01:25 What Community Collective is

Paz explains that to understand Community Collective you need to understand how it started. She was a community manager at RMIT Activator, running accelerators and managing a 60,000-person startup network. Then lockdown arrived and her entire job became impossible overnight. She packed up the co-working space expecting to be back in a week. She was not back for 18 months. The sign she put on the door saying “Back in a week” became a small symbol of everything that went wrong.

03:08 The first meetup

Paz was isolated in Fitzroy North, locked in a house with metal bars on the front that looked like a prison. Her housemates left. She called her grandmother every week, then one week her grandmother did not answer, and the next day she learned her grandmother had fallen in the shower and was hospitalised. She passed away. No one was allowed to visit. No funeral was held. Paz’s mother went to the hospital anyway to say goodbye.

In the middle of all of this, Paz reached out asking if anyone knew community managers in the startup space. Fifty email intros came back. Melia Raina from Blackbird Ventures connected her with Jala Alex from Macquarie University. They organised a meetup between Melbourne’s fourth and fifth lockdowns at the Commons in Cremorne. Seventeen people attended. Jala took professional SLR photos and designed the brand using orange, which became Community Collective’s colour. The Airtable link shared at the end went viral, and within a year there were 600 people in a free monthly Zoom.

10:55 Quitting to build

Paz quit her job in July 2022, calculating $3,800 per month in personal costs and saving $10,000 as her runway. She spent three months doing nothing but interviewing community builders about what they needed. Then she found a group of learning designers trained in the Chaos Pilot methodology and worked with them to design an 8-week curriculum. She posted on LinkedIn asking if anyone was interested in the program, got 100 expressions of interest, and launched it as a paid cohort. 37 participants in the first run. The pattern repeated seven times.

29:02 Niche Cubed

Paz walks through the framework she uses for helping community builders define their niche. Profession plus location plus domain. Community managers in the startup space in Melbourne. She uses the Spider-Man example: making a community for superheroes is too broad to create real value, but making one for Spider-Man in New York who identifies as male is a niche so specific that every member immediately understands why they belong. The specificity is the value creation.

36:20 Growing to 18 countries

Community Collective has reached 18 countries without paid marketing. Nigeria emerged as one of the strongest hubs, which no one anticipated. The pattern is the same in every geography: one passionate community builder discovers the program, the quality of the experience drives word of mouth, and a local chapter eventually forms. Scholarships are available for people who cannot afford the full fee. The vision is to have self-sustaining city chapters around the world, led by community builders who themselves went through the program.

43:50 Sustainability and final advice

992 people on the waitlist for the next program at the time of recording. The challenge now is scaling the program without losing the quality that created the demand in the first place. Paz’s final advice: start small, do it with others. The first meetup was 17 people. The cohort started with 37. You do not need scale to start. You need the right niche, the right people, and the willingness to listen to what they actually need.