Community Playbook

Tropical MBA is a podcast and community platform for entrepreneurs, founded by Dan and Ian. The content focuses on entrepreneurship lessons, featuring prominent guests like Cal Newport, Seth Godin, and others. They offer coaching for $250K+ founders and a community for 1M+ founders through their Dynamite Circle offering.

Tropical MBA is a content platform and community for digital nomads and founders, built by Dan and Ian over 10 years ago in Bangkok as an alternative to the Silicon Valley track. They host in-person events (DC Black Global events) and produce a podcast featuring interviews with prominent entrepreneurs and business thought leaders. The platform serves 7 and 8-figure founders through their DC Black membership community.

Tropical MBA is a podcast and community platform founded by Dan and Ian that focuses on business, entrepreneurship, and remote work. They operate DC (Digital Citizen) events globally, including DC Black events and conferences like DCBKK, using community and events as their primary growth driver.

Simon Treulle founded Pangolia, a digital media site, and Hepper, an e-commerce pet furniture brand. He credits much of his success to attending an SEO conference in Chiang Mai at age 19 and surrounding himself with mentors and friends who provided critical feedback on his business strategy, helping him pivot away from ineffective content marketing approaches.

Smart Passive Income (SPI) is a diverse media brand founded by Pat Flynn with Matt Gartland, who transitioned from running a successful creative agency for eight years. Under Matt's leadership as CEO, SPI focuses on building community-based experiences where peer-to-peer interactions and ritualized habits create value beyond just content.

The Dynamite Circle is a private membership forum and community for entrepreneurs. They host in-person events to build relationships and facilitate learning among members, with DCMEX being their first official event since 2019, held in Mexico City.

Mighty Networks is a community platform founded by Gina Bianchini, former CEO of Ning, to help creators build sophisticated online communities. The product emerged from Bianchini's experience with the limitations of existing community platforms and represents an evolution in how online communities are built and managed in the 2020s.

Martin Hadding, a Microsoft 365 architect with 20 years of experience, built SPRobot as a SaaS solution to solve the content sprawl problem he encountered repeatedly in enterprise consulting. His agency BeSolve (generating $800k revenue in 2022) invested $150,000 into the product, which is currently in beta and targeting SMBs at $150-200/month per tenant. The product is validated through a tight-knit Microsoft 365 community and will launch commercially within 3 months.

Aviyal is building an open source community engagement platform that helps projects with strong user bases monetize through structured support and consulting. Founded by serial entrepreneur Abhishek (who previously sold Weavedin for $10 million), the startup raised $800k in pre-seed funding at a ~$9-10M valuation and has built a 1,000-person waitlist within months of launching in April 2021. With a 28-person team (12 engineers) based in India and a monthly burn of under $40k, they plan to launch paid pricing in April 2022.

FullFunnel.io is a B2B marketing consultancy founded by Andrey Zinkovic that generated €250k in revenue in 2020 through 27 consulting projects and coaching 51 startups from European accelerators. The founder is simultaneously bootstrapping a SaaS product called ROI Plan to help B2B companies manage marketing plans, which has 3 paying customers paying lifetime deals ranging from €150-€200. The agency revenue funds the SaaS development with a team of 2 full-time founders and 4 part-time developers in Poland, with a goal to reach €100k ARR for ROI Plan by the end of the year.

First Blood is a gaming platform built on blockchain that allows amateur gamers to compete against each other for money. The company conducted one of the fastest ICOs in crypto history in September 2016, raising approximately $5 million in under 5 minutes by selling 465,000 ether at $11 per token. The team liquidated 80% of the raised ether (372,250 tokens) immediately to fund operations, converting roughly $4 million into USD for salaries, marketing, and platform development.

New Story is a nonprofit that transforms slums into sustainable communities by building homes for $6,000 each through a digital crowdfunding platform. In 17 months, Brett Hagler and his 6-person team generated over $3 million in donation revenue, built 4 communities with over 300 homes, and secured backing from philanthropist 'investor donors.' The company differentiates itself through radical transparency—donors see exact family profiles and know exactly where their money goes.

Ryan Pahl is COO of Community Co, an umbrella company managing multiple professional communities including YEC (Young Entrepreneurs Council), Founder Society, and Forbes Councils. The company generates revenue through annual membership fees ($500 for Founder Society, $1,200 for Forbes Councils) and has grown to 50+ employees across Boston and the country. They combine proprietary technology with human curation to connect members with peers, business resources, events, and media opportunities.

Phenom is a community platform for young athletes (13-18) to share their athletic gear and game stories, launched in September 2014 by college athlete Brian Vernon and co-founder Mike. With 60,000 registered users and 25,000 monthly actives, they've built a B2B2C model where brands like Wilson Sporting Goods pay for grassroots athlete product feedback and consumer behavior insights. The team raised $700k and operates lean with a 4-person core team in San Francisco through 500 Startups Batch 16.

Scott Gerber founded the Young Entrepreneurial Council (YEC), an invitation-only membership organization with 1,600+ vetted entrepreneurs from companies collectively generating $13 billion in revenue with $9 billion in venture capital backing. The organization maintains exceptional 90%+ annual retention by focusing on highly personalized, human-centric member experiences including curated networking, quarterly check-ins, and proactive value delivery rather than growth-hacking metrics.

Results Junkies is Paul Singh's community-driven newsletter and platform that evolved from a blog into a weekly newsletter written during his time as an investor. It's not currently a business, but rather a passion project bringing together a couple thousand founders and investors in Slack and through meetups to discuss building businesses. Paul built this after exiting Disruption Corp to 1776 and spending 30 days traveling to startup hubs globally to understand how communities grow.

BiggerPockets is a freemium community marketplace for real estate investors founded by Joshua Dorkin in 2004. Starting as a personal forum to help himself learn real estate investing, Dorkin spent 3-5 years focused purely on building community before monetizing. The platform now has 390,000 members, over 10,000 paid subscribers at $9-$29/month, 1.2 million monthly unique visitors, and a podcast ranked #14 in business podcasts, generating well over $1.1 million in annual recurring revenue.

FinCon is an annual conference founded in 2011 by CPA and personal finance expert Philip Taylor that brings together the world's top personal finance content creators and influencers. By 2015, the event had grown to 900 attendees generating over $500K in revenue ($220K from ticket sales and $220K from sponsorships) with $200K in profit, after initially losing money for the first few years. The key to profitability came from treating it as a full business rather than a side project, introducing VIP ticket tiers, and restructuring sponsorship offerings to highlight attendee reach and influence.

Mollye Graham is an operating executive and leadership coach who built Glue Club, a community for scaling leaders. Drawing from 18+ years at Google, Facebook, Quip (sold to Salesforce), and the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, she developed frameworks like 'Give Away Your Legos' and the Waterline Model to help leaders manage rapid growth, navigate emotional challenges, and build high-performing teams.

Bravado is a community-driven SaaS platform for B2B tech salespeople with over 300,000 members, including 50,000 VPs of Sales/CROs, 150,000 account executives, and 40-50,000 SDRs. Through its Seller Portfolio product (a real-time quota tracking tool similar to Mint.com for sales) and War Room community feature, Bravado provides benchmarking data on sales performance across the industry. In the current market downturn, Bravado is helping sales teams and founders rethink their go-to-market strategies, comp plans, and retention focus.