“The worst thing you could do is build community for people. You have to build it with them.”

That’s the line at the heart of everything Paz Pisarski has built, and it’s probably why The Community Collective has grown from a Melbourne meetup into a business that’s trained 350 companies across 18 countries around the globe.

Although Pisarski says she didn’t have a grand master plan to become the queen of community-led growth. In fact, she says she “never set out to build a business” at all.  Rather, the business began to coalesce around her.

At the time, Pisarski was doing the “ weirdly hard-to-define job of community management”, and the more she worked in the space, the more she realised the demand for connection.  The idea for The Community Collective began to formulate. People needed help, they kept asking for more, and eventually the side project stopped behaving like a side hustle she tells Business Builders.

The Community Collective started with a job title and a hunch

Before The Community Collective existed, Pisarski was working in Melbourne’s startup ecosystem, including at RMIT University, where she was helping build founder communities. She kept ending up with the same title: community manager.

“I was like, what is this job?” she says. “Is it weird and kind of elusive?”

It turned out she wasn’t the only one wondering. There was no obvious playbook, no neat degree and no big industry path. So she reached out to 17 other community managers and, with co-founders Melia and Jala, put together a meetup in 2021 between Melbourne lockdowns. What happened next was the sort of thing founders dream about and then try not to act too smug over.

“It went viral afterwards,” Pisarski says. “We had hundreds of people join over the next 12 months.”

The meetup was free and monthly. People came together to talk about how to do their jobs better. Then the emails started rolling in. People wanted more coaching, more training, more support. That was the moment Pisarski realised she wasn’t just sitting on a nice networking idea. She’d stumbled onto a genuine gap in the market.

From passion project to profitable business

Plenty of people talk about turning a passion project into a business. Pisarski actually put a framework around it. When she quit her job, she gave herself six months to test whether it could become financially viable. She got an accountant, bought a website, registered the domain and set clear markers for what would make it a real business rather than a lovely-but-expensive hobby.

“If it doesn’t generate revenue, well, then it’s a passion project, it’s not a business,” she says.

In the startup world, that kind of clarity is refreshingly unromantic. No, ‘just follow your dreams and the universe will provide’ ideology here.  So, Pisarski set to work. She’d saved about $10,000 in runway, so she didn’t have to panic while building.  She needn’t have worried. Three months in, the business became profitable.

That speed didn’t happen by magic. It happened because the problem was clear, the audience was niche and the offer was useful. Pisarski says viability gets a lot easier when people are already tugging at your sleeve asking for help.

Built on word of mouth

Today, The Community Collective has worked with names like Google, Canva, Notion and Airtree. But Pisarski says the growth hasn’t come from flashy marketing wizardry.

“Sixty-five per cent of people find us through word of mouth,” she says.

None of this has happened by accident, either. Pisarski built her husiness model around human connection. The business grew because the community itself generated trust, referrals and momentum. Early participants went through the programs, told others, and then introduced Pisarski to more companies. She didn’t just teach community-led growth; it was the mantra she lived by.

That idea should perk up the ears of any small business owner tired of throwing money at ads and praying to the algorithm gods. A strong community can become a feedback loop, a referral engine and a trust builder all at once. Of course,, that only happens if it’s actually a community.

Your Instagram followers are not a community

This is where Pisarski gets very clear, and frankly, it’s a distinction a lot of businesses need tattooed somewhere visible.

“Your newsletter is not a community, a once-off event is not a community, your Instagram followers are not a community,” she says.

Her definition is much tighter. A community is “a group of people who connect on a regular basis and support each other”.

“They care about the collective, not just themselves. That might look like a Slack group, a WhatsApp group, a run club, a dinner series or something else entirely, but the key thing is that people are interacting with each other, not just consuming your content from afar.”

That’s the difference between an audience and a community.

“Every company should have an audience, but not every company should have a community,” Pisarski says.

It’s a handy gut check. If what you really need is reach, awareness or sales, then maybe your answer is better marketing, partnerships or content. Community is not a trendy label you whack on your socials because it sounds warm and fuzzy.

“If you’re building social media, hire a marketing manager, not a community manager,” Pisarski proclaims.

So, who should build a community?

Pisarski’s answer is practical rather than evangelical. Start with your business objectives. What are you trying to achieve over the next 12 months? Who are you serving? And do those people actually want to connect with each other? That last bit matters. Just because people like your product doesn’t mean they want to join a Slack and become best mates.

She points to examples where community does make strategic sense. Fitness app Kick built trust and long-term loyalty by spending time with the people they wanted to serve through run clubs and cooking sessions. Notion has built chapters around the world where users share how they use the product. Broadsheet, despite already having a massive audience, created Broadsheet Access because its audience wanted to meet one another in person and get together for fine dining experiences.

