Episode 162 - Assaf Lev: Cofounder and CEO of Locals
Today’s guest is Assaf Lev who is the cofounder and CEO of Locals.com. Assaf Founded locals in 2019 along with Dave Rubin as an alternative social space for independent creators.
About Assaf Lev
Assaf Lev is the co-founder and CEO of Locals.com, a platform that encourages creators to be independent.
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Locals Creators
The Local Maximum on Locals
Related Episodes
Episode 50 about Dave Rubin leaving Patreon
Episode 103 interviewing Dave Rubin
Episode 147 on The Local Maximum joining Locals
Episode 153 on the decentralization of the internet in 2021
Episode 161 a recently episode on internet freedom
Transcript
Max Sklar: You're listening to The Local Maximum Episode 162.
Time to expand your perspective. Welcome to The Local Maximum. Now here's your host, Max Sklar.
Max: Welcome everyone, welcome. You have reached another Local Maximum. I'm very excited about today's show. I want today's interview spread far and wide. Because I am so excited to share our—to share my discussion stay with Assaf Lev. We're going to be talking about an alternative social network, say, and alternative platforms. And when it comes to that, you know, obviously, the one that sticks out for me right now is Locals. And you can get our community on Locals at maximum.locals.com. Locals, it's not the largest one for sure, it might not be the most well-known alternative social platform, but it's the one that I'm on. I'm actually on a lot of them. But it's the one that I use specifically for the podcast here. And it's got a great community and a great story. And in fact, the story of Locals is one that I've been following. And I guess along with Aaron, we've both been following since even before it started, and have been documenting its progress here on The Local Maximum.
So way back in Episode 50, that is in December 2018, you get these www.localmaxradio.com/50. Dave Rubin, who is well-known podcaster, and interviewer and commentator, he left the platform Patreon, very dissatisfied with the way big tech would kind of—not just randomly kick people off their platform, or at least the way that they kind of adjudicate disputes in terms of who's to allowed stay on and who's not seems rather arbitrary. And then, we know all of these things that happen where you're on a platform, they decide to change their algorithm, and then you're left high and dry and all that stuff. So anyway, a few specific things happened. Dave Rubin leaves Patreon on December of 2018, and short—and then he seeks to build an alternative not just, you know, rage quit, but actually do something about it. So he finds Assaf Lev. And together, they found Locals. And so they set out to build an alternative and around a year after that was launched.
So in Episode 103, I interviewed Dave Rubin here on the Local Maximum. And that was January of 2020. I was very excited about that year, because I was like, “Oh, I have a big guest, Dave Rubin coming on the show.” 2020 happens and I had other things to worry about. But we kept pushing through here in the Local Maximum. So then, in 147, we've finally joined Locals. I got the Local Maximum on there. So it's www.maximum.locals.com and we've been having some great discussions there. I post all of the episodes there. Plus, I kind of tell you what's going on in the future in the Local Maximum, and what episodes I'm planning and some other behind the scenes stuff. So that was way back, I think in November.
So now we're here we are in Episode 162. And once again, we're going to be talking about Locals. And we're going to be talking more generally about building products and startups. I love that stuff. And we're going to be interviewing, you know, someone who is very close to the locals platform, because my next guest is the co-founder and CEO of Locals. Assaf Lev, you've reached The Local Maximum. Welcome to the show.
Assaf Lev: Thank you. Great to be here.
Max: Yeah, it's great to have you. I have been having such a great time on the Locals platform, even though I have like an itty bitty Local space, which is hopefully going to grow a little bit soon. Hopefully I'm going to get a—hopefully I'm going to get my, I've almost got my hundred members I can get—I don't know verified. I know I get extra features when that happens.
But anyway, so you are the CEO of Locals. First of all, tell me a little bit like how long have you been doing this? What's your background before you started at Locals? And why did you decide to hop on board?
Assaf: Sure. So we are doing Locas for over two years. My background is more on the technology side. So I actually grew up in Israel. I'm an engineer, my occupation, and I moved there about eight years ago and I was always fascinated with start-up and entrepreneurship. To play follow-through as to like why we started Locals. So I'm coming from the corporate space. And I'm talking to Dave for like, I will say for a few years ever since he moved to Patreon about what was missing for him, how he wants to connect with his audience into something very fascinating for me. And everything trigger for us to start the company.
