How Star Wars’ fan community was born 🌌Dan Madsen of the Star Wars Fan Club

"The Get-Together" is a podcast about the nuts and bolts of community building. Hosts Bailey Richardson and Kevin Huynh of People & Company ask organizers who have built exceptional communities about just how they did it. How did they get the first people to show up? How did they grow to thousands more members?

In this episode we interview Dan Madsen, the secret sauce behind the Star Wars Fan Club and the first Star Wars Celebrations.

After a fan zine he created as a Denver teenager was noticed by George Lucas himself, Lucasfilm asked Dan to help them. He was tasked with “[keeping] Star Wars in front of people. I had to keep it alive and vibrant, keep the excitement up,” Dan told us, and man did he nail it.

Dan took over the Star Wars Insider magazine, growing it to 500,000 subscribers at its peak). Eventually he also took the reins of the official Star Wars Fan Club (growing it to 180,000 members), ran a $20 million collectibles business and hosted the very first Star Wars Celebration, bringing tens of thousands of Star Wars fans from around the world together for the first time.

In our interview, we ask Dan about his lifelong devotion to Star Wars and its fans. We’ll dig into how Dan made that first Celebration a success, and also about how he grew his relationship with Lucasfilm from that first zine to a global fan enterprise.

🔥 Check out our book Get Together: How to Build a Community With Your People 📙