A small team had
a compelling vision.
We needed to build it.

vYve launched with a real vision and a founding team that had spent years building communities at VaynerX. The conviction was there. What the business needed next was someone to figure out three things together: who is this truly for, what should it say, and how do we build the systems that let it grow without losing what makes it different.

I came in as the first dedicated marketing hire. My scope covered brand, positioning, all organic channels, content systems, member experience, campaigns, and retention. The CMO Podcast sits separately and is not part of my work.

A few things were genuinely open questions:

• Who was the member, really? The working hypothesis was "senior leaders and CMOs" but that was broad enough to mean almost anyone.
• What category did vYve belong in? The "mastermind" label was doing more damage than good in sales conversations.
• How do you build an audience from zero when you don't yet have proof points, testimonials, or past retreat photos to show?
• What does a premium community retain on? What keeps a founder-level member engaged four, eight, twelve months in?

These weren't blocking questions. They were the work.

In February 2025, vYve became fully independent. We went from vYve by Vayner to vYve on our own terms. Same team, same community, new chapter. The rebrand and the external comms around that transition were mine to manage. It was a chance to clarify the identity and own the story more completely. That work is ongoing.

ICP clarity. Everything else depended on it.

The early hypothesis was broad: senior leaders and CMOs. But when I started talking to the actual members who were getting the most value, a different pattern emerged. They weren't defined by title. They were co-founders, solopreneurs, women founders at a moment of transition. The thread that connected them wasn't seniority. It was a specific feeling: they knew they were good at what they did, they were ready for something bigger, and they didn't have people around them who were asking the same questions they were.

That insight changed everything downstream. The content tone shifted. The events got more specific. The onboarding framing changed. And it eventually became the foundation for the brand repositioning. That quote captures the ICP better than any brief we could have written.

The "mastermind" label wasn't wrong. It was just too small. By the time I joined, vYve already had a podcast network, corporate sessions, international retreats, summits. Every sales conversation started with apologizing for the label. That's not a messaging problem. That's a positioning problem.

I read every piece of content, every sales deck, every testimonial and looked for the pattern. What I kept finding: people weren't there for the community. They were there for what came next. The community was the context. The momentum was the product.

So we reframed. "Growth ecosystem" was wide enough to hold every vertical we had and specific enough to mean something real. Then we rebuilt the website architecture, social messaging, and onboarding language around that frame.

Inbound queries went up 40%. The sales team spent less time explaining and more time closing. 20% conversion on inbound.

The insight was that retention in a premium community isn't about content or access. It's about whether people feel genuinely invested in. And the way to build that is reciprocity, not volume.

We built the whole model around what we call Give-and-Get. Members receive concierge-level support, access to people like Seth Godin and Gary Vee for personal coaching, and events that genuinely compete with programs that cost five times more. In return, they're expected to show up for each other. Not as a rule. As a cultural norm built in from day one.

The outcome wasn't just 80% retention. It was that the founding team extended the membership term from 4 months to 12 because members were actively asking to stay longer. Former members come back as guest speakers. That flywheel wasn't designed. It emerged from the culture we built.

Brand voice first. Before any channel, campaign, or piece of content, we needed to know how vYve sounded. Not in an abstract "be warm and direct" way but actually. What words do we use? What do we never say? How do we talk about the podcast vs. the retreats vs. the community? Without that foundation, everything produced would require my constant involvement to sound right.

From there, the order was roughly: ICP definition, then channel strategy, then content systems, then onboarding, then retention touchpoints, then campaigns. Each layer built on the one before it. The Bali campaign, for example, only worked as well as it did because the audience, the voice, and the channels already existed and had been validated.

The channel decision followed the ICP. Once we knew who we were building for, the channel question mostly answered itself.

LinkedIn is where founders and executives show up in a professional headspace. It's where they make decisions about what to invest in. Instagram is where they show you who they actually are. We needed both: one for credibility and one for culture. The newsletter added a layer of owned reach that isn't subject to algorithm changes. IRL events filled in the conversion layer that digital can't do alone.

The decision to go organic-first was intentional. Paid amplifies whatever signal you already have. If the messaging isn't right, you're spending to confuse more people faster. Organic forced us to listen and iterate before committing spend. We're ready for paid in 2026 because we spent a year earning that clarity.

The Bali retreat was the first time we'd ask someone to buy a physical experience from a brand they'd only just discovered. The business question was: can we sell an international retreat with no past attendees, no photos, and no social proof yet?

The audience we were targeting, women in a professional transition moment, has a specific kind of hesitation. It's not "is this worth the money?" It's "is this actually for someone like me?" The whole campaign was built to answer that question before it got asked.

We built a dedicated landing page that told the experience story, not just the logistics. Social content across two LinkedIn channels and Instagram, carousels and reels grounded in real voices, not polished travel content. A/B tested email sequences: a newsletter-style send vs. a plain-text personal note. The plain-text version converted better, which told us something. And a webinar to warm leads before the sales call so the conversation itself wasn't cold.

We sold 20 seats. The target was 15. For a first retreat with no proof points, that validated both the product and the campaign model.

The constraint was real: six-person team, multi-channel brand, high-touch community. The only way this works is if the systems carry the weight, not the people.

A few things I built specifically to remove myself as the bottleneck:

• A brand voice doc specific enough that anyone could write a caption or a sales email and have it sound right without asking me first.
• An LLM trained on vYve's voice so AI-assisted content had a quality floor.
• Social funnel automation for top-of-funnel engagement and follow-up.
• Production SOPs so content could move through the calendar without everything waiting on me.
• Member onboarding SOPs so the welcome experience was consistent regardless of who ran it.

The question I kept asking was: does this keep working when I'm not in the room? That test shaped a lot of the infrastructure decisions.

I worked directly with Andrea Sullivan and James Orsini. The relationship was collaborative rather than directive. I wasn't receiving briefs and executing against them. I was in the room when the strategic questions were being asked: who are we building this for, what does the next chapter look like, is the story we're telling still the right one.

In a six-person company, the marketing and brand function sits very close to the product and community decisions. A lot of what I did was translate: take what we were learning from members, from the market, from what was and wasn't converting, and feed that back into how we were positioning and communicating. Sometimes that meant pushing back on direction. Sometimes it meant bringing new direction. That closeness to the founding team is part of what made the work effective.

Build the measurement infrastructure earlier.

In the early months I was moving fast, building and launching across multiple fronts at the same time. Attribution and tracking were secondary. I knew things were working: Bali oversold, newsletter was growing, inbound was up. But I couldn't show you cleanly why any specific input was driving any specific output.

I've corrected that. But looking back, the sequencing was wrong. You want to be able to tell the story with data, not just instinct. Especially in a business where the founding team is making decisions about where to invest next. Intuition is valuable. Intuition with evidence is more persuasive.

A few things.

We knew who we were for. Not as a target demographic but as a real felt understanding. The content, the events, the onboarding, the retention model all pointed at the same person.

The brand had a voice that could be used without me in every conversation. That was important.

The business had proof points. A sold-out retreat. 80% retention. Members extending because they wanted to stay. Former members coming back as speakers. Those aren't metrics. They're signals that the community is working the way it was designed to.

And the positioning shift had landed. Sales conversations were shorter. The label was doing its job. 650K monthly impressions, 3K members, 7-fig in revenue. No paid spend. That's what the year added up to.

The member results made that real: