Event Replay: Community Tactics with Gradual: Inside a Community Migration — What Really Makes It Work
Speakers

Ryan Paredez is a Sr. Community Manager at Splunk with over 10 years of experience building communities across B2C and B2B. He currently leads initiatives that strengthen the Splunk Community through practitioner-focused blogs, role-based content strategy, and Learning Path–specific onboarding nurtures. Ryan also played a key role in the AppDynamics → Splunk community migration, blending technical execution with member-first communication. He’s passionate about creating spaces where practitioners can learn, connect, and thrive together.

Josh Zerkel is Head of Marketing & Community-Led Growth at Gradual. A recognized leader in community strategy, he has built and scaled programs at Asana, Evernote, HeyGen, and CBS News that have driven millions in pipeline, global engagement, and cross-functional impact. He’s the author of The Community Code, and a trusted advisor to startups and enterprise teams building community-powered growth engines.
SUMMARY
In this Community Tactics with Gradual session, Ryan Paredez, Sr. Community Manager at Splunk, shares what it took to migrate the AppDynamics community into Splunk successfully. You’ll learn how Ryan balanced technical precision with empathy and communication, what worked well, what didn’t, and what he’d approach differently next time.
TRANSCRIPT
00:00:00:01 - 00:00:27:20 Joshua Zerkel Hello, everyone. Welcome. I see folks are just joining us. I'd like to welcome you to Community Tactics with gradual and today's topic inside of community migration. What really makes it work? I'm also curious. I'm Joshua Circle, head of marketing and community here at gradual. In case you are new to gradual, it is the all in one adaptive engagement platform that helps you turn a connection into lasting business impact and grow engagement beyond your product.
00:00:27:22 - 00:00:46:21 Joshua Zerkel Before I introduce today's guest expert. Just a quick note. This session is being recorded and we'll send it out to everyone after the webinar concludes. Also, please drop your questions into the Q&A and we will get to as many as we can after this session ends. You'll still be able to ask questions and share your thoughts in the AMA and our forum.
00:00:46:23 - 00:01:13:06 Joshua Zerkel We'll share that link later during the webinar as well. And now, without further ado, I would like to introduce you to today's Speaker Ryan, for it is. He is a senior community manager at Splunk with over ten years of experience building community across B2C and B2B. Ryan currently leads initiatives that strengthen the Splunk community through practitioner focused blogs, robotics based content strategy, and learning path specific onboarding nurtures.
00:01:13:08 - 00:01:35:28 Joshua Zerkel Ryan is passionate about creating spaces where practitioners can learn, connect, and thrive together. Ryan also played a key role in the Appdynamics to Splunk community migration. Hence him being here today. Blending technical execution with member First communication, which he will discuss in depth. With that, I would like to welcome Ryan.
00:01:36:00 - 00:01:38:06 Ryan Paredez Thank you for the intro. Josh.
00:01:38:09 - 00:01:52:25 Joshua Zerkel You got it. And then thank you for being here. We appreciate it. Before we hop into your content and I've seen your your presentation, it's great. Why do you think really focusing on the the human element of the migration is important.
00:01:52:27 - 00:02:20:07 Ryan Paredez Yeah. Good question. I mean it's it's kind of really about trust. I mean, our, our community members have, I mean, you know, we hope that they have a level of trust with us as, as community, managers and also the business. And so a migration is a bit of a disruption. And so, you can I mean, technically, it's pretty easy to migrate stuff, but, you know, a big question is what about the trust aspect of that?
00:02:20:07 - 00:02:36:07 Ryan Paredez And and yeah, so it's just like be I'm all about being transparent. So you want to give your community as much upfront and honest communication as you can about like what's happening, what the disruption may look like, and try to minimize that as much as possible.
00:02:36:09 - 00:02:55:03 Joshua Zerkel Yeah, that makes perfect sense. We spend so much time and effort getting folks into our community, building those relationships when we change tools, when we change platforms, when we would change anything in our program, it's natural that they would have thoughts and feelings about it. And so managing that migration seems really smart. So I know you have a fantastic deck for us.