Actually, I don't know if you remember, but at the time, Dave decided to leave Patreon together with Jordan Peterson and Sam Harris. And the reason that they decided to leave was because one of Patreon creator was booted out of the platform, his name was Carl Benjamin, for saying the N-word outside of the platform. And then obviously, they saw the danger with censorship and with cancel culture that today is obviously a problem for mainstream, but they basically call me and said, “Assaff, we have to have a page up and running to collect support for my community, for my supporters,” because that's how he generate most of the income from his business.
So like any other product guy, I put a page in a matter of a week, and connected the Stripe account and PayPal. And when we, when I saw the results and the amount of money, we were able to like raise, I was blown away. So essentially, we saw 30% increase in the revenue for what he was making on Patreon. And then we knew that we have something and then we knew that, like fans are going to appreciate if creators are going to go and be independent. And that's actually what triggers to start Locals.
Max: So where, that is surprising. Like I would think, “Hey, here's Patreon. Here's where the audience is essentially, you think, hey, support creators go to Patreon.” It's sort of it's counterintuitive, too. And I think for a long time, it was probably true. Like, if you leave Facebook or Twitter, nobody's gonna listen to you. Why do you think that that changed? What do you think was going on there?
Assaf: Yeah. So I think first of all, there is a shift also, with consumer in the past few years and subscription based solution are start to be much more attractive for the regular user. And the reason is that users are much smarter. And they know that today, there is no such thing as free in the internet. So if it's free, essentially, you are the product. But on the other hand, his supporters want to pay money not to be the product, they actually care about the information. But even more than this, supporters want to support creators directly. Because the way that it operates today, if you think about Facebook, and Google, right, is like the big players over there, most of the revenue is actually coming from the advertiser. So essentially, the main stakeholder in the company is the advertisers. And we see a shift that I think Patreon is actually paved the way in some ways, where the creator is going to be the dominant player in the company itself. And the way that we look at this in lockers we're going to get to it is that we look at our creators as partners, not necessarily as clients because of this reason.
Max: Okay, right. So you got Dave all set up. You got Dave Rubin, and you got his Patreon alternative just for him. It's working for him. Now, you turn to expanding this out, making this available to other creators. How did you go about that? How did you get started on that? Both in terms of, were there any technical issues that had to be overcome? And also, I know, in terms of the technical issues, there's always one thing at least that's a lot more difficult than you think it's going to be. And then in terms of just getting it started, how did you get your creator number two, creator number three, etc, etc.?
Assaf: Yeah. So I will start more with that when we launched like Dave's support site, right. As I mentioned in the beginning, the first thing that they did is, as a typical product person, I jumped on course with all of the supporters. So I had like dozens, if not hundreds of calls with supporters trying to understand why they support creative. And I realized that it's not only that they want to support the creator, that's what they are coming, they actually had the big need to communicate with one another. And that was also what was missing for Dave on Patreon.
So when we started, even before we went to other support—to other creators, we said, “What do we really need to create, what is this feature set that we need to do to allow a creator to be completely independent, and for the supporters to communicate with one another?” My approach to build products is “less is more,” and more about simplicity. So essentially, it was one news feed will be created and a lot of tools to publish content and the supporters were able to connect to one another. And I think what we did that is very different compared to any other subscription-based solution, we are all about community. So on Locals, you can join, as you know Max, every community, every member can join for free, but only paid member, which we call them supporters, have the ability to comment, to post, and to see also exclusive content. And by doing that we actually were able to filter a lot of the noise from the trolls that exist on YouTube or Twitter.
So we started with Dave's community. And it worked very well. And I was actually very surprised with the amount of engagement that we got from the members. I was also very lucky because a lot of our alpha testers were from the Rubin report community. Our initial investors came from the community. And actually the key employees that works today on Locals came from the Rubin report community. So we said, let's excel one community, let's build them, buy them up. And then let's go and give it to other creators.
