How Paz Pisarski Turned a Local Meetup Into a Global Community Movement

Super super excited. I have got one of my favourite people, someone I've known for many years and I have seen achieved many things. From Blackbird Ventures, like Sofil Circle, a lot of the universities and not just in Australia but across 18 countries. And we just hit 992 people on the way list to hear about the next programme.

Imagine making a community for superheroes. But for Spider-Man, in New York, who identifies as a male, phenomenal, right? So Butter is the only one I've ever used. And Jess and I were just sitting there and Butter has a notification when someone arrives and just says, Seb Golden is at the door.

What do they want to see? Okay, great. Let's build that. Amazing.

Did I get it right? Cool, all right. You want to help? Okay, great.

And it's just become, you know, the best leaders don't leave. They listen. So really coming back to that, around thinking who, not how, I think we'll be talking about what is help in life. I mean, I just love how many different chapters there may be.

What are we going to say in like 10 years? Welcome back to give it a nudge today. Super, super excited. I have got one of my favourite people.

Someone I've known for many years and I have seen achieved many things, paths from community collective, finally on the show. How many times have we tried to film? I think probably about five. Oh, maybe 12.

Welcome. I'm here. You're here and you're here for South by Southwest, which is why I am. And I also had a family trip before this with my mom, which was very nice.

And I saw you a few weeks ago at the awards where you won. Yes. Yes. And the nutric response of one of the awards and then tech visa was a sponsor for the future later of the year award.

I know. So, and Sam's coming on the show actually very soon, because again, another guy who I've been trying to get on the show for four years or something. Yeah. I think we've got him booked in.

So we're finally ticking off these, these people. Food. Say the best to last. Is that the strategy?

No, no, no, say the best to now. Yeah, there's no end point. You're going to be doing this forever. Now, nearly everybody who watches our show will know who you are.

But just in case there's a couple out there, describe in your own short words what community collective is because it's quite an interesting unusual business. And it has just taken this whole Australian ecosystem and now global ecosystem by storm. Yeah. Yeah.

I think in order to explain what the community collective is, it's good to kind of rewind to actually how it started. Sure. Because before the community collective, I was actually working in the startup space basically in the community, surprise, surprise. And I was basically a community manager.

So I kept getting this role title. I was working on RMAT Activator, ran a lot of accelerators there. A lot of incubators and managed the co-working space joined the startup network where the node group was a partner at the time as well. And it was managing the community of up to 60,000 people.

Look at that money. 60,000 in the network. That was wild. Yeah.

So we had lots of different streams for different types of founders. And basically, yeah, throw in a pandemic. If you've ever heard of that thing called COVID, it's still around. It is.

And basically, we realized how hard it was to actually build groups of people at that time because everything was locked down, shot away, moved online. And basically, I was really struggling in my job. I was going to say, how did you feel? Because that was your job.

It was taken away from you. It was tough. It was really tough. We were running all these in-person programs, managing a three-story co-working space.

And then at the time, basically, RMIT demanded one-week close. So we all packed up our things, just left it all at the desk. We were like, we'll be back in a week. We wrote up a sign, and I was like, back in a week.

Did you put a sign up? Yeah. Yeah. It was going.

You know, everyone, we're like, hey, manage to close back in a week. And a year and a half later, it was still close. Did you not go back at all in that time? We were allowed to go back to the building to pick up office supplies and things that we left.

Because we were all like back in a week. And it wasn't a week. And I remember going in one day and it was like deserted. And you had like a 10-minute slot where you could go in, so you didn't cross paths with anyone else.

And I was at RMIT like building 81 or something. And like literally went in, had my mask, felt like a ghost town. We got to take like our office chair, keyboard, full Mac, like Apple setup. RMIT was so generous and really giving at that time.

And then they were like, Dad's borrowed it for the next month. Like still have everything today. They ended up gifting a lot of the office. They gifted it to majority of the people.

And basically, yeah, we could grab everything and then set it up at home. So obviously you could work from home. But it was so tough. I think personally at that time, I was locked down in Fitzgerald North.

We had the 5K radius. My housemates actually all left. They were like, we're just going to go stay like at family homes. We'll be back soon and then didn't come back.

So you were totally on your own? I was totally on my own. And I'll have to send you a photo of like the house because there were all these metal bars out of the front. So it literally looks like a prison.

And I'd wake up every morning, go for a walk, come back and just open my laptop and just work. And you're doing that for months on end. I'm a textbook extrovert. I gain energy from other people.

But at the time, it was just so isolating. You posted. I remember the picture of the bars. You posted a picture of that.

I remember it now. It's coming back to me. You put it on LinkedIn, right? Because you were totally on your own.

And you would, yeah, I remember you said, I was struggling with this. I like to be around people. Yeah. I was obviously, I like to be around people.

But I have, I was with my family. You know, there was four of us at a dog. So it wasn't the same. I imagine it was much harder on you, like literally on your own.

In what is quite a big property, right? Because you're quite a few housemates. Yeah, yeah, definitely. I think everyone would experience differently.

