Building in Community with Stephanie Cartin
gwc: Tell us about your community?
sc: The Entreprenista League is a membership community for women founders and leaders providing the necessary resources to launch, grow, and scale their businesses. Members of the community get access to a private community platform to connect with other founders, weekly learning and networking events, office hours with experts, features on Entreprenista, and discounts on the best business tools and solutions. Members in our community are all networking, connecting, and doing business together and we are all about collaboration over competition.
gwc: Where are you hosting your community outside of social media (community platform like circle, newsletter, etc) and why did you choose that?
sc: We use Circle to host our membership community and it is truly the best platform for us. We chose to use Circle because their technology is far superior to other platforms we had used previously as well as tested and they have incredible customer support if we need to reach their team. We use all of the features including specific spaces for event video replays, networking, and one to one and group messaging. Our community is extremely engaged on the platform and we absolutely love it and highly recommend it.
gwc: Why did you launch your community?
sc: We launched The Entreprenista League because we wanted to be able to put all of the resources and connections we wished we had when we started our first business, @socialfly, all under one platform so we could help as many women founders as possible at scale. There is nothing better than seeing the impact our community has made for our members as they have been building their businesses and we love being part of their journeys. Entrepreneurship is not easy, but with the support of a community, there is so much more we can all do together.
gwc: What strategies did you follow to attract the first members?
sc: We started our podcast, Entreprenista, a few years before we officially launched our community, and we shared with our listeners, and those following and engaging with us on social media that we were going to be launching a community. We built excitement and anticipation and had a special offer for founding members. We also shared more about what to expect in our community through e-mail marketing. Social media and email have been very important in order for us to continue to share more about the benefits of joining The Entreprenista League.
gwc: For someone looking to start their own community, what key lessons or tips would you offer to help them navigate the early stages?
sc: Talk to other community builders about their learning lessons and especially their recommended tech stack before you launch. There's a lot of back-end technology involved in launching and growing a community and the more you get right in the beginning the better. As it is harder to change technology platforms once you are farther down the road.
gwc: Where can people find you?
sc: You can join our Entreprenista League community over at Entreprenista.com/join and follow us on instagram @entreprenistas. Feel free to connect with me personally on Instagram at @stephjillcartin.
