s) - Kirupa That is very cool. So are you an app inside Slack, or are you taking the Slack data and users and building a layer on top of it? ### [21:59](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5FnbOLLpmUc&t=1319s) - Zach Hawtof Both. We are both an app in Slack and, essentially, an OEM-like layer. We take Slack and turn it into a community platform. For example, if you go to community. Clay. Com or community. Mixpanel. Com, you'll see Tightknit operating for those communities. Those are some of our fastest-growing communities on the platform because they've been able to take all this incredible content and deliver it into a customized forum. So it's really a new way of thinking about Slack less as a literal and metaphorical black box and more as a full-on Slack CMS, a digital layer that can sit outside of Slack and power growth and marketing tools for your business. ### [22:51](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5FnbOLLpmUc&t=1371s) - Kirupa Yeah, very cool. I just went to community. Clay. Com and joined the community and the Slack group, and from there it all clicked. So the source of truth is still going to be Slack, along with the permissions and whatever the organization specifies for who is allowed and not allowed. But once you're in, you now have the option of interfacing with the content in a nicer, more community-focused user experience, as opposed to Slack's more chat-based real-time experience. ### [23:15](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5FnbOLLpmUc&t=1395s) - Zach Hawtof Yeah, we do say we're the first modern conversational forum, if that makes any sense. You've got your old-school forums, like the ones on Discourse, where you come in, you post, you wait four hours, you get an email, you come back, and you post again. That's basically how forums have existed since you've been on Dreamweaver. ### [23:37](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5FnbOLLpmUc&t=1417s) - Kirupa Like even today. Even today, I have a Discourse forum. It's exactly how it operates. ### [23:42](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5FnbOLLpmUc&t=1422s) - Zach Hawtof Right. Then there was this new generation of communities that came out around the time Slack and IRC-style channels started to take off, where you could create conversational communities, spaces where you could collaborate with others in real time. So you have your Slacks, your Discords, your WhatsApps. Those are all large community platforms. What we've realized is that you need both. It's not that you should only have one or the other. You do need a conversational space, which is truly best built for this future AI world, where you can collaborate with agents and humans, solve problems, and meet people in personalized new ways in real time. That is a great answer to the future world we live in, where 24-hour SLAs are just not what we need to promise customers anymore. Then the other side is that digital forums are amazing for discovery, and no matter what people are saying, Google is not going away anytime soon. Search is still growing massively. Not only that, AI LLMs actually learn from scraping the internet, so all that content needs to be discoverable somehow. If you have all this amazing content locked away in chat systems, how do you expand it in this future AI world? The value of a business in the future is how much awareness and discovery is out there. You want to be part of those LLM answers. You want your content and information out on the web. Whether we like it or not, LLMs still work on Web 2.0. That's how they train, discover, and grow, and probably how they'll keep growing until some new layer changes human discovery. Anyway, that's my long-winded story of how those two things are connected. ### [25:48](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5FnbOLLpmUc&t=1548s) - Kirupa No, that makes a lot of sense to me. I run a forum, and I've seen its ups and downs over the years. The current forum model definitely isn't designed for new users. If you're nostalgic for the old way of doing things, you may use one. Otherwise, you'll probably join a Discord community, Slack community, Reddit, or something similar, where real-time responses are almost expected. People are probably less patient now than they were back then. If you can get an answer quickly instead of waiting for a period of time, you won't take the longer path. Forums were great back then because they formed communities in their own way. People with different interests gathered around a common topic and had fun. This was before Twitter and LinkedIn, and before Facebook became a big thing. Those isolated communities around specific interests didn't quite exist elsewhere. My forum has about 20000 members. It isn't as active as it used to be, but people still post regularly. The posts are now very transactional. Before, someone might say, “I just got back from school, and I'm playing this video game. What's going on?” That conversation now happens with real-life friends on Facebook or in a forum dedicated to a specific game. Communities used to be broad in their topics and interests. Now each topic goes deep into a specific silo: LinkedIn for your career, Dribbble for design-focused content, and so on. We've seen a bifurcation where community is no longer one thing but many things. How do you connect the dots across all your different community profiles? A person's casual, professional, design, and gaming conversations may all live in separate places, even though that person experiences them as one connected life. The choice is no longer simply between using a forum and having no community at all. ### [27:35](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5FnbOLLpmUc&t=1655s) - Zach