How to Build A Marketing Community (Without Spam Or Pyramid Schemes)

What It Covers

Lottie Unwin explains how she built Upworld, a 1,200-member marketing community, from dinner gatherings in 2016 to a sustainable business with three full-time staff, without becoming a spam-filled sales funnel.

Key Questions Answered

• •Community monetization reality: Upworld generates revenue from membership fees but breaks even after paying three full-time community managers. Additional profit comes from courses, recruitment matchmaking, and a separate consultancy business called Brand Hackers serving startups.
• •Anti-sales funnel approach: Communities built primarily as lead generation tools prioritize scale and conversions, creating wrong incentives. Building for member engagement and emotional response instead of commercial metrics prevents the community from becoming a self-promotion cesspit, though monetization remains possible.
• •Friday Shout Outs channel: Create a dedicated space where members celebrate other people's achievements rather than self-promote. This simple structural change establishes a collaborative tone and models healthy achievement-sharing behavior, solving the double-edged sword of too much self-promotion versus inability to celebrate wins.
• •Member-first decision framework: Only listen to what members actually need, not what you think they want. Identify your core profile and design exclusively for them, accepting that non-core members receive less than perfect service. This prevents building a Frankenstein product that serves nobody well.