I think in my experience, what I found the most challenging was I actually had a call. I would call my grandma every week or so and just like check in and call family. And then I called my grandma and she didn't answer one day. I was like, I'll just call her back the next day.

I didn't call the next day. Nothing, nothing came from it. And then I got a call from her partner, saying that she'd fallen in the shower. And she was just a hospital and she'll be back the next day.

And turns into a very sad story. But we end up getting a call that she passed away. And awful. And at the time, you weren't allowed to go to hospital to see anyone.

And so we were there being like, can we go visit? And they were like, no, like mandatory, no one's allowed to visit. And at that time, you're like so angry. You have a system at the world.

And my mom actually ended up like just going to the hospital and just going and visiting her mom. And you know, despite everything went and said goodbye. But you know, we weren't allowed to have a funeral. And it was so intense.

And it was so intense. And so you're dealing with these macro levels of what's happening in your life at the time. And then you still have to show up at work. And when you put the community manager hat on, you're the face of a brand, you're like running these events.

Obviously dealing with a founder community who have their own challenges. They were looking to you. Yeah, exactly. I'm looking to the university.

And it was so hard. And I took time off. But I still had to come back. And I was like, does anyone else struggle with this?

Like, how do you be the face of the brand? But you can't, you know, who do you speak to? Like the challenges of that? Because it's a really strange role.

You know, there's no bachelor of community management. There's no like university degree. Not yet. Not yet.

That there's a few subjects and Australian community managers have done a great job in educating some university streams in that sense. But there's no like full degree. And so I was struggling. And I was like, is anyone else struggling in this?

So I had reached out to my network and said, do you know any community managers in this out-up space can you just email in Tromi? Got like 50 email intros. And then Josh Litzkin from Lawn Trivick at the time actually said, hey, Melia Rainer from Blackbird Adventures is also gathering community managers. I'm just going to connect you to.

Called up with Mel. She was like, great. Let's join forces. I called Jala Alex from Monash University at the time who now works at Thray Day and said, let's run a meetup.

So we ran a meetup in between the fourth and fifth Melbourne lockdowns at the Commons in Cromon. And there was 17 of us like taking off these masks, like eating sushi, having a glass of wine, just being like, you alive. And we just talked about our job. And how hard it was.

And afterwards it went viral. And we had hundreds of people wanting to join. Which is so, did you? How do people find out about it?

Did you film it? Did you take pictures? How did you like, because obviously you went 17 of you? How did that go viral?

Yeah. So basically at the end of the meetup, we had a couple people there saying, hey, I know another community manager in this out-up space who would really benefit from joining this group. And they were like, great, well, we obviously want to make sure that this group stays valuable. So we want to make sure that everyone is a community manager.

And so here's an air table form. Here's the link. We'll send it in the post event email. Right.

And if you know anyone, share the link. Link got shared on mass. And Jala actually, the phenomenal human that she is, is super creative. And she took these beautiful SLR photos.

She designed the branch. She picked the orange color. The famous orange. Yeah, I actually used to wear pink before orange.

We don't have, we do have pink chairs, but we had their own chairs for you. Yeah. Yeah. No, I love that you got them custom made for this.

Thank you. For this single pocket. We'll never use them again. I really appreciate it.

Yeah. I get to take them home. Yeah. We'll get a package of mine.

You put them in a glass box. Fabulous. Fabulous. You've got to carry these.

I mean, never going to sit on anything else. But we had, yeah, Jala who, you know, took all these photos and we shared it afterwards, sent the photos to everyone. Everyone kind of shared it. And we were averaging 80 to 100 people on these Zoom meetups every month.

Blackboard Ventures was super supportive at the time. We were using their Zoom like admin account. And we basically had a different topic for each session to come talk about community management and then leave. And after a year, this gets us to June 2022.

We basically had about 600 people just in this free meetup whilst the three of us were running like still working full time. Yeah. And they were kind of emailing us being like, like, I want some coaching or mentoring. Have you dealt with this challenge?

And it was getting to this point where we were like, okay, whoa, like, it's kind of hard to juggle both. And I went and spoke to Meli and Jala. I was like, I'm thinking of like quitting my job. And like interviewing these people and just like seeing what they need.

They were like phenomenal. We'll stay in our full time jobs. But we'll join the advisory board and we'll help you. I was like, great.

So I quit my job in July 2022. Registered the Community Collective as a company. My accountant loves me because it was the first July. It's like such a claim fine.

Yeah, it was really satisfying. And basically then spent three months interviewing all of these community builders to kind of understand what more they would need. And so how, I mean, that's amazing. But a lot of people would be going, how could you afford to do that?

How could you afford to suddenly quit your job in a period of a lot of uncertainty and just go and interview people? Yeah, yeah. So I basically made some calculations because obviously I still have a life that I need to live. And I don't believe that any founder should sacrifice their life to serve anyone else.

Obviously the most important asset of a business is the founder. If there's no one else in the business, the founder doesn't exist. The business doesn't exist. So I had to make sure that my cup was full.

And so I basically calculated how much money do I need for Paz runway? So the runway to like live my life. So I looked at that and it was about $3,800 Australian dollars at the time, per month. Me to like pay my rent, pay my bills, go get a coffee, just live.

