Lani Rosales, and her husband Benn, are veterans of the Austin entrepreneurial scene. They founded The American Genius in 2005 and have created multiple communities that support the entrepreneur. It was exciting to learn about the challenges of building and growing a community from Lani.
Editor: Lani, I got to know you from Austin Digital Jobs (ADJ) because I’ve used ADJ to hire people for my company. I was amazed when I started researching your work for this interview and learned how many different things you have your hands in.
You are an author and run Big Ass Social Happy Hour (BASHH), Remote Digital Jobs (RDJ), and The American Genius. That’s a lot of different endeavors. What’s the common thread between them?
Lani Rosales: Think of The American Genius, a news organization, as the hub and everything else as events. ADJ is an event. It just happens to have a Facebook group that supports that. Same with BASHH. Same with Remote Jobs (RDJ)–we haven’t done events yet. We are a news organization with events.
Editor: You started this company in 2005, how did it all start?
Lani Rosales: It all started with a one-person blog created by my husband. He comes from the PR world of Kroger and Apple and is very corporate. My husband owned a boutique real estate brokerage in Austin and really couldn’t find a resource for himself to talk and learn about what was changing in marketing. In 2005, social media wasn’t even called social media yet. My husband wanted to apply his PR skills to the new marketing channels. He launched a one-person blog, and he was seeing 30,000 unique views in the first month–even now is good numbers. Back in 2005, those numbers were just mind-blowing. The blog started taking over and he started spending more time doing that than the brokerage. It was a lot to balance. So, he asked me to come in and help and that’s where it all started. It’s his baby and we’ve raised the baby together.
Editor: You have experience growing several communities of people focusing them in a certain direction. How do you grow and nurture communities around a topic? That’s challenging!
Lani Rosales: The fast answer is to devote the time necessary. Most people think you can just pop up a Facebook group and if you build it, they will come. That is absolutely not true. I would argue that what is visible is probably only about 30% of my effort and time. 70% of communications end up happening over private messages and email. You must be willing to put in the time and if the community is not monetized, well, that can be really hard to do.
Most communities fail because most people aren’t doers. Most people intend on building something. Then they’re confused about why it’s not growing. It’s because you’re not doing anything with it.
If you’re going to start a community, be aware that it is time-consuming. It’s not a plant that you can just water once a week. It’s like a human baby that you make sure it is always eating.
We’ve had communities that have been smaller or slower and all of them have growth plateaus and falls and rises but with work they grow.
Editor: In my experience, when growing a community, there is a big difference when you put out content consistently–every day, maybe every couple of hours sometimes versus once a week or once a month.
Lani Rosales: It’s hard to give a specific recommendation because it depends on the platform. You never know the results from the algorithm for a particular platform, so it takes some experimentation to figure out what works for each platform. For example, I didn’t use LinkedIn for years and I still hate LinkedIn I knew that to get my profile back up on LinkedIn and make the LinkedIn algorithm happy, I had to do something different. I just started bad-mouthing bad actors on LinkedIn and tagged people that I thought were being douchey. People love that! People love bad-mouthing. My profile engagement increased.
That, that same action and level would not have worked say on Twitter, on Twitter, I would’ve had to speak at maybe 20 to 30 times the volume of what I’m able to do on LinkedIn.
Editor: That is a big difference from most people on LinkedIn. You are a much more direct voice than most…
Lani Rosales: I am, but it is a luxury. It’s not something that I would’ve been able to do in my early twenties. It’s not something that I would be able to do if I moved to England right now and I don’t have a big network there, I couldn’t just go pop off. It’s because I’ve been in a community for a really long time and built out separate communities to support that.
Editor: And built a lot of trust.
Lani Rosales: Yeah, plus everybody likes the cynic. If you tap people’s inner cynicism, especially in tech it usually does well.
Editor: I’ve always appreciated how you have managed communities very directly and set tight boundaries around those communities. Most of my experience with your communities is with Austin Digital Jobs. That community is a challenging one to moderate.
Lani Rosales: It is. The thread through all of them is, especially in Austin, knowing the audience. If we built Austin Medical jobs, for example, or we wanted to cover Austin Medical News. That would be different. It would still be counterculture. We would still fight for the underdog like we always have, but it very much would have a different feel. The programs would be different. The efforts would be different. The language used would be different. How we built it would be different. Each community is built differently.