And then we recorded our second creator, which was Bridget Phetasy. And then after this, Michael Malice, and from there, Scott Adams. And then what happened, I shifted from talking only to supporters to spending most of my day talking to creators, and I started to really learn the creator ecosystem, and who they are, and what are the tools that they need. And part of the things that we understood, creators today are looking for more and more way to simplify the workflow and focus on creating content, not managing everything else. And that's what we try to do with Locals.
Max: Yes, I noticed that—so you said that the supporters, they really liked talking to each other, and not just one-on-one to the creator. And so I find that very interesting, like I had, I have a little bit of chatter on my page. And like, you know, I noticed some thread going on and someone said, “Oh, I don't want to get off topic from what Max posted.” I'm like, “No, no, no, by all means, go ahead.” Like I love when, when, like random discussions sort of pop up. And it's, it's really—I think I support some people on Patreon. So it's my understanding, I guess you can't talk to other people who are supporting the customer. It makes sense. Like, why would you, you have something in common with the other supporters that you both listen. So, you know, it's sort of, you know, it sort of makes sense, you'd want to chat.
Assaf: Right. So when you think today, for example, I will give two examples, right? If you take Substack and if you take Patreon. From our interview with a lot of creators, we actually discovered that they really want to have a community. Unfortunately, those solutions are not supporting it, because it's only a way to publish content. So they go today to Discord or to Slack. And another thing that we realized is that for supporters hosting content, for example, it's also important.
So what we start to notice more and more, creators today operate like their own company, their own media company. That's, in effect, how we see the future. And what we understood on Locals, we need to allow the supporters to communicate with one another and the creator. But we also need to, again, I'm going back to the point to learn the workflow of the creator. Because when we started to learn, “who are those creators that are very successful?” At the end of the day, all of you and when I say you, I look at you also Max, some type of entrepreneurs that are going out there and I have tons of respect—I was actually on the call this morning with two creators, and it's mind-blowing for me how every creator is finding their niche. And they are able to create this like a core group of supporters that really want them to succeed and are willing to support them financially.
And the way that we see it, and the way that we see the future, I think it's very optimistic and very encouraging for a lot of people that want to get to the space of being a content creator. We're gonna see that the next big media companies are not going to be built by organization, it's going to be built by creators, because also the consumer is ready to support the creator directly. And the creator themselves are starting to use tools like Locals that give them the ability to operate without—have zero knowledge in tech and how to operate the community.
Max: Yeah, I have tried to, I mean, sometimes I've had, you know, discussions on Slack that have been good, we actually use Slack and Foursquare. If we have like a beta for one of our products, we'll have everybody using the beta on Slack. And we'll have a discussion. And I've tried to have my friends and people who listen to the podcast, go on Slack, go on Facebook, go on—all these other things—Reddit. But I was never able to have a really good discussion on those platforms going. And then you'd see Locals come around, you tell me, “Oh, now people are gonna have to pay. And it's like, that's gonna whittle it down even more, how are we going to get a discussion going?” And to my surprise, that's not how it turns out. So it's something that you have to educate people on it. Was that a surprise for you?
Assaf: It was definitely a surprise for us. But from the beginning, it was something that we noticed that changed the nature of the discussion as you said. So putting a paywall in front of it, make—two things actually happen. Number one is I mentioned before you filter the troll. That's the obvious thing. So I do understand that if you're going to put a paywall less haters are going to come because someone that hates you, not necessarily is going to pay for you. And that's the behavior that we see. The second thing that was surprising for us and it's actually very similar to other solution that you use, when you pay for something, let's say that you pay five or seven bucks per month, you care more about the service. It's the same way as I always say, when you have Netflix and you pay the $7.99, and you are bored at night, you're going to go and you're going to open Netflix, and you're going to give it more attention to the content that's going to be there.
And similar to this, that's what we see with the communities. If you're paying money, you already feel like you're part of the group and you're going to treat it with more respect. You're not going to be an asshole. And you're not going to try to trigger anyone to say nasty stuff. We actually see that we have a lot of disagreement in our Locals community. But the level of respect to one another definitely was something that surprised us.