I'm not like buying new cars and things like that. But I'm also not like living off like noodles or something. So I saved up 10 grand and I was like, cool, this gives me three months runway in Paz's life where I can afford to go and like really run an experiment and see if the community collective can then take over and give me enough money to serve the rest of the community collective. So I spent three months interviewed everyone, jumped on all these calls, asked them the challenges, the goals they had, and what support they were looking for.

And then went to, have you heard of chaos pilot? Yes. Yes. How many from you?

Okay. That's amazing. If anyone hasn't heard of chaos pilot, it's a Scandinavian school of learning design. So I know a lot of learning designers who've studied under that methodology.

I've done the methodology in some of their master classes. And basically I gathered a couple of them and said, I'm trying to design a learning experience to solve these challenges, help them achieve these goals and give them this support. Let's like design a curriculum. So designed an eight week experience, a cohort program.

And then I wanted to test if it was worth running. Obviously it's like building a community. It's like building a business need to test product market fit or community market fit, as I like to say. And I basically wrote a LinkedIn post.

I was thinking about running this eight week program, maybe in September, anyone came and had like 100 people express interest for 24 hours. I was like, whoa. Okay. All right.

I've got something here. I've got the fit. So that was then the trigger for me to build the thing. Yeah.

And I wanted to spend pretty much like no money on it because I just wanted to experiment. And basically launched the first program. It was paid. I was expecting like maybe 10 people.

We had 37. I was like. Fantastic. Amazing.

And at that time, I was contracting on the side. So I was actually building communities for co-working spaces. I'd moved my life from Melbourne. After that pandemic experience, I was like, I'm out.

And I moved to the surf coast down to Turkey. Yep. And basically then was playing music gigs on the sides. I actually had an album launch.

At the same time when the program was running, I never recommend anyone to do. And so I had, I like signed with the label and was distributing a lot of music and then generated basically enough income to kind of live my life on the side. So I didn't actually need that 10K in savings. But it was the mental buffer, you know, of like the safety net.

And yeah, we ran the first program and a lot of people wanted to then join the next. And we've ran seven so far. So good. So is it seven now?

Seven cohorts? It's only in week five of cohort seven. And how many people have you gotten this one? We have 119 companies.

So how many people have been through? We've had over 320 companies. And this is in three years. In two and a half.

Yeah. Yeah. So first program started October 2022. And then we're in the seventh at the moment in October.

And basically we have trained so many different types of people. And so cool. Because we've have companies who basically have had employees go through our program from Google, Canva, Notion, MIOB, AirTree, StartMate, people from Blackbird Ventures, like SoFull Circle, a lot of the universities and not just in Australia, but across 18 countries. And we just hit 992 people on the wait list to hear about the next program.

Which is wild. So did you ever want to be a founder? No. I was going to say because you kind of fell into it.

And I think it's interesting because you managed to build communities. So you saw founders. You see what founders go through. You see the ups and downs, the stresses.

Do you think you would have fallen into it if you hadn't had the pandemic? Do you think you would have been a founder? Because it's a very different job to building a community. I mean, there's a lot.

There's a huge amount, of course, over, of course. But becoming a founder is a massive commitment, as you now very much know. And I guess usually you need something that drives you to do it, which is exactly what happened to you. But I'm just intrigued as to whether is COVID the reason you're here or do you think you would have ended up there anyway?

Because I feel that I've known you a while that you would have ended up there anyway. I think I would have ended up there anyway, but it was never something that I actually wanted to do because my job was to help founders build businesses. And the three way in which I did that was by building a community around them to connect them to mentors and such. And when you run a co-working space, you obviously see how hard people work.

And so I looked at people who were founders, and I just thought, that looks really tough. It looks really tough. And it didn't look like there was a lot of problems, a lot of stress, so many challenges. And it wasn't crying out to me as something that I wanted to do.

Like my intention was never to start a business. But when you have one problem that you experience so deeply, the thought of anyone else feeling as isolated as I did in Fitzgerald North in 2020 was heartbreaking. And I was like, if I used my one big life to even just better one other person's life for not feeling the way that I felt. You know, I was having panic attacks and just anxiety.

I had an idea with a lot of psoriasis and dry skin and my skin would be ripping if I moved my head. I was in so much pain. And I was so confused by what my job was. But I loved it and hated it at the same time.

And I just thought, oh, community managers and just people who connect people in a business setting should have that support. Because the conversation is so nuanced. So I think I probably, I have a very passionate and hard core vision. And I'm not going to stop at anything until I feel like that's coming to fruition, which I really think it is at the moment.

Like our vision is to make community building the most impactful business strategy. And looking at case studies like Notion and Canva, the culture and is such a great North Star. But I think to start a business, the goal shouldn't be I want to run my own company. The goal should be I want to serve people.

So I've always been passionate about serving people. So probably yes. My whole family also run their own companies, which I think. You are entrepreneurial.

I mean, even with your music thing, right? I mean, you know, there's a big difference between just wanting to play music, which you do. But because you've achieved a heck of a lot there too, as well, right? You've got your whole separate music.