00:02:55:05 - 00:02:58:12 Joshua Zerkel I will turn things over to you to run the show.
00:02:58:14 - 00:03:05:26 Ryan Paredez All right. Thank you. Okay. Just.
00:03:05:28 - 00:03:22:24 Ryan Paredez Okay. This is a little about who I am. Josh already gave me a wonderful intro, so I will not repeat it, but I am on Twitter and LinkedIn. It's just my first and last name, if you care to follow me. I will not be upset if you don't.
00:03:22:26 - 00:03:46:20 Ryan Paredez Okay, so let's get right into it. When plants pivot, the story of the dynamics community, migration. So here's just a quick snapshot of the agenda. I'm not going to read these all one by one, so we will get into them later. Here. Okay, just a question. Food for thought. You can migrate content and accounts, but how can you migrate trust?
00:03:46:22 - 00:04:03:04 Ryan Paredez Josh kind of already invoked this from me with the question he asked me just before we started. And. Yeah, so just always kind of something to think about. As you think about migrations, whether you're forced to or you're just looking to change platforms because you want to.
00:04:03:07 - 00:04:30:16 Ryan Paredez Okay. So here's a little bit of like high level of what I'll be talking about today. The dynamics community was set to migrate to the Cisco community by September of 2024. This timeline was really set upon, our particular Carlos contract ending nine months from them, which would have been around this time last year. So if you go just for awareness at dynamics was acquired by Cisco before I got there.
00:04:30:16 - 00:04:53:27 Ryan Paredez So this is why I'm talking about Cisco and not dynamics. So we had our own core associate community. Cisco has their own course hosted community, which, theirs is much larger. It hosts a lot more other subcommunities and technologies and products. And so it kind of made sense that they wanted to fold us into their into their community.
00:04:53:27 - 00:05:17:00 Ryan Paredez So my coworker Claudia, at the time, her and I spent all this time working with the Cisco team, diving into our customization and seeing kind of what we wanted to keep, what we didn't. And then, just this summer of 2024, just as we kind of thought this, project was going to be going, everything was just kind of put on hold.
00:05:17:02 - 00:05:30:13 Ryan Paredez You know, the decisions are made above my pay grade, and so I didn't know what was going on. And as the presentation goes on, you will kind of find out why if it wasn't maybe all so clear in the title.
00:05:30:15 - 00:06:02:21 Ryan Paredez So just some context of the eponymous community before migration. Some of our core programs that we had were, with the blogs, forums, Welcome center, technical knowledge base, product update recaps, and observability video series and badges. Pretty like pretty standard stuff for community. For a a technical niche product. B2B our engagement was consistent. I mean, it was kind of consistently flat in spite of efforts to bring more attention to the community.
00:06:02:22 - 00:06:28:28 Ryan Paredez We spent a lot of time internally just trying to raise or raise awareness of the community by speaking with sales, marketing, product. And, so it was a lot of effort really kind of trying to build those internal relationships with, with, my colleagues to just say, hey, you're talking to customers like communities here, please. Like it's a free resource.
00:06:29:00 - 00:06:53:15 Ryan Paredez Share it, use it. And regarding access, you know, one really nice thing about our community, from a technical standpoint, I mean, we used so our so back end spoke to, a particular database. And so we classify our members based on them being paying customers an employee a partner or a trial customer. So that was really interesting.
00:06:53:15 - 00:07:21:21 Ryan Paredez And how I could slice and dice data to look at who was doing what over any given period of time, who were who was most active. And one thing that was quite surprising is our employees. I mean, customers employees were the two most, active folks amongst the community, at least per sign ins and visits. I always thought that that was it's cool that your your employees are one of your biggest advocates, but, they never really spoke too much to us, so it was weird.
00:07:21:21 - 00:07:53:07 Ryan Paredez They were obviously coming to the community, but they weren't really talking to us as a team. And, you know, there's always limitations with these platforms. Not all, you know, they're not all of them fit all your needs. We tried to fight a lot for getting community connected to Salesforce and other internal tools like Tableau. So you could just so other folks with the marketing product would just see community data, where they're already looking at customer data and other information.
00:07:53:09 - 00:08:25:21 Ryan Paredez Okay. So, the migration journey pivot and trade offs. So back to the migration. We're meeting with the Cisco team, reviewing customizations, auditing everything. What do we want to achieve. What are we willing to let go? You know, that was really a choice that we had to make as far as working with them and the the cost of things and the time frame it would take to build that, rebuild out those customizations to fit from our community to the existing Coreos community.
00:08:25:23 - 00:08:44:13 Ryan Paredez Obviously, if you're moving your community fresh from one spot to another that, you know, you kind of have a clean slate, but since we were, moving from one house to an existing house, you know, all of our furniture, so to speak, had to fit in with the already existing layout. So so it's a lot of time doing that.
00:08:44:16 - 00:09:05:09 Ryan Paredez And then, yeah, we were, like, ready to go. And then all of a sudden we were just told, sorry, this project is put on hold. I'm just like, okay. Like we were moving pretty quickly and all of a sudden now I just have to sit here and total my thumbs because I'm not going to work on any new community programs.
00:09:05:09 - 00:09:31:10 Ryan Paredez While I know this migration is in the works. It was just in a weird state of flux for me as a professional. Like, I don't know what to do. You know, how do I kind of communicate this? Or how am I supposed to act with my community knowing that we're stuck in this limbo state? And then after a few months of kind of uncertainty, we get the direction that, okay, Cisco had acquired Splunk.
00:09:31:12 - 00:09:51:20 Ryan Paredez This this acquisition happened faster than I think everyone was expecting. And then all of a sudden epidemics was becoming part of Splunk. So instead of the kicker here was instead of, you know, we spent all this time and effort preparing to move to the Cisco community. They were like, just kidding. You're now going to move over to the Splunk community.
00:09:51:22 - 00:10:11:24 Ryan Paredez So a big pro here is they also use coral. So a lot of the work that I heard had done with the Cisco team, all of it remained pretty much relevant. Understanding our customizations, except for the house that we were moving into, was different. Different layout of different furniture, etc. but all of the work still made sense.
00:10:11:24 - 00:10:19:04 Ryan Paredez So it was nice in that sense that I didn't have to start completely from scratch.
00:10:19:07 - 00:10:46:12 Ryan Paredez And yeah. So that was, it was. Yeah. That's like that was a big shift there. Just like, okay. Like that was kind of that was strange. But okay. We'll continue on. And so I started meeting my peers at Splunk, and honestly, it was I, I'm personally happy for this direction. I mean, the Cisco community is great, but it's so huge that I know that, like, you just would have been buried in and they're much larger community.
00:10:46:14 - 00:11:12:09 Ryan Paredez So Splunk being you know, like a at the adjacent company similar size and everything. Felt like we would have more I would have more authority and more space to kind of represent the community within this community. And so working with the the Splunk team, you know, was one key thing is when you're getting ready to migrate, you want to do some housecleaning.
00:11:12:12 - 00:11:38:04 Ryan Paredez It gives you an opportunity to, reach out to maybe inactive members and give them a heads up saying, you know, we're going to be migrating if you want to keep your account, like take action, which is basically just like sign in. So we ended up doing an account cleanup. We had around 105 to 152,000 total. Accounts.
00:11:38:07 - 00:11:57:10 Ryan Paredez And we looked at anyone who had not been active, who had not signed in from the past four years. And we always sent them two emails over about a month and a half period saying, you know, we're going to migrate. Your accounts are going to be closed. If you don't take action, all you have to do is just just sign in.
00:11:57:13 - 00:12:26:19 Ryan Paredez With so, you know, that's really easy. And so we ended up removing quite a few accounts 132,000, which is a significant amount of our was a significant amount of our member base. But as this is a B2B community, you know, these people go and leave jobs they're not in. Maybe they don't use ABDA anymore. So there's numerous reasons why they may not be active anymore than a lot of emails bounced.