Hawtof Yeah, even the word community can be difficult because it means so many things depending on whom you're talking to. Social networks have become much more focused on building audiences than on creating connections and communities. TikTok is a good example. It bypassed the groups concept and essentially said it would connect people with people they'd never met, creating massive audiences at scale that people could use to grow their businesses. The social-network incentive is reach: put content in front of as many strangers as possible and let a creator turn that attention into a business. Community asks those people to connect with each other, not only with the creator. I'm not saying an audience isn't valuable. It's simply different from a community. I remember the golden days of Facebook Groups. They were amazing because you finally had spaces where you could create niche communities and actively facilitate and participate in them. Facebook Groups still exist and are still widely used, but not at the same capacity they had when I was using them most. They had the momentum, and I don't know what happened. I'll also argue that LinkedIn Groups never got it right. I still think that was a miss, and the fact that the feature remains there is odd to me. Reddit, on the other hand, got this right. It created a space where people could find hyper-niche groups, collaborate through comments, discuss problems, and build trust on the internet. We should talk about the future of SEO too, because that actually matters. Reddit has grown as a trusted source for both content and people. Its downside is that a business or community doesn't own the content. The experience isn't white-labeled. Everything lives on reddit. Com, and Reddit's goal isn't to keep someone within one community. Its goal is to expand that person into many different communities. A company may benefit from the discussion, but it can't control the domain, presentation, membership experience, or direction Reddit takes. We're beginning to see the next generation of this question: how do I own my community on a white-labeled platform? How do I bring it back into our ecosystem and build a business with community at its center? Technology is clearly no longer the moat it once was. These new apps let people build tech much faster. Last night, I attended a Vercel v0 meetup, and we watched it build an entire app during the call. The technology itself can be replaced, while relationships, repeated participation, and trust are much harder for a competitor to swap out. What will that look like in one year or two years? Application development will continue expanding beyond small hobbyist apps. That makes distribution the real moat. Can you build a community as strong as Kirupa can? Can you create something people have relied on for 27 years? The future of a business depends on whether it has a story, whether people trust its brand, and whether they believe it will survive. Even if that business isn't first to build a tool or app, customers may wait if the company listens to them. They'll work with a company when they connect strongly with its story and believe it will help their own business. When starting a company, think less about the tech, because tech will be swapped out left and right. Ask whether you can build a platform and a place where people feel connected enough to sustain a long-term business model. That customer isn't merely buying whatever code exists today. They're choosing the relationship, the company's responsiveness, and the confidence that the people behind it will eventually deliver what they need. ### [31:29](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5FnbOLLpmUc&t=1889s) - Kirupa Agree. We also talk about stickiness. What creates sticky users in your world? Number one is a personal connection. They know you, they know the company, and all that. Number two is a personal connection with other people who are part of it. You can always replicate tech and the look and feel of something. You can't replicate the people along with it. So when someone says you can acquire the technology, great, I always ask whether the technology is actually why people are staying, or whether it's the ecosystem it enables. If you have a platform of integrations or a platform of communities, that's where the value is. Look at Stack Overflow getting acquired by a private equity firm several years ago. I'm pretty sure they didn't buy it for the underlying software alone. It's really the network effects of this large community of people who have invested so much of themselves into it that they're going to keep coming back. The sunk cost is huge. Even if something brand new comes along, the center of gravity is already here. Unless it's something drastically game-changing, I'm not going to switch. I'm already happy being part of this group and part of this community, so I think that's very valid. You mentioned why Facebook Groups and forums and all these things kind of decreased. I think part of it is that, back in the day, to create a forum or a place for people to go, you needed a little more tech savviness. It wasn't just click a button and have it working. You had to understand how to configure a server, get a database password, and things like that. It wasn't a lot, but for the average person it was more. So you had these walled gardens where a handful of people created communities, often in their own particular style and how they thought things needed to go. That was the early world of forums and part of what made it work. Then you had things like MySpace, where it was like, you know what, it doesn't matter what some central authority says things should be. I can make this reflect my own personality. Then forums evolved a bit