In this episode of Masters of Community, we speak with Max Rothery, VP of Community at Finimize, a platform that provides investment education for casual investors in small, digestible bites. Max has a truly wide range of work experiences, from working in a bank to working in the film industry. He even ran a record label. Learning anything new is more effective if, alongside self-learning, you learn from others. This is where having a community of learners plays a big role. The Finimize Community helps casual investors capitalize on tech tools to connect and learn from other people like them. This episode is packed full of insights about community from a person who had no experience in the field when they first started. Listen to the full episode for specific insights on how to use your community for research. Who is this episode for? For community managers who have started in the community field from other fields and casual investors. Three key takeaways: 1. When a community makes sense for service-oriented businesses: Learning content includes several questionable sources online. Creating high-quality content that people love to consume and then creating a paid community around it helps to profitably solve this problem. Talking to your community (free or paid) helps you understand the different types and subtypes of people your content will help and their favorite topics. 2. Researching Community Members: As a first step to your community strategy, start by talking to the most engaged fans and understand their intrinsic motivations in life. Expand this circle in steps until you get credible data on a solid ideal customer profile (ICP). After this, create, grow, and optimize your community to improve the experience of this ICP so that any new members will find something they have in common with existing members. Have a clear business goal (what your company gets out of the community) and a clear community goal (what members get out of being in the community). Be ready to leave out a particular segment that is not well-represented in your data set to focus on your most profitable ICP. 3. Making the best use of community spaces: Create a community space that allows connections and public discussions to flourish. Let your content team find new ideas from these discussions. Your sales team can also use these spaces for competitive research. Make sure you collect data to prove the efficacy of any insights you use from the community. Notable Quotes: 1. “The best thing to do when you lose money is to speak to someone else. That's [how you realize] that's kind of the point of investing. It's like, sometimes you do well, sometimes you don't. I think that that's a really natural way for a natural reason that a community should exist. ” 2. “We're just creating spaces and watching and observing, and then trying to feed that back and give context to the rest of the business” 3. “Our core audience is probably like twenty-seven to forty-year-olds that have got surplus income [and are] working in well-paid jobs and investing on the side… We're saving them time that they can't get anywhere else. If we try to focus on students or even beginner investors, it distracts us from delivering to that core audience.” Answers to rapid-fire questions: 1. If you could only eat one food for the rest of your life, what would that be? Burgers. 2. What's your favorite book to give as a gift to others or to recommend to others? “Rules for Revolutionaries” by Becky Bond and Zack Exley. 3. A go-to community engagement, tactic, or conversation starter? Reserve time with people to talk more with them about a particular topic. 4. Have you ever worn socks with sandals? Yes, wearing them while recording this interview 5. What's the weirdest community you've ever been a part of? A natural wine community that was associated with a startup but members ended up creating a parallel, more helpful wine community of their own. 6. Tweet-size deathbed advice? Life is always the most rewarding in the deep end.