The music. Yeah. Yeah. But you don't talk about very often.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Let's dive into the music business.

Do you know how started? I feel I might, but I'm not going to guess because I don't want to spoil it. I don't want to get it wrong. I know that you've had views in the millions.

Yes. Yes. I do know that. Yeah.

I think I just hit about 10 million streams. What I heard. On my little dashboard that I can log into by a gyro stream. But I actually started playing classical guitar when I was four.

So my brother started learning. Was it really classical guitar? Was it just guitar? It was classical guitar.

Really? Suzuki train. So Suzuki is not the car brand. The classical model of learning instrument.

So Dr. Suzuki was from Japan. Yeah. And he created this methodology of learning an instrument by all, like, sound.

Yep. So instead of learning notation and me trying to play along, I would listen to the song 100 times a day for 30 days. And then I would pick up the time. You did that at four.

That's the methodology that you start to learn. Right. You start learning at four. So you can't do something 100 times in your four.

Playing the Valdi concerto. We were doing like twinkle, twinkle little star. Right. Like happy birthday.

But Bo was classically trained for 20 years. So my teacher's, yeah, Readin is phenomenal. And basically we did lessons every Monday, 6 p.m.

from when I was four all the way up to 18. Wow. And the beautiful thing about the Suzuki community of musicians, it can be for violin, piano, and saxophone guitar, is every second year they would have the Suzuki annual music conference. And so you'd file around the world to be hosting America in Japan.

Like we've performed in the Sydney Opera House. How cool. Melmond Recital Center. And we would come together with all these thousands of students all around the world who play an instrument.

But we don't speak the same language. Like I was in Italy and South Utsuo in the North. And we're all studying the same music for the week to prepare for this one giant concert. And I don't speak Italian.

I can speak Spanish and French, but not Italian. And I was like, I don't know what you're saying. But we can play the same same song. So you would have a ball like all week.

And that was I think definitely the first taste of the power of community that I felt. But what music has given me has been the foundation, I think of how I've approached everything in life. Because music says, here's a giant difficult song. Like the Vivaldi concerto.

You know, it's like 30 pages. It's really, really tough. And you look at that and you go, that's impossible. But all you do is you break it down, chunk by chunk, and you practice this one bar 40 times every day.

Until you've played it perfectly 10 times, you know, move on and add the next bar. You just, just building blocks. That's the most, I mean, you can relate that to anything. You can relate that to sport.

You can relate to business. You can relate that to languages. You can relate that to, it's how anyone who's achieved anything and they say, how do you do it? One step at a time, one chunk at a time.

Well, it's exactly that, right? Break down. But it's also repetition. Repetition.

Which I'll come back to in a minute. Because I want to talk about repetition in business and repetition in community. Because I don't know where the repetition has the same impact in that. But anyway, keep going.

Well, the key here is consistency. Yeah. Like we kept at guitar. That was the one thing that we did.

You know, it's like the book, so good they can't ignore you. Just pick the one thing, great book. And you go so deep in it and you just become so knowledgeable in that one niche. And so that was a phenomenal platform.

And I end up living in Spain for a year. I studied full-man go guitar. I started writing my own music. I was really hung over one morning.

It felt so awful. That I was like, I need to write a song to make me feel better. And I started writing relaxation music. And so I started writing relaxation music.

And then I signed with the label in Brisbane about three years ago. And I sent them about three to four albums of music every year. But I compartmentalize it. So I'll do music in, so I take four months off every year from the community collective.

From the delivery. So there's like nothing in my calendar for the community collective. And at that time, I will bulk record music in January and June. And then I'll send it, it'll go out across like 180 music platforms, Spotify, alpha music, etc.

And then it'll go out and be released every four night. You know, you might do that with a podcast, for example. So we do that at scale. And then, yeah, label, suit sounds, they have phenomenal, have an incredible team.

And then, yeah, we've like hit, I think, over 10 million streams. Why did you do that? I was on viral on Instagram. I think we're not bringing a guitar here today.

We should have done that. Yeah. But you don't mix the two. I've never seen you play for me and go to any of our birthday parties that we have shared with our businesses, which we've done a few times.

Yes. I've never seen you do that. I didn't know that you did. I knew you went off and record it.

Yeah. But the for me and guitar, it's cool. It's fun. It's really fun.

And, you know, you meet so many amazing people. And I met Janey, actually, who is the co-founder of Smiling Mind. And it's actually just stepped in a CEO of KICK. Yeah.

With Steph Klesmith and Laura Hentrow. And I met Janey on a panel out of Forever Projects event. And afterwards, I was like, oh, Smiling Mind, you don't need some music. Like, let me know, because they're an app for meditation.

And fast forward, all my music is now released on Smiling Mind. They have about 9 million users a month. Or like something observed. But I was like, whoa, and it's completely free app.

And it's just phenomenal the rate that they do. So I love writing music to make people just feel better. And just try and sport them to a different place. And so listening to music like that in hospitals.