to have theming and customized looks for their own purposes, but it was still like, yeah, it's cool, but it's not truly mine. And it was still hard to build your own forum. Even if you built one, how did you get people to actually start using it? So you had to go to large population centers, popular websites, popular destinations where people were already going, and then try to build something for yourself there. What we've seen with Twitter, LinkedIn, and so on is that it's no longer about a central authority having the visibility. Each individual can now be an authority of their own. They have their own persona and profile. So instead of them being a small part of a bigger community, they're now a big part of many different communities, and they carry their personal brand around with them. Everyone talks about how many Twitter followers you have or what your LinkedIn profile looks like. There was even that company, Klout, that gave you a social media score based on how influential you were. Those were all things people cared about, and that can't really be done when you're contributing everything to a community run by someone else or some other organization. That's where we saw the shift from centralized communities to this decentralized world where I'm going to be a top follower on LinkedIn or Pinterest or wherever, and the idea of me building my own audience becomes the thing. What I find fascinating about what you're doing is that the hardest part of many communities is day zero. How do I get the first person to post? How do I get people to sign up? Whereas Slack is already a community in its own way. People have been using it inside organizations for a long time, and there is already a large amount of content there. In some ways, the day-zero problem is solved. It's like, yeah, all my existing Slack members are now part of the community. They're going to keep doing the things they've always done. It just happens to be viewed through another UX layer, through more of a community lens. So if someone new comes in, it feels like a buzzing, active place instead of a typical community where it looks like one person has been posting for two years straight and the only replies are random spam nobody deleted. What you're doing solves that problem nicely while still connecting with the ultimate human desire to feel connected to products, community, and things like that. ### [36:03](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5FnbOLLpmUc&t=2163s) - Zach Hawtof Yeah, and to elaborate on what you're saying, people sometimes think I simply love Slack and that Slack itself is what I care about. That's not it. I'm after the lowest-friction way to create a community, and Slack is currently that answer. That's our thesis and belief, which is why we built the business around Slack. If Slack weren't the answer, I would have gone in another direction. As a product thinker, or even as someone thinking customer-first, your first job when building a business, especially in B2B, is to ask a few questions. How do I get my customer promoted? How do I give my customer more time? How do I help my customer become a happier person? Only after answering those questions should you decide what to build. Do that first. If you don't need to build anything to make those outcomes happen, don't build anything. Solve the problem instead. People often believe they have to build a thing first to prove there is something viable. But if a services company could solve the problem better, create that. If documentation or courses could solve it better than a product ever could, create those. You don't begin with software and then search for a reason it should exist. You begin with the customer's desired outcome and use the simplest available way to create that outcome. There's a great deal of value outside products. A product should be the last thing you build, when you have no other option except creating new technology. Picture a larger and larger circle with products sitting at the outside. Throughout the circle are smaller dots of value. You can find business opportunities by creating courses and content that teach people about products that already exist or show new ways to use them. That is a value opportunity in itself, and it's where community comes in. Community is about learning and connection. I've had many debates about which of those matters more, but I personally think it's a useless debate. Some communities focus on connection and some on learning. They solve different problems and respond to different needs. The job of a community isn't to show people how cool your product is. It's to show how the product can enhance their lives, just as it has enhanced other people's lives. When people want to build a community, they often start by asking how to reach a thousand people. I don't care whether you reach a thousand people. Reach one person and solve that first person's problem. Can you get one person to care about what you do? If you can, you can get two people to care, then three, and eventually I run out of fingers. At that point, you have a community that actively cares about what you're building and will recommend it to other people. That's the growth model more community builders need to consider. They often treat community as audience building, where they have to impress people, show off, and do all these other things. A stronger network comes from authentically giving someone your time and making a difference one step at a time. ### [39:35](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5FnbOLLpmUc&t=2375s) - Kirupa Yeah, that is 100% true. The nice thing about communities is that the network effects often kick in fast. With each person you bring in who's convinced of the value you're