How to build a business around a free community

Grace Ling is the founder and CEO of Design Buddies, a free community with >64k members on Discord and a total audience of >150k. Here she leads a vibrant online community, does in-person meetups around the world, sponsored partnerships, helps designers land jobs and is even organising a conference. In this episode, Grace does a deep dive into how she started this community, how she grew it and how she turned it into a thriving business. This episode is made possible by Curated Connections - a tool we created to increase the value of private membership communities by creating networking programs that run on autopilot. Try it in your community - https://curatedconnections.io/ Links: • Join Design Buddies - https://designbuddies.community • Partner with Design Buddies - https://forms.gle/6nVjUHHBa3NgtsZHA • Grace Ling on LinkedIn -   https://www.linkedin.com/in/graceling