Two hundred recruitment leaders in a WhatsApp group, and no way to charge anyone.

The situation. A community of senior recruitment leaders running since 2018, living entirely inside WhatsApp. Real influence. No product.

What was wrong. Suppliers wanted access to those 200 people and there was nothing to sell them. Members would have paid for the good material and there was no gate to put it behind. Events happened, cost money and made none. A WhatsApp group is not an asset. Nobody can find it in search, nothing about it compounds, and it dies with the founder’s phone.

What we built. A brand first, then the platform. There was nothing to carry over from a group chat, so RecConnect was drawn from scratch: near-black, teal, and a brush script for the payoff line. Then a membership platform on Astro and Contentful with three revenue lines wired into it and published pricing on every one.

• Membership. Core free. Club £39/month for paying-member groups, priority events and monthly insight drops. Club+ £100/month for two seats, exclusive lunches and roundtables. Cancel any time
• Supplier partnerships across three tiers, up to a Category Partner arrangement with exclusive category ownership and an obligation to bring clients to at least one event a year. 46 vetted suppliers across 21 categories, each with their own page
• A ticketed flagship event. CONNECTED 2026, Thursday 12 November, BOX Piccadilly. Ten speakers, a live podcast recording, nine sponsors
• A social studio. Nine categories of card, generated from the site rather than drawn by hand: event headers, Eventbrite covers, event squares, “I’m attending”, membership, CONNECTED, speakers, sponsors. An email signature generator and a brand assets page sit alongside it. More on this below, because it is the best thing on the project

The event, and the brand that carries it. CONNECTED is the flagship, and it needed an identity of its own inside the RecConnect one. Hotter, louder, orange burning up out of the black, with the line doing the work rather than the layout. “The standard conference is dead. This is what replaced it.” “Adios, PowerPoint. Hello, CONNECTED.”

Then the part that decides whether a brand survives contact with real people. Every asset in the campaign is generated from the site: announcement cards, Eventbrite covers, squares, “I’m attending”, a card for every speaker on the bill, a card for every sponsor. Add a speaker to the site and the card exists. The date, the venue and the headline sponsor lockup pull live, so nothing goes stale and nobody has to remember to update anything.

Open a card and the written post is sitting next to it. Copy the caption, download the image, or send both to LinkedIn in one go. It also says plainly that LinkedIn will not let anything auto-fill a post, so you paste it yourself, because the alternative is somebody clicking a button and quietly wondering why nothing happened.

That is the difference between a brand and a brand document. Ten speakers, nine sponsors and two hundred members can post about the same event, on the same day, in the same identity, with no designer in the loop and nobody going off-brand because off-brand was easier.

What it produces now. Three lines of revenue where there was one group chat: subscriptions, supplier partnerships, and event ticketing plus sponsorship. Published: 200+ active leaders, 2,500+ wider network, 20+ events a year.

The bit that compounds. The old site made finding a supplier hard enough that most people gave up. Now every supplier has a proper profile, built to the same template and optimised to be found, which changed who wants to be listed. Being in the directory became worth something, so more suppliers asked to be in it, which makes the directory better, which makes it worth more again. That is the whole trick with a marketplace and almost nobody builds the supplier side well enough to start it.