Editor: Let’s discuss all the different communities you have built. You have Austin Digital Jobs, which focuses on digital jobs as the name says. I can guess what Remote Digital Jobs does. In this era where our jobs are increasingly remote, I see the value in that. Can you tell me a little bit about BASSH
Lani Rosales: The Big Ass Social Happy Hour in Austin. Benn, my husband, decided why don’t we get people offline?
When Twitter launched, there were 30 or 40 Austinites that were at the South by Southwest, and we all hopped on. We were using Twitter to organize: Where are we going next? What panel do y’all wanna go to next? What parties? We were using Twitter for its original intended purpose
We realized that that was still in the era where you didn’t meet people on the internet. It was still weird if you met somebody online. People that met and dated from the internet didn’t admit it. It was still very strange.
One of our friends from Twitter was coming into town and we thought let’s just go have something offline. It was just Benn and me, some of the culture writers at the Statesman, and some Dell executives–it was maybe eight or nine of us. We went to Waterloo and had a great time. Then the next month people were asking, what are we doing this month? We were like, what? I don’t know, we already met you do we have to do anything? It just became this way to get people offline because when it started it wasn’t normal to meet people from the internet. Now it seems normal.
BASSH has become a tech get-together for casual networking. There are no assignments, games, or speakers. It’s just a casual environment. Most people are very casual and walk up to people to start conversations and keep it chill. Several startups have been born through lots of business partnerships, of course, lots of friendships, and some marriages. It’s been going on for 15-16 years–as long as Twitter.
Editor: I found some research that said if, if you physically meet even once a year, it deepens the sense of community, a great deal. Every now and then. A community has to get off the internet and meet in person.
Lani Rosales: BASSH was designed by my husband and me–both introverts. It’s designed to be not intense and not over the top. That’s our challenge with other networking events–you go in and everybody’s in blazers and it’s intense. And everybody has this attitude of I must close five deals today. I immediately freeze up in that scenario. So that does not work well for me.
Editor: What’s The American Genius’ focus?
Lani Rosales: The American Genius focuses on news and guidance for entrepreneurs. It is intended to help people who don’t want to wade through 800 stories to get something that might help their business. An entrepreneur should be able to open the site and not have to scroll to find something. We either give them a trend, a tool, or any sort of method that will help their business with small iterations. You and I both know as entrepreneurs that there is no silver bullet that fixes anything. However, if you can pick up nuggets along the way it’s iterative and your business does improve over time.
We’ve always had a counterculture vibe because it’s how we are. We’ve always had very strong reporting and storytelling when it comes to tech. The goal is to reach people who are too busy and, people that are ignored by other news organizations because they are too busy. They might not even subscribe. They are too busy. They might not like it. They might not comment on it. They might not share it. Those are readers that tend to be ignored by other news organizations. They’re the ones that don’t appreciate a copied and pasted press release like several news orgs put out. Our goal is to help those people
Editor: The counterculture vibe matches the Austin brand.
Lani Rosales: It is national. Our readers are from all over the place, but of course, our strongest readership is in Austin where we’re headquartered. TechCrunch is the valley. Geek Wire is Seattle. Ours is Austin. Austin is one of the cool places that people want to be, and it’s gotten cooler in the last 10 years.
Editor: One of the challenges is maintaining a sustainable community and that’s, and that’s one many people fail at. How have you sustained these communities?
Lani Rosales: I think Austin Digital Jobs provides a good example. Most jobs-oriented groups or communities tend to be cyclical–people come in and then they find their job and they leave. It’s hard to capture those people. 65% of ADJ’s community are people that are employed and who are not actively looking. Those are the unicorns that are hard to find. Usually, you can’t get them in a jobs community because they’re employed. it goes back to investing the time. It’s really a career community.
Building the community has been about being programmatic and regularly presenting useful content that taps into things that are needed as the long-term driver. People know what to expect. They know every Monday they’re going to get a meme thread and they know that Tuesdays, they’re going to get a raise your hand if you’re this type of professional, and Fridays we’re going to have the friend and friendship round up so people can be friends. We have anonymous ask questions every single day that people submit. I have this question, is this normal? How do I negotiate my salary?