bringing, they're going to bring in a handful of people of their own, and that's going to strengthen the community overall. The flywheel effect for community is probably faster than in most other product areas, so I think it's a great way of thinking about it. Before we get to SEO, I noticed that you now live in New York. So it seems like the old concern about downtown San Francisco versus the East Bay or the Peninsula no longer applies. What made you decide, you know what, I'm going to shift and move to the other side of the country? ### [40:17](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5FnbOLLpmUc&t=2417s) - Zach Hawtof I think, for me, it was truly about trying something new. One of the fun things, as a tech guy, about moving to New York is getting to say, oh, I used to work at this company called Salesforce, and more often than not people go, what's that? And I'm like, oh my God, I'm outside the bubble. That was a personal thing. The other thing is that I see New York growing a lot in the startup space. I tell a lot of startup leaders that there are some industries I think will do better in the tech scene here than they will back in San Francisco. Obviously, if you're building an AI dev tools company, you're probably going to end up in SF. There are a few in New York, but the center of gravity is still very much in San Francisco. But I'm building a community company that happens to use AI. Yes, we are a tech company. We do serve B2B. But the people I help aren't solely B2B providers. They're thinking about how to grow, and New York is very much built around that growth mindset. A lot of the businesses here are incredibly human-first. They're super community-driven, because the people of New York are built like that. You go out, you see people, you go to events, you collaborate. I think this is a new burgeoning tech scene, and I'm excited to be here in this growth cycle. ### [41:52](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5FnbOLLpmUc&t=2512s) - Kirupa No, that's really cool. I had a hunch that was going to be your answer, but because we talked about how geography shaped the first step of your career, I figured I'd bring it up one more time here. ### [42:08](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5FnbOLLpmUc&t=2528s) - Zach Hawtof No, I mean, I'm a big fan of New York. If you're a founder trying to decide between San Francisco and New York, I love SF. I actually have nothing against it. People move to New York and say, oh, I hated SF. I actually love San Francisco. I love New York, and both were great periods in my life. The thing New York has that just can't be beat is the energy. It's the kind of energy you know about even if you've never lived here. It is nonstop energy. If you like that kind of environment and those kinds of people, it's a great place to be. If you want something a little more chill, it's probably better to stay in the Bay Area. The technology market is going to constantly adapt and change. San Francisco will not be the hub of everything forever. It will change and evolve, and that's just how things work. So I'm very bullish on the New York tech scene. I can see it. ### [43:17](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5FnbOLLpmUc&t=2597s) - Kirupa Very, very cool. So let's talk about SEO. Let's talk about, yes, content and SEO. ### [43:22](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5FnbOLLpmUc&t=2602s) - Zach Hawtof Yeah, as someone who works at Google, this is something I love discussing with you. One thing I've learned, even after speaking with many people at Google, is that no single person knows the complete algorithm for deciding how content is ranked. People imagine one person inside Google understands it all, but that isn't the case. Hundreds of people have their own algorithms and systems running across all the technology inside Google Search. One very noticeable trend is the decline of the niche blog world and the growth of the niche community world. The reason is that everybody and their grandmother can write a blog now. It's a 5-second activity: ask for a blog about X, Y, and Z that covers those topics, and it's built. It's done. We still want new content and a personal brand, but even that is moving into AI systems that learn to write like us. In this new content landscape, we're returning to authentic content. Who cares about perfect grammar? I'm sure people are freaking out about that, but we've moved toward short sentences, comments, replies, and hundred-thread discussions that explore multiple viewpoints in real time. Those conversations include arguments, agreements, and all the other elements of a community. Instead of presenting one viewpoint, they let readers balance multiple viewpoints and opposing ideas. Google has noticed that people like this. Reddit has moved toward the top, as have Quora and even Stack Overflow, alongside niche blogs. That difference matters because a polished blog can be generated from one prompt, while a live discussion exposes disagreement, correction, and the process by which people arrive at an answer. The mixture gives searchers more than a single author’s claim. Apparently someone got excited about SEO and wanted to join us. Yes, Pixel decided to make an appearance, and I love that your cat's name is Pixel. But that interruption fits what's happening. You and I search in the same way. How often do you type a query, add Reddit, and press Enter? It has become the new search forum. As a business, you want to own more conversations around your work, generate more interest, and show that you aren't only a discussion forum for answering questions. You may also run advocacy and learning programs, maintain member directories, and highlight partners, ambassadors, and