Max: Yeah. And I think also that applies to the creator as well, because it's like, you know, if somebody writes a comment on Locals, well, that's a paying supporter. So I feel, “Okay, they better get,” I mean, I can’t always drop what I'm doing and just go and reply, but I'm like, “Okay, they get my first reply. They come before email, they come before Twitter, so I feel that way, too.
So, what do you tell people, who—so a lot of the people who are coming on as creators and supporters, they may be—you're kind of branching out from Dave's community, like, you know, Michael Malics has been on the Dave Rubin show and, and and Bridget Phetasy, I guess. I feel like there are a lot of people who are doing politics. What do you tell people who want to get out who either want to do something completely different? Or maybe you have someone on there? I mean, I don't know. It's a what if someone from the New York Times comes in and says, “Hey, I want one?” That would be a little surprising, but like, how would you—would you try to sell them on it? What types of people are you trying to get on your platform right now?
Assaf: So first of all, 100%, if someone from the New York Times or any other organization want to come they are more than welcome. And we will, you know, empower them the same as we do with any other clients to be independent. So yes, we started with Dave network. And you are right, when we started the company, definitely it helped us to bring and to grow the audience doing it this way.
And essentially, when we started, the main problem was censorship. And you are right that it was more for people on the political space. But the last year, I think, was a very interesting year for all of us. With COVID and with the events that have been January, for example, with Parler being removed from the App Store and Google Play, a lot of creators understood that they are not really safe. And censorship, as they mentioned before, start to be a mainstream problem.
So now actually, we start to see a lot of doctors that are coming to the platform. So we have Dr. Drew, and we have ZDogg, which came for us from Facebook, actually, that now they are not able to speak about everything. So a lot of the people that come to us now I will say the common features, those are people that are very vocal about their opinion. We have people that are progressive, we have people that are not. So we start with other vertical, now that we are expanding too. We are now getting into beauty, we are getting into sport, and essentially is people that want to share their opinion.
What we are looking for, and the type of creators that are successful, are creators that are authentic. And I think that authenticity is something very important for the viewer today. So if you want to succeed as the content creator, our advice to you is be authentic. And actually when we talk to our creator, we encourage them to share content that not necessarily they edit, just be themselves because that's what people are craving for today. They are looking for something real, and they don't really trust the other media outlet that exists out there.
Max: It's interesting, if you go back, you know, five, six years, there'd be a lot of people on like, on YouTube, for example, or Facebook, who were not political, but they'd say, “Hey, I've been working on my channel for several years. And now all of a sudden, let's say YouTube just changed their algorithm on me. They randomly decided to change their algorithm. And now that hits my numbers, it hits me financially.” And they kind of felt like, “Well, that was really unfair.” I think at the time, it wasn't really enough to spur on these alternative networks, but that was a concern as well. Do you guys speak to that to like being at the whims of the algorithm, so to speak?
Assaf: Absolutely. So there are two interesting things that you mentioned there. Number one is the ownership of the creator, of the user. I think one of the problem today, because creators understand that they are not safe on the big tech platform, they don't have a way for example, to reach out to their entire members. So if you go on YouTube or Twitter and you have millions of followers, a) the algorithm not necessarily is going to be in your favor. So if you're going to post something, it's not like they guarantee that everyone are going to see it, and b) if you want to contact those people, you don't have the data. Now, those are people that follow you that support you. And that's exactly what we are doing on Locals. So Locals we don't have algorithm, by the way. So we decided to remove the algorithm, the user can solve the feed.
Max: I guess I'm out of a job.
Assaf: No, but it's working actually pretty well, right. So the user can decide what they want to see. We do have a trending option that you can see like the posts that got the most traction, or the most like, or the most comments. And actually, when the creator posts, everyone are getting either push notification or email notification and the creator control at 100%. And we believe that that's what the consumer wants. If you decide to go and opt into someone’s community, you want to be informed when they're putting new content out there, and the creator wanna have a direct channel with the supporter without any middleman. And that's essentially what we see today's creators understand. If you want to grow your business, you need to own your business. You can’t rent spaces. If something happened, now your entire business is gonna be, you know, removed from the planet.