00:12:26:22 - 00:12:48:25 Ryan Paredez But the point being is you want them. You want to move over a healthy community and like the active folks. So the reality is you are going to take a hit in your in your member account. But you can always say, what is what's the phrase? I mean, you want you want the people that want to be there are it's quality over quantity.
00:12:48:25 - 00:13:14:07 Ryan Paredez That's it. So, you know, if there's fewer of them, that's okay, because they're the ones that want to be there. They're the ones that are signing in and posting. And so outside of the member, we also did some content cleanup. Luckily Kronos has some pretty good bulk feature or a bulk archive feature where you can kind of put in some parameters of looking for content that is, you know, many years old, hasn't had more than five use.
00:13:14:07 - 00:13:37:12 Ryan Paredez And so I was able to, archive around 500 different pieces of content. And I closed out about ten different spaces that were inactive or underutilized. So the point being is just to do some house cleanup. It's good to just, you know, just like we do in our own homes. A little bit of spring cleaning before you move.
00:13:37:14 - 00:14:06:15 Ryan Paredez Okay. Executing the migration communication at launch. So as this migration was happening, it was happening very quickly. In total, I sent around four different emails to the entire the remaining entire of the APT community member base. So I sent one in December saying, hey, this project is happening. At that point, we didn't have an exact timeline of when everything was going to happen, so I wanted to be transparent and just say, hey, this is happening.
00:14:06:17 - 00:14:29:25 Ryan Paredez We will share more information when we have it. And the next one came early February, where we had more details and more action and just say, you know, our main CTA was go create a symbolic account, go sign in to this one community. So your name and profile are already like pre pre-made before the migration. It wasn't required but it was just a nice bonus step.
00:14:29:27 - 00:14:55:10 Ryan Paredez Excuse me. And then I sent another one mid February as a final reminder that this migration is happening. Please go create account early if you want. And then the migration happened early March. And then the, I sent one last final email just kind of reminding everyone that the migration happened. They have to community is now closed. If you try to go to it, you will just be redirected to the Splunk community.
00:14:55:10 - 00:15:14:17 Ryan Paredez So people would have either found out on their own. But the point, you know, I'm all about transparency, which I hope you guys are too. You wanted to share as much as you possibly can with them. Obviously, we still are a business, so there's certain things we can't always say, but I think transparency is very crucial and important.
00:15:14:19 - 00:15:46:03 Ryan Paredez And alongside this work, you know, we have a lot of internal stakeholders. So I was also tasked with sharing regular status reports with basically every leadership within marketing and product. The folks that really kind of were interested in care about community. So just as much as you want to communicate with your community members, you want to communicate with your your colleagues and your peers and your your teammates because they're also users of the community and they're like talking to their customers about community.
00:15:46:03 - 00:16:12:26 Ryan Paredez So you want to make sure they're also up to date. So they're not giving out false information to the the customers that they talk to. And the the migration timeline was pretty quick. It all happened within about three months. And we did two migration. Dry runs had very little minor issues, luckily. So Coral's Professional Services did do a pretty good job with that.
00:16:12:29 - 00:16:40:20 Ryan Paredez One of the hardest things we had to work through was the acesso part, because ABDA used a different set of technology versus Splunk. So we had to work in tandem with our our account team and sponsor team to really, like, sort that out. We ended up creating a custom, just in time URL for any empty customers that they could bypass this, SSL flow.
00:16:40:23 - 00:16:58:26 Ryan Paredez Needing a Splunk account to get into the community, not take a new technical, but there's a lot of things you have to think about when you are migrating, like the we take for granted SSL and how simple it is. But there's a lot happening in the back end, and it's just overall thinking about the the experience that your members will have from one platform to the next.