all the other community programs outside customer support. Community sits under marketing about 30% of the time, under customer support about 30% of the time, and in some other group the remaining 40% of the time. There's a handshake between community, marketing, and customer support when building a platform that handles both. That's how customers operate: we solve one problem, then want to learn the next thing. We solve that problem and move to the next. I'm trying to make sure department leaders don't create a false dichotomy between those goals. Bringing them together is much more effective than leaving them apart. ### [47:04](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5FnbOLLpmUc&t=2824s) - Kirupa Yeah, and there's an authenticity element with community too. When I look at a blog post now, I'm like, at this point, if AI generated it or it went through eight rounds of review and all personality got stripped out of it, there is always some agenda in how it got written. We've both worked at big companies, so we know how posts get put up. It's never just, I'm going to be straight with my customers and give the real deal on what's happening. It has to be couched in many layers of legal review and PM art, where you're saying something without really saying anything. If I go to Reddit or Stack Overflow, I'm just getting the exact unfiltered version, grammatical errors and all. That almost makes it feel more relevant. I don't work in search at Google, and I'm just a beneficiary of the improvements they make, so I also don't know how it all works. But if I look at my own bias and what I actually click on, if there's a link from a community or something like that, I'm going to trust a Reddit answer more today than some long, complicated article. Pick any topic, like what's the best light bulb to get. Once I dig through the ad-filled links, the first Reddit post or some community where people are actively discussing light bulbs because they love light bulbs is almost guaranteed to give me a better answer than a company page ever will. Even a company-created guide has an agenda. For me, community is one step closer to the real answer instead of something abstracted away by agendas. ### [48:36](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5FnbOLLpmUc&t=2916s) - Zach Hawtof And I think it also goes back to what is a transactional conversation versus a non-transactional one. If Kirupa needs to figure out a problem and doesn't care whether a human gives him the exact answer, great. Go for it. But if it's something like, what's the best light bulb out there, and a robot says, this is the best light bulb, you're like, I'm not sure I'm buying it from a robot that literally cannot see light. You want to hear it from a human being who has shared some version of your experience. You want the best human answer about what the best light bulb is. That's the thing about these non-transactional conversations. You want to be part of more of those, and you want the transactional stuff in your life, the day-to-day operations, to just solve the stupid problem so you can get on to the more interesting and creative elements. That's what I'm excited about AI taking away from us. On the non-transactional side, I'm excited about AI connecting us faster to the answers we want from other humans. Can AI bring us closer together by unlocking discoveries and giving us upfront knowledge about the questions we should ask, or the background of the other person? Those moments where, 30 or 40 minutes into a conversation, you realize you both went to the same school or know the same person. Can AI help surface that faster? ### [50:20](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5FnbOLLpmUc&t=3020s) - Kirupa Imagine that, in some ways, it's like a very capable CRM. As I'm replying to you, the AI might say, “By the way, Zach went to Berkeley. You might want to add that.” I'd think, okay, that's actually useful to know, and I can add those details. But what is your take on AI itself mimicking human beings? A common conversation, especially among forums, goes like this: why have a community that gets maybe 10 posts a day when I could make it 100 posts a day, with 90 written by AI assistants chatting with other AI assistants? They could still add valuable content rather than doing random things. They might ask questions aligned with the community's subject. In a light bulb community, for example, one AI could ask which light bulb is better, LED or another kind, and other AIs could reply. That creates the illusion of a lively environment. Almost everyone I've met has a hard-line answer. Some are completely against it because they can't believe people would impersonate others. The other side says it lets them scale much further and faster. I wonder where you land. ### [51:25](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5FnbOLLpmUc&t=3085s) - Zach Hawtof Sit in the middle. There are so many different views and takes on it. I think there are a few different ways to look at it. One is that it's an incredible equalizing experience for people who didn't come from the kind of opportunity I had. I'm so lucky to have gone to Berkeley, and there are many things I don't have to worry about in the same way others do. So if suddenly someone has the ability to create an ad, for instance, where they aren't a supermodel and people are expecting a supermodel-esque person, they can do that. You could say it's unfair, but it's also equalizing. It gives people access to tools that let them accomplish things they otherwise didn't have the cards to do. That's pretty cool to see. At the same time, it depends on how you use it. I think about the deception that can be created with these experiences. Do you want to be loved