Max: What was your reaction to Parler being taken off, basically being wiped off the face of the internet for a month? Were you surprised? Is that something that you talked about in terms of, “Hey, this is a risk.” In your SWOT analysis, your business analysis. What are potential threats to the business? How do you think about that?
Assaf: So I think definitely, I was surprised. I mean, it's something we discussed a lot. I think Dave talked about it even more, I have to give him credit. He saw it actually coming. And I never saw an example like this before, that the company is basically being removed from every single thing that you can think of, right, from the Google Play and the App Store, and then AWS. And what it shows us is that no one is protected. So that's the one thing.
The other thing that it basically made us understand is that, as a platform that provide user-generated content, you have certain responsibilities. And you cannot come and claim, “I allow any type of content to be on my platform.” I actually think that's the mistake that Parler did. Because when you look at the way that we approach it from our side, we want to keep our stuff on the App Store and Google Play and all of the places that consumers are operating today, because we want to make it easy for the supporter of the creator to consume the content. Saying this, we understand that there's a platform that have user generated content, we are obligated to have moderation in place that will prevent from bad things from happening.
What are bad things? For example, on Locals today, the way that we do moderation is divided to two. There is platform moderation, and there is community moderation. That the creator actually make the decision. And it's much better. And it works much better for us. So in example, if there is a threat of violence or illegal activity, that's something that the platform, we internally, are responsible for this, and we are reviewing this, and we have to take the action to prevent stuff like this from happening on the platform. Everything related to hate speech, to spam, we allow our creator to make the course if they want to block the user from their community that they have full rights to do it, this user will never be able to join their community. But they can operate in other communities.
So essentially, I think when we think about it, it's in some ways the mission impossible to moderate the billion people. But when you divide it into small groups, and you work together with your creators, that's how you can make better decision. Because I don't think that we as a platform expert, for example, in medical, and I can detect if something that the doctor said it's okay or not okay to say, based on COVID 19. Right. But I do think that the creator can make this decision. But I do think that if something is illegal, there is the law of the United States that we can follow. And if there is a threat of violence, it's pretty obvious to see. And we actually see that the supporters themselves are the ones that are reporting this content, then we actually put mechanism in place to overcome this issue. The other thing that...
Max: Oh, sorry, go ahead. Oh, no.
Assaf: I wanted to mention also that what happened—because of what happened with Parler, it made us unfortunately for as a start-up company to spend more time to have backup. And it's not something I like to spend because I prefer to spend all of my resource to improve the user experience and deliver a better product. But now we needed to create a separate database in several. So if something will happen, I wouldn't be able to keep operating the company for our customers.
Max: Yeah, that's—it's probably pretty smart. Yes, do some creators say, “Hey, you know, I'd like to moderate this, but I feel like it's too much.” I mean, maybe, you know, I'm sure Dave Rubin doesn't want to sit there for hours a day going through all of his comments. But I certainly can. I think you have some tools for that, right?
Assaf: Yeah. So we developed like all of the tools that allow the creator to actually like, do it pretty easily. I also have to say that most of the big creator that we have, that's the things that we discuss, like the shift from like a small creator to creator that is doing it full-time. Usually they hire a small team. And what we see with our community, I'm very proud to say that some of our communities are generating enough money that people actually hire people to manage their community or Locals. And it's great because we are providing work for other people.
But essentially, we have all of the tools, we provide the creator, everything to be in complete control. If they want to be hands on they can make all of the decision. If not, we can help them to make those decisions. So it's all up to the creator to decide how they want to do it.
Max: What is the—is there an upcoming feature that you're working on that you're really excited about building, that you could share?
