Most AI note-takers just transcribe and summarize. Granola is an AI notepad. You jot down what matters during the call, and Granola uses your notes plus the transcript to generate summaries, action items, and next steps from your point of view. The powerful part: you can chat with your notes. Write follow-up emails, pull out decisions, prep for your next meeting ā all in seconds.
I donāt promote tools lightly. This one earned its place.
Building a community-first product, private community or vertical social network.
Or learning battle-tested tactics to build a successful community for your startup.
So letās get into it:
Act I: The Facebook BJJ origin story
Finding a co-founder
Back in 2017 I was walking around the third floor of our new Soho office when I stumbled upon a dude with a big smile and a Spanish-American accent, with a bunch of tatami mats stacked next to his standing desk.
We soon realised we were both obsessed with surfing, tech, and mixed martial arts.
We started the Facebook Brazilian Jiu Jitsu club at the London office (which spread across other offices across the world). Looking at the social club budget, we also figured out there was a āglitch in the systemā, which made it possible for us to start other clubs. Needless to say, we ended up with one martial art per day of the week including boxing, MMA, BJJ, wrestling and so on.
Some say that Zuck started training BJJ because of the trend we started š.
This was the beginning of my friendship and founding story with Jorge Bestard.
Building something people want (on the right flywheel)
We tried a bunch of things including building a training app, an ecommerce, a marketplace and a bunch of other ideas. But none of them took off, and we both felt something was missing.
Time went by and we kept throwing things at the wall. But this time it had to tick a few boxes, since we had both switched roles and felt strongly about helping our home turf.
Tech sales is underrated: especially in the spanish-speaking world, where it is typically misunderstood (people think ācar salesmanā).
Top talent often doesnāt even know its an option: and that it can not only be very attractive in terms of income potential, but also in terms of career fulfilment.
Cleaning up your information diet and continuous learning is hard: Keeping up to date with the latest developments in sales - tooling, plabooks, market trends - is challenging, especially in a space mined with questionable āsales gurusā.
Sales can belonely: And finding a curated peer group to bounce ideas off of when you are stuck, and that helps you guide your career choices, is hard.
Linkedin is bad at community: People have spent the better part of the past 10 years being āharvestedā, as passive consumers of information.
Solution
A highly curatedpaid membership community for the best tech sales professionals in the Spanish-speaking world.
Vision: The sales profession is understood as a great career path - attracting more talent into the tech scene in the Spanish-speaking world, both in terms of its earning potential and how interesting / prestigious the job can be.
Mission: Elevate the sales profession.
Validating demand (through pre-selling)
We both knew we didnāt want to re-invent the wheel in terms of business model, and that we wanted to get paid first before building anything to validate demand.
So hereās what we did:
Throw our top 50 smart GTM friends in a slack channel. Mostly spanish-speaking sales leaders from unicorns and high-growth startups.
Wrote and published a sign-up form on Tally, with the value-prop and explicitly calling out that is is a paid membership community.
Scheduled 30+ interviews selecting from that list of 400+ submissions, and sent payment links to those who cleared our talent bar.
And it worked.
Act II: The Facebook Community Playbook
The Spark AR Community
There is a surprising amount of work that goes into building a successful community, especially when its a community-as-a-product.
I know because I was a Product Specialist on the Spark AR team at Facebook, working hand-in-hand with engineering and design to ship Instagram's AR camera effects. We built the community as a product lever because we saw the opportunity.
My team launched these filters in 2017, and went from zero to hundreds of millions of daily active users, over 1 billion unique camera effects used, and suddenly thousands of creators making a living off of building these filters.
The Spark AR Community grew to over 100,000 members. It was considered internally as a source of competitive advantage for the platform. And we proved with data that community creators were significantly more likely to publish effects and retain as active developers.
When we started Revenue Squared, we took those learnings and applied them.
Here are the top 10:
1. Build the MVP where they already are
At Facebook, we built the Spark community on Facebook Groups. We looked at a bunch of options (custom platform, standalone app, stack overflow, etc). We chose Groups because creators were already logged in, already had notifications turned on, already had the muscle memory of checking their feed every day.
Whenever someone asks me about this I use a freeway analogy.
Your community is a town. The platforms your audience already uses every day are freeways. For salespeople, the two biggest freeways are LinkedIn and Slack. They're already on both, every single day, with notifications on. So we built our town right at that intersection. The Slack community was where members lived. LinkedIn was how new people found us.
The point is, don't make people take a detour to reach you. Build where the traffic already is.
The temptation is always to build something custom. Resist it for as long as you can.
Our R2 tech stack at launch was:
Tally (forms)
Webflow (website)
Slack (community)
Stripe (payments)
Google Meets (workshops)
Thatās it. We didnāt add Podia, Luma, etc until we had 150+ members.
2. Find your first 50 ākindling membersā + MVP
Andrew Chen calls this the āatomic networkā in The Cold Start Problem. Which means the smallest possible group of users that can sustain the network on its own.
Tinder for example did it by throwing a campus party where 500 students downloaded the app in one night. LinkedIn did it by having employees and investors invite their professional contacts. And Reddit literally faked early activity with multiple accounts to make the community feel alive.
At Facebook, the first Spark AR creators were hand-picked. My team identified the most talented AR creators we could find (create + technical usually), gave them early beta access, and brought them in one by one. These first creators set the tone for everything that came after. They built the best effects, answered other creatorsā questions, and gave feedback that shaped the product roadmap.
It was also super cool to see how excited our own Engineers got when they saw real people building amazing stuff in real time, collaborating, commenting and so on.
With R2, we ran the same playbook. Jorge and I had deep networks across tech sales from Facebook, Bloomreach, Canva, Miro and so on. Our first 50 members came from personal relationships. We literally threw our smartest GTM friends in a Slack channel. Then we started hosting dinners in Madrid and Barcelona, bringing together talented revenue professionals we thought weād enjoy hanging out with. Every dinner was oversubscribed and word-of-mouth did the rest.
You cannot crowdsource your founding members, you need to hand-pick them very carefully because they are your kindling. And without kindling, thereās no fire.
This is also super important for any startup thinking of bolting on a community for āsupport purposesā. As we discussed in our recent Growth Playbook about Lovableās journey to 400M in ARR, most communities become dumping grounds for negative sentiment if you donāt get this step right.
3. Kill the cold-start problem with curated seeding and setting the tone for culture
The thing nobody talks about but is crucial in the early days of any community, and also the most anxiety inducing, is that the biggest risk is silence. People join, see nothing happening, and leave.
At Facebook, we seeded the Spark AR group with content every day. Tutorials, creator spotlights, product updates, detailed comments to work showcases, announcing bug fixes.
I remember some of our most amazing content came from our Engineers or Designers directly pushing a demo of what they were releasing on the group. Some of them were almost āsuperstarsā in the eyes of these talented creators.
My teammates and I were in there constantly, posting, commenting, surfacing great work, from all across our org including PMs, Data Science, Research, Eng, etc.
With R2, we did the same thing. Before we had organic discussion, we seeded the Slack with data, articles, sales insights, and questions worth debating. One of our most popular channels ever is #Memes. We asked questions we actually wanted answers to and shared stuff weād found genuinely useful.
Hereās where we found Luisen through Twitter. He was at Salesforce at the time. He joined the team to run community management, and having someone dedicated to keeping the conversation alive made all the difference. But most importantly, he had a great pulse on culture, and maintaining that tone across all our channels.