00:16:58:26 - 00:17:33:19 Ryan Paredez If they're used to logging in one way, then all of a sudden they have to log in a different way. You know, no one likes being inconvenienced by technology, but that's just kind of the nature of how it is sometimes. And so after migration, I wrote up a nice little blog post welcoming all the ABP team members kind of shared with them where their new home was, because we went from having our own home to basically having a bedroom within a home, so directing them where they could find all of the same content the forums, the blogs and knowledgebase, all the stuff that we had before where they can find it.
00:17:33:19 - 00:18:04:04 Ryan Paredez So they can keep, you know, being, members of our community. So after the migration, some outcomes and realities, as I had mentioned, while the community engagement was consistent, it was kind of fairly fairly flat. And we did wipe out 132,000 members. We I had some internal expectations of how many members we would actually, get.
00:18:04:07 - 00:18:30:03 Ryan Paredez Even so, even though we migrated our members, we Splunk use uses heap and common room. So we have these tools that are allow that allow us to see how many folks from the community started signing up and interacting with the with their new home. So obviously our members got migrated over, but if they never signed in, then we wouldn't know that they were active.
00:18:30:05 - 00:18:54:09 Ryan Paredez So I kind of had an idea of how many people with that were going to start actively signing up and engaging, and the numbers were not good. Like significantly lower than I was expecting, even for my somewhat low expectations. And so leadership obviously had some concerns around that. When you do migrate, you do have to expect to lose some people.
00:18:54:11 - 00:19:29:06 Ryan Paredez Maybe it's only a matter of time before they just realize that the community migrated and they eventually go and sign up on their own, on their own time. We tried some tactics by offering swag and gift cards to get folks to come sign in, but it had very low traction even with offering free stuff. And, I think some of that was really based on the the nature of the business at the time, which had been going through some, some struggles with the just some, some business struggles.
00:19:29:06 - 00:19:51:06 Ryan Paredez I don't want to get too much into that. Just, you know, to protect myself and and from my, from my company, things that I can't control. Luckily, leadership wasn't too hard on me on that because that's not really something I can control. Given that we did tactics, I emailed people four times. We were offering free stuff. We can't force people to do things they don't want to do.
00:19:51:09 - 00:20:16:14 Ryan Paredez So that's something to think about is think about some tactics, post migration, how you can encourage folks to come visit your community, whether they were active or inactive. You want to maybe offer some incentives to get them just to sign in, just so they know where their new home is, get familiar with it. So they have an account, and you can kind of start, tracking it from there.
00:20:16:16 - 00:20:40:18 Ryan Paredez Okay. The evolving world has created new demands. So after the migration, you know, API is now part of the Splunk community, which, I'm not sure if anyone has checked out the community, but it's really rad. I mean, they have a much vibrant and strong community, which was honestly, much better than the Apd's, which, you know, I'm not, I'm happy to say, but also kind of hurts, hurts to say at the same time.
00:20:40:18 - 00:21:05:22 Ryan Paredez I mean, they have an awesome user user group program. The relationship they have amongst other teams is great. I am having to do less, internal championing of myself is just people already are familiar with the Splunk community and are actively coming, reaching out to us to work with us and post content and share data updates, etc. so that's been really nice.
00:21:05:24 - 00:21:36:14 Ryan Paredez Which has led to a lot more opportunities. I went from a two person team to a one person team in APD, and then after migration I joined a team of six. So it was nice to be with peers who understood and respected and appreciated community instead of just me being, by myself. And, it allowed us to kind of like reengage members, expand collaboration, and continue proven the experience, discipline community team that I was brought into.
00:21:36:17 - 00:22:09:15 Ryan Paredez But you're wonderful people, and I was lucky to join that team and, you know, offer some outside perspective of of not being so close to that team in their programs, but also so understanding community. So, I've been with this team over a year now and it's been awesome. I'm loving it. And it really has kind of brings some some fresh life into, and to me, professionally, being part of the community team in a community that has active and really strong programs.
00:22:09:17 - 00:22:31:26 Ryan Paredez Okay. So closing reflection, wrapping up here. Every migration is unique. What would you prioritize if you had to rebuild your community today? I know some of us have probably joined a company where there's already existing community, and you just you inherit what you inherit, what's there, and you kind of have to build off that foundation.