Assaf: Yes. So for all—we basically, and I think what creator like, we support all types of media today. So you can post on Locals like your blog, and you can post images, and you can post podcasts, and you can post videos. We really want to go into videos, and podcasting in particular. But the reason we want to go into videos, it's again, going back to their authenticity, being more authentic. And I think that's what people want to see. So when someone is sharing what they think about their life when someone is giving an update…
So we are working out on a live stream that we are hoping to release in the next few months. We got a lot of requests from our creators to do it. So that's one feature that we're going to put out there. We are also going to develop more ways for creators and for supporters to tip one another. So in the form of super chats that we're going to have on Locals, because we want creators to spend more and more time with Locals, we see that it's great for them. So we have to develop more tools that will attract both the creators and the supporters. So for us, the videos and livestream is definitely something that is coming next.
Max: Yeah, that's really cool. One of the things that I've done a couple times is like, while I'm editing a show, assuming that I'm not doing it at one in the morning, extremely tired. I'll be listening to it. I was like, “Oh, that was an interesting clip.” So I copy it, create a little mp3, and post it. So it's like a few days before the episode comes out. It would be nice though, if I could kind of hook it up to my RSS feed for my website or the podcasts that it automatically goes out. But I'll just do that manually for now.
Is there a feature that you get requested a lot, that you don't want to prioritize right now for whatever reason? And I asked just because as you know, working on products, that's actually kind of a common thing.
Assaf: We actually had a feature that is on our roadmap, but we are putting more time to think how to develop it. And it's coming along from our supporters. So when we build Locals, we focus mainly on our creators to build one community at a time. But what we start to notice now we have a very nice cross-pollination, which means that one supporters support more than one community. That thing can start to be very expensive for the user. So we have some super users, super supporters, I will call them, that support four or five creators, and it starts to be expensive for them.
So one of the feature, I will not say that we are delaying it, I'm saying it's coming a lot, but we are thinking a lot about it internally in the company, is how we create bundles in a way that it's going to work both for the supporters and the creator. We don't want to think that control is a platform, but we want to figure out something that will work for our creators as well, they will be able to create those type of bundles and for the user from the other side. So if you support a few creators, you can get a discounts in some way. So this is something that we are thinking a lot internally, and will come also in the coming years for us. And we hope that we're going to do it in a way that's going to work for both sides.
Max: Oh, yeah.I didn't know that you're working on that or thinking about that. I'd be really excited about that. Because I feel like there'd be—well first of all, I'd like to support more groups. And if there's sort of like a bundling deal, then sort of it makes that less mental overhead to be like, “Well, how much am I spending on all this?” But also, as a creator, if there are a bunch of, you know, super members who are out there who are getting discounts by supporting lots of communities, then, okay, maybe you get less per person, but they're kind of easier to get. They could be like, “Hey, you're already a supporter of all these groups on Locals, you could just join mine.” And, you know, whatever. Maybe it's thrown in for free and maybe like the creator gets a little bit but I feel like you could get more people in your community that way.
Assaf: Exactly. So I think it's a very important point. We do see bundles helping a lot the smaller creators right. Because what we see on Locals, and again, why we are different compared to other subscription based solution, we understand that in order to be successful, we have to create a network effect. Like any other technology product that exists out there, the success come from the network effect. It's beautiful to see what happened today in our big communities. It's something that we call the Locals flywheel. T
he Locals flywheel happen when the supporters are starting to create more content from the creator. And in all our big communities that are working, that's actually the behavior that starts to happen. So the creator actually generate less than 5% of the content. And the paid supporters are the ones that are generating most of the content. For smaller creators. It's difficult to get to this like flywheel. So actually being in abundance will allow smaller creators to expose the content for more people, and potentially more and more supporters will be able to post in their communities and create this flywheel and eventually get to a network effect.
Max: Yeah, that network effect is really important, I think. I mean, so I go to like, when I lived in New York, and then before corona, I went to Union Square Ventures events a lot. And they always talk about how their investment thesis is investing in networks.
So that raises the question for me like, okay, you have all these Locals communities, they seem relatively self contained, how can you have two communities interact more? Maybe I have a community but I also listen to this other podcast, and so I want to interact over there, are they going to remain completely separate? And what way can you have kind of cross-interaction?