Or, you know, I was a music therapist as a volunteer at the Royal Melbourne Hospital. And just simply played guitar for patients and staff to just feel a little less stressed. How did that incredibly impact music? It's so profound.

Yeah. I've like a music song that I'll listen to every point of the day for every activity. And I've done that for like five years. So do you think there's an element of, you know, you get a lot of founders, mentors, talking about getting in a state.

Getting yourself in a state to be able to achieve certain things. And there's lots of different ways people do that. You essentially doing that through music, right? That's why you have your songs specifically.

I do as well. If I'm not feeling good. If I'm not feeling overly positive, I have some very specific songs that I play. Is it Taylor Swift?

No, it's not. I'm not going to tell you what it is. Can you arrange album, though? It's not Taylor Swift.

But it changes your whole mood really quickly. It does. It's incredible. It does, I mean.

That's the smell, right? A hundred percent. It's the five senses, right? And sound is one of them.

But also, if you listen to music at a certain hurts level, it'll tune in to a brainwave frequency. It's about low five. That kind of things. Yeah, low five.

But there's like, you know, you can listen to like 85 hurts or like 125 hurts. Like that is then tuning to the frequency of the brainwave in which you're in. So if you're in alpha, theta, data, delta, then it depends on what you're doing. So if I'm about to go to sleep, I'm probably not going to listen to like hardcore.

No. So what are those? For you just gave four. What are those?

Alpha Delta. Tell us about it. Because I don't know. Yeah.

Yeah. And I can get up in the morning. There's a song by P to B Helen. And called flying.

And it goes for like half an hour. And I'll listen to that half an hour. Half an hour. That's a long song.

Because it will take you from, you know, the sleepy kind of like subconscious into being awake. And fast forward into working through the day, I'll listen to low five. Because that's it. More upbeat.

Yeah. And then rewinding in tonight, going back down into low brainways, you're then really thinking about the type of music that you're listening to. Like this is like high performance, right? Athletes will listen to their song to like add them up and it'll be ritual.

And so I see the power when you consistently listen to the same song during the same activity over a long form and a long time. So for example, if you always start listening to the same song every time you sit down and start work. I'll listen to that song whether I'm at home or to co-working space home overseas or I'm traveling or I don't really feel like working. But I've got a deadline to meet and it will put you into the mindset so much faster than if you were just trying to do it with coffee and silence in my mind.

Interesting. I can't stand silence as everyone who knows me knows is what I talk all the time. Actually, that's not true. I do, but only at certain times.

Yes. You know, I like silence when I'm on holiday. So I really switch off on hold. I've learned because I don't switch off really all the time as you probably know.

And I tend to work seven days. I like working seven days. I don't just mean to work 24 hours, seven days a week, but I like to work every day. I do.

And so when I go away for a week, that's when I like silence. That's the only time. So normally I listen to podcasts or books. I listen to music.

I'll always have headphones in. I'll always be doing some sort of noise around me. Yeah. But when I'm away, I actually can't, I take my headphones down on the beach.

I don't want to listen to them. I just actually don't. Yeah. Yeah, you want to be in the chair and just disconnect.

Yeah. Yeah, we have that space. I love that. And what did you want to ask about repetition?

I wanted to say, when you look at things like sport, when you look at things like music, when you look at things like that, they talk about how repetition is mastery, right? When you're in a founder's job or building a community, it's very difficult to do really. It's very difficult to do repetition because there's so many things. So I'm always intrigued as to people who get to the top of their game in certain things.

And it's often music and sport and so forth. It has come from hitting too many intense balls in the same way, right? So they can just do it without thinking. Exactly.

How can you relate that to community building or how can you can relate that to a founder where there's just, it's a constant, you never know what's going to happen. So it's very hard to be repetitive. Yeah. I think something that we teach at the community collective is when you're picking who your community serves, which is obviously relatable for a founder, obviously picking a customer for their business, we like to use the niche-cubed concept.

So to be niche, very specific, is not enough anymore. Like we are in the age of AI, information overload, like people unsubscribing from newsletters, there's just like content everywhere. Like probably five email accounts, getting notifications on WhatsApp, LinkedIn, Slack. It's just, it's a fire hose out there.

It is. And now we don't know, is that actually Sally posting on LinkedIn? There's a lot of M-dashes in that post, like can I trust, is it just AI? Yeah.

Is this an actual bot? Is this an agent with this LinkedIn DM? Is this some campaign? You know, we can't actually trust and I think with the increase of scams and a lot of spam emails and like hackers for things like that, there's just, we're in a trust recession.

And so there's so much competition and the, and the playing field has fundamentally changed. Like the game has changed. So we can't play in which, in the same way as we have in the past. So in the past, it was enough to just be niche.

But now you have to be niche-cubed. So to be niche is just, perhaps you're serving an audience who have one trait in common. So for us, when we started the community collective, we were like, community builders. That was their profession.

And we thought, all right, well, that's still not enough, that's quite general. So let's be niche-squared to the power of two. We said community builders in Melbourne. So we chose the location.