for something that isn't actually you? That's a question I ask every influencer: if you could have a million more followers right now, but it wasn't really you who did it, and those people didn't know or understand you, would you still do it? That's a tough question to answer. Some people will say yes and some will say no, and I'm not sure either group will be fully happy with that answer, because people want to be loved for being themselves. That's honestly what everyone wants. At the same time, you have to grow a business. You've got to move the needle, and sometimes it's hard to get people to love you for being you. I understand that tension in the world we've created. So I sit somewhere in the middle. It's really case by case. ### [53:38](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5FnbOLLpmUc&t=3218s) - Kirupa Yeah, I struggle with this all the time too, because I like the authenticity of having real people post. But I'm also like, wouldn't it be cool to just have an AI profile? I'd make sure it's very clearly labeled as an AI profile so nobody thinks it's a real person they're about to hand a credit card to. Maybe it just posts a question of the day, like, hey, today's question is this. That has existed for years. Slack bots basically do exactly that. Standup bots are like, hey, what did you accomplish today? So there is a world where we can gradually figure out what this becomes. But I do land more on the side of saying I'd rather have an authentic community than one with a lot of artificialness in it. Then again, like you mentioned, my needs are very different from someone trying to build something quickly to sell something. I'm just doing this for fun. My day job is not running a community, and my material success doesn't hinge on it. It's just something I've always enjoyed doing. It keeps me close to tech and lets me chat with people I've known for decades. It's kind of like one of those old coffee shops where you're like, who even goes there? It's the same 10 people. And I'm like, yeah, those same 10 people are exactly why the owner keeps it going. ### [54:55](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5FnbOLLpmUc&t=3295s) - Zach Hawtof Yeah. I'll even say the way I use AI is that everything I write is still my voice, but I use AI to edit a lot. It is a phenomenal thing to bounce ideas off because it's not judgmental. It jumps in, gives pretty useful feedback on what you're writing, and has saved me more than once from phrasing something in a way I hadn't really thought through. It's getting surprisingly good, from an EQ perspective, at doing those things. And that's helpful. It helps me move faster. But at the same time, it is always my voice. I'm always the one writing or creating behind it. Because like I said before, like all of us, I want to be loved for me. It's a weird thing to say out loud on a podcast, but you do want to be authentic and be who you want to be. It's hard, and I know a lot of people are going to struggle with that because they may achieve a lot of success by not being themselves. That's a tough place to be, because changing back to yourself is very difficult. You see it with celebrities all the time. When they try to drop a persona and just be themselves, there is a lot of pushback. They lose one audience and move to another, and it can be tumultuous. ### [56:40](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5FnbOLLpmUc&t=3400s) - Kirupa Yeah, no, that totally makes sense. So let me shift us a little bit and talk about Tightknit itself. I love the design. I love your website. I like the design of all the communities. What's the thinking behind that? ### [56:55](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5FnbOLLpmUc&t=3415s) - Zach Hawtof Yeah, that's a good question. I'm very thankful that both Stephen and I have generally decent taste. Neither of us are designers. We've just had the privilege of working with some of the best designers in the world, and I like to attribute a lot of it to osmosis. Just by being around great design, great UX, and great accessible experiences, we've picked up a lot. Of course, we're always thinking about how to improve the design, but design is very much at the center of it. And, Kirupa, you're also one of those people. With all the work you did around design tokens, we've done a lot of that work too. A lot of how Tightknit is built is through design tokens and thinking in that framework. Design is really important, and we think a lot about accessibility. Technology shouldn't be the reason a community prevents people from joining. That's kind of at the core of our mission. I'm not saying everyone should be in every community. Sometimes you're just not supposed to be in certain communities, and that's fine. But it shouldn't be the tech that keeps you out. So that's been our approach. We want to make it very friendly and very accessible in how it feels. We actively avoid flashy experiences. We want it to feel like an internet people can belong to. ### [58:47](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5FnbOLLpmUc&t=3527s) - Kirupa Yeah, I mean, maybe you're underselling it a little bit, but when I look at the iconography, the spacing, and how well the posts and responses are structured, you really did a very good job on this. And I love the cat icon, Pixel. Of course, a cat named Pixel is already a win for me. I'm always thinking the technology is really cool, but how can I also make it look nice? How can I make it aesthetically pleasing? Balancing all of those things is something that really does drive me, even in what I work on right now. We always try to make sure what we're building has a certain look and feel that's unique and highly polished. So when I look at Tightknit, the