00:22:31:28 - 00:22:52:08 Ryan Paredez And maybe some of you have been lucky enough to be hired and start a community from the ground up, which even then, maybe you obviously have learned some things, and maybe if you had to do it again, you would change some things. So, just food for thought, something to think about. And, that is it. Thank you.
00:22:52:11 - 00:23:10:08 Joshua Zerkel Ryan, thank you so much. That was a lot of information and I am so glad that journey. We did have a couple of questions come in. So I'd like to get to those. So first is from Hannemann who asks, when you mentioned community to migration, were you referring specifically to channels? Maybe you can elaborate a little bit, right?
00:23:10:11 - 00:23:35:01 Ryan Paredez Yeah. So what I meant by migration is the API community was all hosted on the cross platform. So we had the, you know, the blogs, forums, knowledgebase, like we had our own just like domain and so all of that was moving all the content, all of our members, all of the all of the data was moving from one chorus instance to another.
00:23:35:03 - 00:23:39:20 Ryan Paredez So I guess the that's kind of what I meant by that. Hopefully that answers your question.
00:23:39:23 - 00:23:51:15 Joshua Zerkel Thanks, Ryan. Next question is from Roland, who says, how did you support your core community members? So they experienced more ownership rather than disruption.
00:23:51:17 - 00:24:22:07 Ryan Paredez Good question. So I think for us, as I kind of mentioned here, Roland, is we while our while we had a in in actively our community was engaged in a in a flat sense, we didn't really have a whole lot of like power users. I mean, there was like there's a few that would be quite regularly active. And for those few individuals I did messages in privately, I kind of gave them a heads up before I told anyone else that this was happening.
00:24:22:10 - 00:24:46:03 Ryan Paredez And even then, like I would message and I don't think I heard back from from either of them. Or maybe they had kind of some initial questions, but so if you have a group of like VIP users or power users, I would definitely reach out to them first, give them a heads up and maybe collect some thoughts and feedback from them on how you can maybe communicate with the rest of the community.
00:24:46:05 - 00:25:14:17 Ryan Paredez Think of some ways. Maybe they can just offer insight on how to make the transition easier from a technical standpoint or from a communication standpoint. But if you do have a core group of community members, if it's if I call you, you're speaking to like your power Users VIP, then I would definitely spend some time talking to them ahead of time just to get their thoughts and insights before you kind of move forward, even though you may not be able to take any of that, or do anything with it.
00:25:14:17 - 00:25:31:21 Ryan Paredez At least you had that conversation with them and you heard them out and they felt they felt heard. A lot of times we just want to feel heard. Even if you can't necessarily take those action, you took the time and you reached out to them and had that open dialog, which can go a long way.
00:25:31:23 - 00:25:52:17 Joshua Zerkel Yeah, that open dialog, I think is one of the things that goes towards building that trust, especially during a transitional period. If you aren't communicating with your members. If I were them, I would probably feel lost. What's going on? I don't understand what's happening. Why should I move to this new place? I like the old place. Yeah. So those sorts of communications actually really make a big difference.
00:25:52:20 - 00:26:07:22 Joshua Zerkel Totally right. One more question. Mean asks. After the migration, especially at a larger scale, involving other companies, I assume the priorities shifted away from acquisition and more towards engagement and retention. What was the main strategy?
00:26:07:24 - 00:26:31:26 Ryan Paredez So I guess it it varies. I mean, for us it was the first goal. Well, I mean, because for me personally, since I was the one person coming from the, my main goal was trying to increase engagement from the community. So that was me trying to build out ways to reengage the folks that just got migrated over.
00:26:32:01 - 00:27:01:01 Ryan Paredez So while the rest of my sprint community peers were continuing to do what they do, I mean, you know, I had conversations with them and they helped me, but it was really trying to remind the AG folks, hey, we're we moved. But all the things you used to do, all the content is still here. So I was really trying to push that amongst other members and also internally again, to like customer success and marketing and product and just letting everyone know, hey, we're still here.