Assaf: So we actually believe in keeping them separately. And the reason that we believe is that when you dive into a community, you're getting much deeper on one topic, or one group of people. And I talked to a few smart people. And the best analogy that I can find to this is a culture of magazine compared to articles. And I think that people want to go back to magazine, which means I want to go deep, and I want to develop a deeper relationship with the group.
And for example, that's the challenge that you see sometimes on Twitter or Facebook, which is more the culture of articles, I get a lot of blips of information that are not necessarily connected to one another. But when you dive into a community, you get more detail, and you are able to develop relationship.
Same this what we actually have on Locals and you're going to see it coming in the next few weeks, now you are able to follow people and we develop something that we call “My newsfeed,” which essentially will show you all of the posts from people that you follow. So if you follow to the people, you will also see posts that they are posting on different communities, which allow you to discover new communities. It's up to you if you want to opt into the community. But we understand that we need to improve the discovery. We got it also from a few user, we now added it to our website, it's also going to be in the app, you will be able to discover more and more community. But the best way to do it, it's actually to follow people that you find interesting. But then if you want to dive into the community that's up to you to opt in as a user.
Max: Yeah, I feel like for me, like Locals might be a good way to find other guests on the podcast, or place to like go on someone else's podcast and have a discussion, where it's like, “Hey, you kind of keep it within the Locals community.” And then like, I'm having a discussion with someone else. And they're somehow you know, we both posted on each other's site, and then it's like, “Hey, if you're on my Locals, then you'll know about them. And if you're on their locals, you know about me.” And...
Assaf: I think I think it's an interesting point and it's a behavior that they already see that is happening. So when you look at most of our creators, I see them on different podcasts interviewing each other. And it's beautiful to see it like it's something that we are very proud of not only creating a great solution for creators to be independent, but allowing them to network with one another under their own terms. So it's something very natural, that just happened to us on Locals.
And again, I'm saying I'm very thankful for working with such great creators that allow us to build a great company because all of the feedback that we are having, and what energizes me during the day is talking to creator—I'm just fascinating with this new industry that in my opinion is gonna grow so fast. And to hear how they are running their business, how they are producing content, how they want to go, what is their ambition, where they are moving from here? I think it's something that gives us a lot of inspiration for the entire team. And that's how actually, the entire company was built.
Max: Yeah, that sounds great. Awesome. We're gonna wrap up now, but do you have any last thoughts, any parting words, and also, well, where can people go—I mean, look locals.com is not that hard to remember, but we're can people go to learn more maybe—are you hiring or anything like that?
Assaf: Yeah. So definitely we are now expanding the team. It's a great question. Because we are now in a gold phase. And I think the company focused a lot in the last year to focus on development, to build a lot of tools for creators. Now we are going—more and more creators are coming to us. So if you are working on customer success, if you are a great back-end developers, which we always like to hire smart people, please feel free to send your resume to jobs@locals.com.
And as you mentioned, the best way to learn about Locals is actually to join a Locals community. So you can go to locals.com, you have a discover, you can see the trending communities that we put out there. Everyone can open a community for free. And for every question that you have, you can always email support@locals.com and you're going to get an answer for this.
Max: All right, that sounds great. So thanks for coming on the show.
Assaf: Thanks for having me, Max.
Max: All right. Great discussion today. Next week, I'm hoping to have another conversation with Aaron. We're going to do maybe a March news update if we have time, if not on deck, that will be there next week or the week after. I have Anne Griffin coming on the show. And she is a product manager. She does online courses. She talks about AI, she talks about blockchain, she talks about finding your dream job, how to attract the right kinds of employers. So lots, all sorts of practical stuff and emerging technology stuff and in that discussion. So lots of great things happening on The Local Maximum, stay tuned, localmaxradio.com. And of course, join Locals, maximum.locals.com to, like I said in the show, you can speak directly to me. So, have a great week everyone.
That's the show. to support a Local Maximum sign up for exclusive content and our online community at maximum.locals.com. The Local Maximum is available wherever podcasts are found. If you want to keep up, remember to subscribe on your podcast app. Also, check out the website with show notes and additional materials at localmaxradio.com. If you want to contact me, the host. Send an email to localmaxradio@gmail.com. Have a great week.