logo, and everything there, I actually spent a little time just clicking around yesterday thinking, is there any part of this experience that got the second-grade treatment instead of first-class treatment? And no. Everything felt well done. The copy, the words, all of it felt very thought through, and I wanted to make sure you knew that. ### [59:39](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5FnbOLLpmUc&t=3579s) - Zach Hawtof Well, thank you. It's probably because both Stephen and I are very pedantic and obsess over tiny details. But at the same time, and this is really the center of it, we listen to our community. When people say, hey, could this be slightly better, we listen to every little nitpick, we write them down, and we try to improve them. We try to figure out what could make this incrementally more lovable. So if you have feedback, please share it, because that gets back to how you build a great product. What most people don't realize is that one of the hardest situations is having 10 customers who aren't telling you something and are just silently sitting on it. You have to create the easiest possible channel for people to tell you what's wrong, and then you better actually listen and not dismiss it. Another big part of this is just making people feel heard. That does not mean you have to do everything they ask. That's very different. Feeling heard and feeling understood are so important. Even if you say, we're not doing that, and here's why, that can still be really valuable. I give a lot of feedback to companies and vendors because I know how hard it is both to get feedback and to give it. The best vendors I work with hear me out, tell me why they're not going to do something, and I go, great, I was just tossing out an idea. That is community building. It's trust between you and your customer, and it means they know when you'll listen and act, and when you'll listen and choose not to. But the key thing is, you have to listen. ### [1:01:38](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5FnbOLLpmUc&t=3698s) - Kirupa Yeah, being a co-founder or CEO and obsessing over details is important. Different people obsess over different things, so it's good that you balance the areas you focus on. The result is a set of highly detail-oriented deliverables. I want to ask about something I saw the other day that fascinated me. Someone posted an idea on LinkedIn that made me think. ### [1:02:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5FnbOLLpmUc&t=3720s) - Zach Hawtof We're going to be a bugless company. If there's a bug, we're going to fix it. And my red alarm went off. I was like, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. That is a terrible way to build a business. I've been an engineer, a product manager, and now a CEO, so I know what brain is thinking there. The engineer brain is very much built around perfection, and that's something I try to avoid. You want to build this perfect product with all the right things and no bugs. The problem is, it's not the bugs you should be optimizing for. It's the customer experience. If those bugs are minor details in their world, don't fix them first, because it might take so much work that you ignore the features they actually need to solve their problem. Optimize the customer experience, not the bug. So anyway, I saw that the other day and thought your audience would appreciate hearing it: do not focus on bugs. Focus on the customer experience. ### [1:03:02](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5FnbOLLpmUc&t=3782s) - Kirupa 100%. Because people at the end of the day aren't waking up saying, I can't wait to go into a community and type messages for eight hours, or I can't wait to open a code editor so I can build an app for eight hours. They're doing this because they want to sell a product to their customers, or get better insights, or make their professional lives better or their day-to-day lives better. We're just the tools they use in between. And yes, there's a balance. Visual polish matters. P3 and P4 bugs should be addressed. But the P0s are the things that help them accomplish the task they hired your product to do. That's the classic jobs-to-be-done mindset, and I think that often gets lost. Small companies and big companies both lose the bigger picture. And as you also noticed, the more people you add, the more your P2s become someone else's P0s. Then you're spending time making sure their work goes well even when it's not the critical thing, because you hired this person or you have someone who wants to help. Balancing all that is one of the hardest parts. ### [1:04:08](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5FnbOLLpmUc&t=3848s) - Zach Hawtof Definitely. Balance is hard no matter what. It even goes back to the big-company-versus-little-company thing. The big company just has a different balance problem from the little company. Both sides are difficult for different reasons. At a big company you're solving a problem in much more depth. At a little company you're stressed because you have to scale it so fast and so wide. You're trying to solve all of your customers' problems because you're still in a growth phase, whereas a big company has massive tech debt. No business is without it, because good decisions do not stay good forever. Things change. Businesses change. AI gets invented. Suddenly that five-year plan for natural language processing can be done for a tenth of the cost in one line of code. Tough, but that happens, and you still made the right call at the time. You just have to keep moving forward. ### [1:05:22](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5FnbOLLpmUc&t=3922s) - Kirupa I mean, that goes back to your point about bug-free perfection. It's