00:27:01:03 - 00:27:21:21 Ryan Paredez Don't forget to keep reminding your customers that we're still here. We just have a new home. And then after, you know, a few months, kind of after post migration, it was less it was less around acquisition. You know, I spoke with my management and they're like, okay, I think we've kind of done all that. We can around trying to acquire new members.
00:27:21:21 - 00:27:42:15 Ryan Paredez We can't keep putting time and effort in this. If they want to come, they will come. If they want to find it, they will find it. It's not like we're hiding, you know. We're not trying to hide from you. So from there, yeah, it was veteran acquisition and then more towards an engagement, which really for me my role in at since I at towards the end it was just me.
00:27:42:15 - 00:28:01:25 Ryan Paredez I was doing everything by myself and then moving to a team of six where everyone had specific roles and I didn't have to be the one man show. My particular role really focused on onboarding. So my manager spoke to me and was like, we have all these awesome community programs. How can we kind of introduce members to them?
00:28:01:28 - 00:28:18:12 Ryan Paredez Little by little, as they join the sport community for the first time. So I started working on some onboarding, nurturing flows to encourage, all new members to explore and dive into all of the awesome programs that we have here at the small community.
00:28:18:15 - 00:28:27:15 Joshua Zerkel That's great. Thanks, Ryan. As we wrap up, what would you tell someone that's about to embark on or is considering a migration? What's one piece of advice you would give them?
00:28:27:17 - 00:28:47:10 Ryan Paredez Yeah, I'll say this in two parts. Josh, we kind of spoke about this, a beginning. I know migrations are kind of a two part project. One is is the platform and that is there's a lot of good information out there already. I can't really answer that for you. That is a business choice. You have to determine on your own as far as what features you're really looking for.
00:28:47:12 - 00:29:00:16 Ryan Paredez You know, obviously granular is a community platform, so be sure to check them out. And the second is, I'm sorry, I'm blanking here. What was what was the question again? Yeah.
00:29:00:18 - 00:29:03:23 Joshua Zerkel What advice would you give to someone that's embarking on my journey?
00:29:03:25 - 00:29:26:20 Ryan Paredez Yeah. Thank you. And as I say, just trust in transparency. Again. Your members have really given you a lot of trust. And I think having those conversations and communicating with them as much as you can and being as transparent as you can is, is helpful. People are going to be pissed. You can't please everybody. All you can do is do your best and communicate with them as much as you can.
00:29:26:20 - 00:29:39:10 Ryan Paredez As far as what's happening, and make sure your community feels heard. And hopefully you're able to answer some of their questions or appease some of their requests. But at the end of the day, you cannot please everyone. So just do the best you can.
00:29:39:13 - 00:29:46:13 Joshua Zerkel Absolutely. Well thank you Brian. This is amazing information. Remind us, where would you like people to find you online?
00:29:46:15 - 00:30:02:21 Ryan Paredez Yeah. I'm not super active on Twitter, but our expert, you can find me just Ryan Paredes and also the same on LinkedIn. Just my first and last name. Yeah. If anyone wants to chat outside of this, feel free to reach out. Happy to have any, any private conversations with, with anyone.
00:30:02:24 - 00:30:26:17 Joshua Zerkel Great. Well thanks again Ryan. This was awesome. Everyone who is watching or attending. Now, as a reminder, there is an AMA in our forum with Ryan. You can ask more questions there. You can ask him his thoughts on migration or how to select a platform that is waiting for you. The link is in the chat or on your screen now, and it will also be in the follow up email I'll send you.
00:30:26:19 - 00:30:38:15 Joshua Zerkel So I want to thank you all for being here. I want to thank Ryan for being an amazing speaker, Leanne behind the scenes for doing a fantastic job running the show, and we'll see you at a future event. Thank you all so much.
00:30:38:17 - 00:30:39:06 Ryan Paredez Thank you everyone.