Right. niche-cubed says, hey, we need three traits for this audience segment to have in common in order to be eligible to join this community. Mm-hmm. So that then is community builders, the profession in Melbourne, the location, in the startup industry.

So then we picked a specific, what's the name? Domain. Domain, exactly. And so we then were ruthlessly specific in serving that niche-cubed audience.

And we sat down and said, okay, great, this audience segment can become members. And all we want to do is serve you. And so repetition comes in when you actually stick to that. Yeah.

So we had a lot of people who wanted to join. We actually said, no, we're like, sorry, Sydney. Sorry, New Zealand. Oh, sorry, not for profit.

Like, we're just starting with community builders in Melbourne in the startup space from accelerators, co-working like VCs, that's all we're going to do. And we're going to be ruthlessly repetitive and just do that for the first, like, three to six months. Mm-hmm. Because then when you serve that group, you're just like blowing their minds.

Yeah, because nothing, everything's coming out for them, dead for them. Yeah, imagine making a community for superheroes. But for Spider-Man, in New York, who identifies as a male, phenomenal, right? Like that, they imagine a meet-up of Spider-Man.

They're going to be like, oh, you get Spider-Man sensors, like all the things. And then also the power of that is the referral. So everyone now knows how to refer that group. Yes.

That man sitting there like, I wasn't allowed to go to the Spider-Man meet-up. But sees another Spider-Man was like, you should join. That's exactly for you. Yeah.

So what that does is it's creating an audience who just feel so freaking sane. And they become your raving loyal fans. They refer. They increase word of mouth.

And you have this insane retention because you're only bringing in that vetted group of people. Yeah. So would you rather be invited, imagine if you just got an email from someone that is like, Steve, you should come to this party. Nothing else.

Nothing else. Or if Tim Ferris called you, he said, Steve, I'm curating this private dinner party, about 20 execs from all around the world. I'm going to fly to Hawaii. We're going to have this 24-hour dinner.

And I've invited you. And I've vetted 18 other people to join. Would you like to come? A lot more.

Yeah. You're going to be like, whoa. I mean, that's not much better than the party anyway. Yeah.

Yeah. I mean, that one's pretty hard to beat. But you see the point. It's ahead of the party.

Yeah, it's ahead of the party. 24-hour dinner. Yeah. Oh, my God.

How does that even happen? I don't even know. But you see the point. I see the point.

If you're ruthlessly being that niche cubed. And so where repetition comes is you're actually being consistent over a long period of time. And you can break down those barriers over a long time. But I think when we started the community collective, we wanted to just run that cohort program.

And we just wanted to do that well. And that was the number one product that we invested probably about 80% of our time in. So I like to use the 80-20 rule, which is something that Gary Williams introduced me as we were walking in Melbourne to sound his place. And he said, I like to use the 80-20 rule.

80% you're spending time on what you know works. It's delivers. It's reliable. It's consistent.

And it delivers results. And 20% is for those other experiments. And so I apply that in building community and in running a business by going, OK, we're going to spend 80% of our time resources and team on building this program. Yeah.

And I just want the community collective to be known for running this awesome eight-week experience. Yeah. And that compounding effect of sticking to that, which is really hard. It is.

You have to have so much self-discipline with all these other things that happen on the side. And so far so good. And the other 20%. Yes, we do coaching, consulting, partnerships, sponsorships.

But that is the main game. Yeah. So when you can be ruthlessly repetitive in serving your niche-cubed member and delivering a really high quality white club service. And you do that to the test of time.

Like you are just going to surpass anyone else who's decided to do a thousand things, eight of them and build 20 different products. Like it just, would you rather be great at one thing or kind of mediocre at eight? Yeah. No, I think it's great.

I think and it is really hard to do. I always struggled with just doing one thing. The focus. I mean, look, we've kept nudging the startup space.

That's been hard because there's been so many other companies that have come to us. We've managed to do that. Yes. And we could probably cube that niche a bit more.

Now you said that. Yeah. It's like that. Yeah, yeah.

Coin here, hurry up first. But yeah, it's incredibly hard to do. Because when something's working, you feel like I need to move on to the next thing. Well, I know I do.

Yeah. Or you think, oh, I've got to diversify revenue streams. I've got a, I can't put all my eggs in one basket. Yeah, that particularly.

Oh, 100%. And also you're the founders. You can make all the decisions. And then there's a thousand different opportunities.

Like it's really hard to say no. But I like to just say not yet. That's a good answer. Not yet.

Not yet. Not yet. Not yet. And slowly you build capacity.

And eventually once you become like the top of your game in a particular niche, you know, imagine if every athlete chose seven sports. You're mad. Madness. Rugby, Nebo, swimming.

Rugby. You're like, what? What are you doing? What are you doing?

Yeah. If you're paying Nebo on soccer, you have to have long nails. Like, what are you cutting all this? So you've been doing that for a while now, the course.

And you've been saying not yet. Are you close to a now moment with anything else? Is there anything else that? Yes.

That you're coming close to with community collective? Definitely. I think at the end of our program, there are a lot of because the main goal of the program is to help someone master community lead growth. Yes.