often the biggest hindrance to releasing something, getting feedback, and improving it. Was it worth spending 5 years on something if you didn't know whether even one person would like it? I think big companies struggle with this all the time. They ask how to solve something for a billion people when they haven't solved it for one person yet. They over-engineer and over-architect everything because big companies have distribution. Salesforce and Google have massive distribution because of how long they've built their names and all the other advantages that come with that history. What they may lack is the ability to react quickly to something promising, even if it won't become a 100 million or $1 million business in two years. You have to start somewhere and make it work. Startups have that advantage and the nimbleness to say, “I'm going to solve this very niche problem.” It may only be profitable enough for me and three other people to work on, but it could become something big. Many large companies are afraid to take that risk. Big-company processes often assume an opportunity must already justify the full machinery required to pursue it. ### [1:06:27](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5FnbOLLpmUc&t=3987s) - Zach Hawtof Yeah, no, I think it's hard because the people who build technology are not always the same people who build distribution. The irony is that your salesperson can really hear the customer's problem but may not have the mindset for how to build the product, while your builder sometimes doesn't have the customer-relationship skills. That's another thing I got from working at Salesforce. I got to see from the inside what it looks like to build a relationship-based company, where AEs weren't just answering questions about what Salesforce did. They were actually helping think through digital experience problems. Salesforce, like any business, can get caught overselling its own software. But the best AEs I've ever met are the ones who sell their software while also selling other people's software. They're actually trying to solve a customer's problem and build a trust relationship. That's direct sales, not community, but it's still the same human-to-human connection. You can do that same thing at scale in a community by solving people's problems. I tell people, you can let your partners and sometimes even some of your competitors into your community, because sometimes there are customers who are not right for you and those customers will bury you. That is the really hard part. It's so hard to turn down a customer. But sometimes you have to send them away. You have to say, we don't do that, and send them to the right place. They'll thank you for it, even if it's a competitor. I've sent plenty of customers to competitors because they weren't the right fit for us. But when I know someone is the right fit, then I can tell them the truth and say, this is going to work really well because we're better than X, Y, and Z for this reason. When they're not the right fit, I have to push them away because it's going to be bad for them and really bad for me. ### [1:08:38](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5FnbOLLpmUc&t=4118s) - Kirupa Yeah, there are so many horror cases like that. On the surface, a client looks fantastic, but they end up becoming a huge pain. Even if they're paying more, once you amortize it across the stress, time, and chaos, you're like, you know what, it wasn't worth it. ### [1:08:58](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5FnbOLLpmUc&t=4138s) - Zach Hawtof Yeah, and sometimes you won't know whether it was worth it until after you're through it. That's just part of growing a business, and part of early product-market fit. You think you know, but you don't know. You have to keep going and learn from your mistakes. So I think that's part of it. ### [1:09:18](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5FnbOLLpmUc&t=4158s) - Kirupa No, you know, I learned this line during orientation week at Salesforce, and I really wish I could remember who said it, so I'm attributing it to some Salesforce leader. But one of my favorite lines was, and I've kind of made it my own, there are perfect companies and there are companies still in business. Those are the two types of companies that exist. So true. Well, Zach, it was great catching up, great talking about community and all the other things we touched on as well. Any final thoughts or closing words? ### [1:09:54](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5FnbOLLpmUc&t=4194s) - Zach Hawtof My final thought is good luck with your Dreamweaver migration. I'm wishing you the best of luck, Kirupa. And if anyone is interested in learning more about building communities, go find us at Tightknit. You'll be able to join our Slack community focused on community building. I'm excited to meet whoever the next big community leader out there is, because I really do think this is the future of building a business. Every 10 years we say it again, but being customer-first is still the case. It just changes how we do it. ### [1:10:29](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5FnbOLLpmUc&t=4229s) - Kirupa Perfect. Zach, links to everything you mentioned will be in the description of the video and interview, so people can click there to find it as well. ### [1:10:38](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5FnbOLLpmUc&t=4238s) - Zach Hawtof And, K, by the way, thank you so much for having me. This has been a ton of fun to jump on and catch up. ### [1:10:43](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5FnbOLLpmUc&t=4243s) - Kirupa Yeah, likewise, likewise. [Browse all Interviews with Creative People](https://www.kirupa.com/podcast/index.htm).