Everything that we’ve built has been bit by bit because of either a problem or a challenge that we’ve come up against. For example, people love to share memes about either unemployment or employers and the community gets noisy if you don’t have a place for it. To solve that we silo everything into a thread. Most of the roundups that we have are because we’re trying to keep things laser-focused to where you can open ADJ and find job, job, job, maybe a career thing, maybe an event thing, job, job, job.
Community moderation means being willing to be disliked because you cannot make everybody happy. I get hate mail several times a week. People are always unhappy with something, but if it means pissing three people off to keep 10,000 there, I’m going to piss three people off. That sucks. I am a southerner. I want everybody to be happy, but you can’t.
I would also include that speaking, speaking an audience’s language, and building out a vernacular are important in building a community. Inside jokes are the secret sauce that groups never master. Have words that identify your members as opposed to other groups.
Tech people like you, and I both know, tend to be cynical and tend to see through the bullshit. They don’t fall for like standard marketing messaging. You must speak the language of that audience.
Each group has its own unique culture. For example, I really thought that when we built Remote Digital Jobs out, it would be just like ADJ. However, because it’s the audience is national and remote, RDJ attracts a totally different audience. So, we have to be more vigilant there than we do in ADJ because work from home attracts anybody that needs a job like right now, urgently. When you have a different demographic, you must be vigilant with behavior. To summarize be programmatic, speak the language and jokes, and be vigilant.
Editor: I read ADJ every time there’s a significant post, I’m not looking for a job because I’m unemployable. However, as an entrepreneur and as a manager, ADJ gives me tremendous insight into what my employees are thinking and what has changed in the environment. It has changed how we advertise jobs because you get a tremendous insight into the mind of a potential employee on ADJ–What people are looking for? What they’re complaining about. ADJ has made me a better employer.
Lani Rosales: Thank you for saying that is a huge win but a byproduct and not the mission. That’s something that when a jobseeker is upset in the group or they feel underserved, we can tell them that there are employers that have adjusted and are trying to be better employers just by being part of ADJ. Groups when they’re successful, tend to have that ripple effect, it doesn’t always just serve that main purpose which also makes the job more complicated.
Editor: It takes a lot of empathy for your audience, to be a community manager, doesn’t it?
Lani Rosales: It does. And I really think that some people are wired for empathy and others are not. If someone’s not naturally wired for empathy, building community can be tremendously difficult. People that aren’t wired for empathy don’t understand that if somebody is yelling at you or criticizing you, they can be converted easily to being very invested in the community if you take the time to listen to them and be respectful and give them the space to express themselves.
I find that spending that time with people and expressing “I understand what you’re saying. Having content deleted never feels good. I know that you’re just trying to be active in the community and help other people. That would upset me too”
If you’re not wired for empathy, those phrases don’t come out of your mouth.
Editor: What’s next? What’s the future of these communities? Where are you headed next?
Lani Rosales: Good question. Right now, we’re in the process of evaluating all the properties and seeing what changes need to be made because the pandemic really changed things whether we liked it or not. Events have been the primary driver of funds for our company for a long time. When events went away that was very tough.
We did try to pivot online, but we didn’t have success with that. Now that the COVID is in the rearview mirror, I can admit that out loud. We really thought that with the viral nature of some of our properties, we would be able to translate that into an online conference. It went fine. We broke even, a little bit better than broke even, but it didn’t go gangbusters. That was a big surprise.
We’re going back to offline; we’ve started BASHH back up, but we’ve not started the ADJ recruiting mixers back up and we haven’t done any events yet for RDJ. We are evaluating what can be done online better. We will likely build out a couple of separate groups that support the larger groups and have sub-communities and to support the large community and see where the demand is because the demographic has changed. The expectations have changed.
Going back into an offline events world is very complicated because none of us know what to tell sponsors. We cannot tell them the numbers. We cannot tell them the demographics. We have no idea because we haven’t remerged yet.
As for the news side, we’re working on improving the diversity of our storytelling and making sure that we have more people that are in the field with entrepreneurs telling their stories–what they’re seeing, what’s working for them. As we bring on more editorialists from around the nation, we can tell a more complete story. That’s something that we’re putting a lot of effort into improving. We have already seen the positive effects of that.
Editor: Lani thank you for the time and your keen insights into community building. I look forward to meeting you at BASHH and continuing this conversation in the future.