So we bring in all these different speakers. We've got the founding member of Burning Man coming in next week. Yes, I heard that. We've interviewed Seth Godin and Seth Gosmith and Laura Henshaw.

Which I remember you were so excited about. It was like a complete like dream for you. Yes. I remember you was, I've never seen you nervous.

Ever. I have never seen you nervous. Probably comes from your music background, your ability to perform. I've seen you on stage a thousand times.

I've never seen you nervous. And this was even a video. Yes. And I think I spoke to you maybe the day before.

And you had nerves. Yes. Of course. And it was, you know, Jess Walker.

Yes. Obviously, it was her and I in the butter tech check 15 minutes before Seth Godin was joining for the interview. So butter is the online platform that we use. And Jess and I were just sitting there and butter has a notification when someone arrives.

Which just says, Seth Godin is out the door. I mean, Jess, do this photo like. It was a good interview. It was phenomenal.

We had 85 of our members there live asking questions. It was so cool. Yeah. And he, like, you could just ask anything.

I mean, he was saying when he invented email marketing, you know, decades ago, you're just like, what? Yeah. I mean, how can you say that? We're just, you're only inventing email.

You know, yeah. I asked him, like, oh, what have you got planned for this week? And he's like, oh, I'll just have dinner tonight. I'm a good friend Simon Sinek and, and I'll like cut.

And you're like, oh, my God, just a whole lovely. So, yeah, things like that are just phenomenal. To be able to bring people at the top of their game, the top of their industry, into a world of community building, where we'll take these members through and ask some questions to help them where they are now. And so the end goal of the community of the cohort is to build a community strategy.

But after that program, you then have to build the thing. You do. Yeah, you've got to deliver the roadmap. You've got to do what you've said you've got to do.

And it's really hard. It's super hard. You're like, going back into big organizations. Yeah.

It might be at a university. Like, can't build it. Didn't get approval for that. Like, there's a, there's a whole nother set of challenges.

And so what we've actually found as well is that community builders can be the bottleneck to the growth and success of the community. Because you end up being the events manager. Can you do partnerships? Here's a bunch of tips.

Hey, we've run out of milk. Can you really order that? Oh, hey, Charlie. Can you really say?

No, I'm like a founder. So many different areas and everything becomes community. And it's really tough to understand, like, where is my lane? And so not having efficient operations, not leveraging AI, automations, and being really efficient.

I think makes a lot of people a bottleneck. Yeah. So we've been, like, really seen this kind of key challenge of how can you set up a business and a community to run without you? Not to write yourself out of a job.

Yeah. Make sure that you're not the bottleneck to the success and the scale that this group can grow to. Yeah. So it's definitely, you know, we've, like, doubled in, like, a 10-day challenge here and there.

And kind of thinking about, um, other ways we can serve people in that, in that group. But honestly, like, the main game is still the community cohort. And until there's, like, another bigger problem that, you know, really is calling us. We'll just, like, keep sticking out of it.

I love your business. For now. I think it's amazing. I think what you built is amazing.

I think, tell me, I've got a question that I am fascinated, which I keep meaning to ask you. Tell me. It's gone quite global. Yes.

So you started off with a niche in Melbourne. You're now all over the world. How did that happen? Because that happened in my view of watching very, very quickly over a period of about 12 months, right?

Yeah. Yeah. How? And why?

Did you know? No. Yeah. Third point.

But did you know that the second largest country in where our members are based is Nigeria? Yes. Because you've told me that before because it's the wildest thing ever. And it's crazy.

And so it's Australia, then Nigeria, and then New Zealand, and then we're across 18 countries, just members. This is not including our total audience. So the total audience is 17,000, or 700 in our private community of CSEANs. And basically, when we launched that first cohort, we had invited a speaker who was from Lagos, Nigeria.

His name is Jeff Tabdu, phenomenal human who's coming in to speak about building DEI community, diversity, equity and inclusion. And basically we didn't realize he was like famous. The person. He's like famous in Nigeria.

After he had posted on LinkedIn, like, hey, I'm speaking in this cohort that has never existed before. And we had like all these applications from people in Nigeria. And I was like, whoa, wow, okay. Like I wasn't expecting that.

And actually the average salary of a community manager in Nigeria is about $1,800 Australian dollars. For the year. For the whole year. The program at the time was $880.

At the moment, it's $2,800 for the base entry package. So you know, exorbitant amount. That's like nearly a whole year of someone's salary. So the equivalent of paying like $100,000 in Australia for a program.

So for now, we were like, whoa, I mean, that's wild. But these community managers were building community at Google and she goes Africa and like, these insane not-for-profits and they were starting their own company. So he was paying for that? Were they paying for it?

So so a lot of them were volunteers in communities like they have a high unemployment, very difficult to get a job. And they started applying for the program, but we were like, whoa. And so we actually ended up building this scholarship fund that we've just funded ourselves. And we fund 10 full or partial scholarships per program.

And so we've had over 100 scholarships funded just from us, for people who are either living technically below the poverty line by Australian standards or from underrepresented groups have supported a lot of female founders who didn't have enough money and many different types of people. And so we then built this scholarship fund and then had a lot more people from all around the world applying at different rates. And so what that then meant was when you then support 10 and they had this phenomenal experience they went and told everyone else.

