House of Visionaries CommunityI was tasked with launching SCALE, a dedicated community for startup people leaders, from the ground up within just three months. Building on my background co-founding a diversity in engineering community, I was brought on to spin off this new space, recognizing that people leaders building teams at startups face a distinct set of challenges that warranted their own dedicated network. Success meant defining our target audience, standing up the platform infrastructure, and organizing launch events to reach 100 founding members.
To bring SCALE to life, I combined outreach with hands-on community building. I leveraged my existing network while also market-mapping and cold-prospecting startup HR leads on LinkedIn to identify and recruit our target audience. I set up a Slack community as our core platform, and organized partnerships with local businesses to host quarterly in-person events. Critically, I personally onboarded every single member — using those conversations to understand their specific challenges and forge genuine connections that would make the community sticky rather than just another Slack channel.
Within 8 months, SCALE grew to 90 members, just shy of our original 100-member target, with strong event retention and consistently positive member feedback validating the community-first approach. Beyond community metrics, SCALE also drove tangible business impact — the relationships and prospecting built through the community generated 6 new deals for Bond Global, demonstrating how a well-run niche community can directly fuel commercial growth alongside its member value.
