A speaker (likely the founder) describes how their B2B community grew after running the first World Summit AI. Initial event attendance was ~3,500 people; ticket sales surged in the final two weeks before the event. Following the summit, organic word-of-mouth and influential speakers drove rapid list growth from ~35,000 to ~118,000 within three to four months. Further spikes occurred after public campaigns (e.g., support for an all-girl Afghan robotics team against Donald Trump coverage) and rapid pivots during COVID; the community/subscription base later grew to about 220,000. The speaker notes challenges in marketing accomplishments and mentions Ricardo as someone who could help.
Chapters
When did it become like something big or at what point it started to become something big? That's really. Yeah, it's a really interesting question because it's grown now in a way that I could never have possibly imagined because it's now subsets of communities. Like, for example, we have 22,000 clinicians who are in the. Because we've launched an AI and medical portfolio. For example, we have climate change pioneers. So it's become very interdisciplinary. So I think. I think the key points where after we ran our first summit, the World Summit AI we attracted, it was about three and a half thousand people came to that event. On the morning of that summit, me and my team, we did not have a clue if people were going to show up. I mean, I know that sounds crazy because you think they're going to come, right? But I remember, I mean, we were all having really, really vivid dreams about walking into the Gas Howdah. My partner Vijay was saying, but every time I wake up, I walk into the Gas Howdah and there's one person standing there. And I was like, I'm having the same dream. What does it mean? You know, so, yes, yes, people have bought tickets, but actually our doubling point for the ticket sales for welcome AI were in the last two weeks before the event. Yeah. So in the last two weeks that we were like, okay, so in the morning when we turned up the Gas, Howard was absolutely packed with people. And as a result, then we kind of knew that we were, you know, that was the proof that we needed that people were following us and that it was become something big. Within probably about two to three months after the first World Summit AI it went really, really well. And a lot of things that we did, the word spread and very, very quickly, we found that people started subscribing and we went from 35,000, a data set of 35,000, to a data set of 116, 160, 118,000 people within three to four months. Wow. And that was mainly because of just word spreading about what we've done, people tweeting about it, people, you know, the type of speakers that we had were very influential. And. And it just went from there, really. I think the other significant points where we've seen big doubling in numbers is when we have tackled big causes as an organization, and we probably don't. We're not very good at this as an organization, and maybe this is something, Ricardo, I need your help with at some point. But what we don't do is really market our accomplishments as well as we should do. And that's a problem. That's a problem I need to work out as a founder. But we probably don't tell people enough about the good stories around what we've done. And we campaigned against Donald Trump for the all girl Afghan robotics team. And it was. Yeah. And when that went across the Times and people saw that that was happening, that's when we saw another big, substantial jump in community members. And then digital. The start of COVID which has been awful and a massive disruptor. We pivoted very quickly and we created new products within weeks and days and weeks because of the type of team that we had. And that's when it doubled up again, up towards the kind of 200. We're on 220,000 people now, because that's a different entity now. It's subscriptions.
