In 2016, I agreed to speak at the CMX Summit in the Palace of Fine Arts in San Francisco. It was still a relatively new conference, just a couple years old, and it proclaimed to focus entirely on community management. As a longtime community founder, I didn't know what to expect. At every other startup or marketing conference I had been to (and I had been to a lot), community building was usually a footnote on the agenda. But from the moment I arrived, I knew this event was different. Everywhere I turned seemed to be conversations, people, and products focused on building community. To my shock, as I sat in a dense crowd of hundreds of people, I felt something I hadn't felt since I started building my community six years before: true professional belonging.

The conference was started by David Spinks. We had first met a few weeks before the conference and I immediately recognized that he cared about and deeply understood what I cared about: building communities. But the way he spoke about community and how it would change the world of business wasn't something I heard anyone talking about at that time. He was sure that in the near future, every business would be building community. And he was dedicating his life to that cause.

My own journey of building a community-driven business dates back to 2010 when a few friends and I began hosting events called Startup Grind in my small office in Mountain View, California. At first it didn't seem like much of anything special—just a couple dozen startup people meeting up and networking. But the momentum soon started to build. Ten people at the first event turned into 20, then 50, then 100, then 250.

At one event, an attendee approached me and asked me if he could launch a Startup Grind chapter in Los Angeles. The culture we had built at Startup Grind around the values of giving first, helping others, and making friends were actually very unique in the startup world at the time. They wanted to bring that mentality to LA. And it worked! Soon, the LA chapter was growing quickly.

After the success in LA, we started inviting our members to kick off their own local chapters in their city. Today, Startup Grind has 600 active chapters in 120 countries. We've hosted 15,000 events led by 2,000 volunteers. Most of what we did was self-taught, fumbling around in the dark until we figured out enough wrong ways to build our community to find the right things to do.

As a battle-scarred community builder, discovering CMX and meeting David that day in 2016 was like returning home after being gone on a long, impossible journey. At CMX, for the first time I was in a place where other people were speaking my community language. Each attendee seemed to be engaged in their own epic community building journey. I found myself nodding at every speaker's insights and having to hold back on all my questions.

When people ask me to describe David Spinks, I affectionately tell them that he is the Yoda or Dalai Lama of community (much to his chagrin). This isn't just because David is one of the most genuine and thoughtful people I have met, but because he is the first person I met that put frameworks and science behind the things that I had been building. The SPACES model was the first true business case for building a community. The language and tools he put forth in the industry have become staples in the process of building branded communities today.

Over the last ten years, David's advice has been sought by the very best companies in the world to help them figure out how to craft and grow an authentic community with their customers. Leaders from the top communities come to CMX to dispense their knowledge to the rest of the industry.

Tens of thousands of decision makers have already benefited from David's experiences and frameworks, but probably no one more than me. In a veiled excuse to spend more time working near him, in early 2019, my company Bevy acquired CMX so that we could be part of the community revolution that he helped pioneer.

Having worked side by side with him since then, I have been thrilled to see the Business of Belonging finally come to light as our company has grown 10X since David joined, in large part due to implementing many of the principles that he shares in this book. I truly believe that this book will become the bible that every community builder reads.

When competitors' product features and functionality are the same as yours, having a community is, as David eloquently says, “The one thing they can't copy.” At a time when no one wants to click on another digital ad, your community can fire up your sales channel or turn a detractor into a promoter. If I had this book when I started Startup Grind, I can only imagine how much further I would be and how many mistakes I could have avoided.

As you study and apply the lessons in this book, hopefully you will feel what I felt at that first CMX event I attended: a connection to the people who have trodden the path you're on or embarking on, and that there is a fountain of support and lessons you can benefit from to help you on your own community building journey.