And what was really crazy as well is that all the different speakers that we keep landing are from all over the world. And so when they share, you know, we've had the head of community at Slack, I think Jacob like reposted something and had like five people apply. And it's like, so Jacob's part of this, like, I want to be a part of this. And so it was just this huge, you know, we like to call it the community flywheel, everyone wants a flywheel.

Everyone. Opposite to flywheel is a death loop. No one wants a death loop. Let's stick with flywheel.

Yeah, yeah. Are you going to death loop for the notch group? No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, So building a flywheel is you find someone through word of mouth, they find you through word of mouth, they have this phenomenal experience, they then become a raving fan, then they tell them that work, then they find you, and then it's just this flywheel. So the community collective has just fallen into this community flywheel at scale where now people from all around the world are joining our program and then sharing about it.

joining, but that's really hard because we've changed our schedules to be globally friendly, not just in the Australian time zone. And then you, yeah, it's so many growing pains because then you're dealing with different markets. But overall, we have a rule of thumb of if we have more than eight members in one city, we can allocate a host. And then that host connects all of the members in person in that city.

So we've got one in Lagos, Nigeria in Auckland, Brisbane, Sydney, Melbourne, Perth, Adelaide, and a couple others. And so really then you're finding, you know, the equivalent of Steve and Sydney in Auckland. And then you're saying to that person, how can I help you? And then they're connecting everyone there in person.

So you just have this, this, this huge flywheel model of everyone catching up all over the world. And then sending a selfie with a sea, hand gesture, like into our slack. So it's been super fun. That's so cool.

Right. Last question. One piece of advice without giving away your eight week program. Yeah.

To that's relevant to both founders and community builders because we have both the watch the show. We have probably a lot of founders to watch the show. We have a lot of community people as well. What would be the one piece of advice, the one little nugget out of your eight week program that you could easily articulate to someone that they could start to, I guess one they could start to do, but also we'll get them thinking in the right way because there's a thought process to putting a community which I know you've spoken about before.

Yeah, definitely. I like to have decision making frameworks because actually if we just zoom out and look at life, a great life is determined by how many great decisions you may and at scale. And so I like to adopt, there's one particular framework. There's a book called Who Not How.

And that is a framework of when you're trying to think about how am I going to build this community? How am I going to run a business? How am I going to create a marketing strategy? How am I going to find someone to teach me how to build a flywheel instead of thinking how and being in that individualistic solo mindset.

Think of who? So ask yourself who can help me build a community? Who can help me build a business? Who has mastered a marketing strategy?

Who can I learn from? Who can co-create this experience with me? So who is now a collective mindset that is actually flipping the script and saying you're not alone, you're actually not meant to build something like that alone. And you're going to be much stronger, much faster, way more enjoyable surrounding yourself with people who've mastered it and who want to help.

And so the same principle goes for building a business and the same principle goes for building a community because if there's one piece of advice that I have, it's to never build a community or a business for someone, shocking. Like you can't build community for anyone. So what do you mean? You have to build, yeah, you have to build community with them.

So the key element there is like you can't just build it for the make all the decisions. Here it is. You have to build it with them. Hey, I'm thinking about XYZ, which one?

Collaborative. It's collaborative. Exactly. Exactly.

You know, many of the approaches that you've done with many of your incredible businesses, it's really about understanding who am I serving? What do they want to see? Okay, great. Let's build that.

Amazing. Did I get it right? Cool. All right.

Cool. You want to help? Okay, great. And it's just become, you know, the best leaders don't lead.

They listen. So really coming back to that around thinking who, not how I think we'll, I mean, that will just help in life in general. That's a great piece of advice. That's going to make the best.

That's going to make the best short. That's going to go everywhere. That's going to go viral. Hey.

Well, Paz, thank you for coming. Thank you for sharing. You articulate things particularly well. I love talking to you.

It's going to be fantastic. Fascinating to watch this back because I've never been able to watch our conversations back before. I'm actually really looking forward to it. And I cannot wait to see what happens next.

You, as I've told you time and time again and when we cut our birthday party comes around again next year, I'll still say, I can't believe what you've done in the last 12 months. I'm sure we're going to say that again. I say that right back out you, Steve. I mean, you've been instrumental.

You knew me before the community collective even started. We met at the commons. We did. In Cramon.

Before the COVID. Before the COVID. Before everything happens. And, you know, you've helped us all along the way.

And I've always been such a great sounding board. So that, you know, you've definitely been. It's amazing. It's just so cool.

I mean, I just loved how many different chapters their theme. What are we going to say in like 10 years? Well, we'll just get you back every year. We'll be at that 24 hour dinner party with Tim Ferriss.

In 10 years? Or 24 hour dinner party? Sounds awesome. I love the sound of that.

Yeah, I don't. I mean, let's do it. Let's do it. Tim, if you're listening.

Done. Great. But because then for 10 years. Thanks for coming on this show.

Oh, thanks Steve. Appreciate it.