“Community works best when your customers or members get value from each other, not just from you,” Pisarski explains.

So, if they benefit from swapping advice, sharing experiences, solving similar problems or feeling part of something bigger, then you may be onto something. If not, don’t force it. Not every business needs a community. Some just need a better offer and a cleaner sales funnel.

Start smaller than feels comfortable

One of Pisarski’s smartest points is that most founders start too broad. They want to build a community for “women in business” or “creatives” or “founders”, which sounds good until you realise that’s approximately half the internet.

Her fix is what she calls “niche cubed”.

“It’s not enough to be niche anymore, you have to be niche cubed,” she says. “Find not only one trait that people have in common, not just two … but three traits.”

She uses a superhero analogy to explain it. A community for all superheroes is too broad. A community for Spider-Men in New York over 40? Now you’ve got something. Those people are much more likely to feel an immediate connection, see the value and refer others like them.

Pisarski says that’s exactly how The Community Collective started: community builders in Melbourne in the startup space. For the first eight months, they said no to everyone else. Painful? Yep. Smart? Also yep.

“Be really ruthless, ruthlessly exclusive to be inclusive with the right people at the start,” she says.

That’s brilliant advice for any founder. You can broaden later. But in the beginning, specific beats vague every day of the week.

Don’t build it for them

When it comes to building community, here’s the bit Pisarski comes back to again and again: co-creation. If you build a community in a silo, based on what you think people want, there’s a decent chance you’ll end up building your own dream instead of theirs. Lovely for you. Useless for everyone else.

“The worst thing you could do is build community for people,” she says. “You have to build it with them.”

She compares it to an architect designing a house without consulting the client. Sure, it may look impressive, but it’s probably not what anyone asked for.

“Don’t  over-engineer things before you’ve spoken to the people you want to bring together. Ask what they need. Ask how they want to connect. Ask what kind of format would actually work in their lives. Then build from there.”

Trust is the whole game

Pisarski is very clear that community is not a quick cash grab. If people feel like they’ve walked into a room just to be sold to, they’ll leave.

“The worst community would be like, ‘I joined this Slack channel and then 1,000 people tried to sell to me,’” she says.

That doesn’t mean community can’t support revenue. It absolutely can. But trust comes first. Pisarski says trust is built through “consistent action with integrity over a long time”. It comes from showing up, making introductions, creating opportunities, listening to members and being genuinely helpful.

That might sound obvious, but it’s where a lot of businesses come unstuck. They want the return before they’ve done the relationship bit. They want loyalty before they’ve earned it. Community doesn’t work like that. It’s slower, more human and much harder to fake. Yes, community can drive revenue, but don’t be grubby about it

Of course Pisarski isn’t naive about the business side of community building. She knows founders need ROI. Rent does not get paid in vibes.

Her view is that revenue should be designed into the community model only if it aligns with both the business objectives and the member objectives. If the business gets value but the members don’t, the whole thing will eventually fall over.

“A community isn’t just for the business to extract value. The members need to extract value, too,” she says.

That’s why the best community-led businesses tend to generate revenue indirectly through referrals, retention, loyalty and advocacy rather than by flogging people every five minutes.

The founder’s lesson hiding underneath it all

What makes Pisarski’s story resonate is the way she built it: patiently, experimentally and in response to real demand. She gave herself parameters. She started narrow. She tested things for three months at a time. She kept it simple. At one point, even when enthusiasm was high, the team resisted the urge to launch everything at once.

“We’re like, no one’s going to come weekly, let’s just do monthly,” she says.

That restraint is underrated. A lot of early-stage founders could save themselves a world of pain by doing less, testing more and not trying to roll out the full Marvel cinematic universe before they’ve proven the first scene works.

Pisarski also talks openly about the personal side of building something. She says she never imagined herself as a founder, doing the accounting, building products and running a team, but now says, “I absolutely love it and it’s been such a joy.”

There’s a nice honesty in that. Sometimes the business you’re meant to build isn’t the shiny idea you dreamed up on purpose. Sometimes it’s the one that keeps tapping you on the shoulder until you finally pay attention.

And when it comes to community … Not every business needs one. Every business needs an audience, yes. But a true community is something more specific, more active and more relational. It works best when your people genuinely want to connect with each other, when you’re clear on why it exists and when you’re prepared to build trust over time instead of chasing a quick win.

Pisarski built The Community Collective by noticing a gap, starting small, co-creating with the people she served and resisting the urge to go too broad too fast. That’s a pretty handy blueprint for any small business owner trying to build something meaningful.

Pisarski was a speaker at Southstart. The author was a guest at the festival.

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