If you want to build a business around a free community, it’ll be hard to find a better idol than ​Grace Ling​.

Grace is the founder of ​Design Buddies​, world’s largest community of design professionals. Here are some facts about it:

• She has 60k+ members on her Discord, 150k+ members on her newsletter
• She organises in-person meetups in different cities around the world that get 200+ attendees regularly.
• She counts Figma, Adobe and countless other startups as sponsors - all of who reached out to her…inbound!
• She ran it as a solo founder for 2+ years along side her full-time job at Electronic Arts until going full-time at it in 2024.

So if I were you, i would use Grace’s “magic sauce” to build my free community business.

But what’s her magic sauce?

That’s what I’ll share in this lesson which is based on ​her interview on my podcast​.

First, are you sure you want to build a free community?

If you want to be in the business of building communities, you essentially have 2 routes:

• build a free community and monetise through sponsorships
• OR, build a paid community and charge members for access

None of these models is superior to the other. But only one of these is probably right for you. Here’s my checklist to make sure that you’re want to get on the free community train:

• You want to leave a big footprint by impacting the largest number of people possible.
• You’re ready to play the numbers game - because your primary metric of success is going to be the number of people in your community. Every other success metric is going to follow this.
• You’re okay with serving 2 sets of people - community members and sponsors.

If any (or all) of these facts make you question your will to build a free community, you should consider starting a paid one instead. With a paid community, you don’t need to spend energy on reaching tens of thousands of people - you can have a good business serving only a few hundred members.

Okay, now let me tell you how to go the free community route..

Start small but strong

Like every other business, you need to make sure your community has a strong start. This will both validate your idea and provides the seed for future growth.

Design Buddies started when Grace posted in a Facebook group called Asian Creative Network saying something like, “Hey, is anyone interested in creating a group chat about UX design and just chat about UX and product design?”

She had, ~200 people comment on that. So she made a chat group on Messenger. This group got really active. People were talking about career stuff, asking for feedback, sharing resources and being chaotic in general.

Only when she reached the cap of max members in a Messenger chat, she migrated to Discord where she could organise discussions around channels.

Lesson? You don’t need to offer much at the beginning. No websites, no channels, no nothing. Just give people a place to chat and try to create a chaos.

Wanna get 1000 members in 1 month? Be shameless.

With a free community, growth is the king. You need to get the big numbers as fast as possible. That requires a growth hacking mindset.

It won’t be enough to just announce it to your LinkedIn and wait for people to find you. Initially, you will have to find them.

When Grace was starting Design Buddies, she did a lot of crazy things to get her first 1000 community members. Here are some of them:

• She was shameless in promoting herself. She had been a content creator on LinkedIn so she maxed out that channel by creating a lot of like design career content and using that to drive traffic to Design Buddies.
• When she attended Zoom events, she noticed people were sharing their LinkedIns in the chat to connect with people. She decided to share link to her community and be like, “hey, join Design Buddies, the world's largest, like fastest growing design community”.
• Whenever she organised a workshop, she would join other communities and promote that workshop. Then when people joined the event, she would ask them to join Design Buddies, the host of that workshop.
• She ruthlessly plugged Design Buddies wherever she could - Slack groups , facebook groups, subreddits, everywhere. This got her banned from some subreddits but resulted in her getting 1000+ members in 30 days.

Lesson? Be shameless in promoting your community wherever you can.

Partner with other communities

This was another growth tactic that helped her. Especially when organising local city meetups around the world.

“In our meetup with Singapore, we partnered with communities like Singapore product design, Lottie Files, Rakuten, Friends of Figma Singapore. So by leveraging my network to connect with other community builders I was able to get connections to the venue, the catering and a lot of marketing stuff.”– Grace talking about the Singapore meetup that got 200+ attendees*

Lesson? Don’t think of other communities as competition. Think of them as partners and find ways to grow together.

Money stuff: How to let sponsors find you

"All of our sponsors have been inbound.”

This was the craziest part of the interview. Grace has this philosophy of doing great work, telling the world about it and letting the money find her.

It’s almost like she doesn’t care about the money. In fact, she told me this:

“Money is a plus, but it's not like everything that I want to get out of it (the community).”

That is the chill, low stress and fun way of making money that I want to embody. So here are my notes.

1. Be loud and proud about your work

If you think you’re doing the best work you can do, you have every reason to loudly tell the world about it. Toot your own horn. Build in public. Be loud and proud about your work.

Grace talks a lot about community building, design, what she does with Design Buddies and the value it brings to people.

So sponsors naturally reach out to her on LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram or on the Design Buddies website (through the partnership form).

2. Deeply understand their goals and partner with them

Grace doesn’t simply slap on the sponsor’s name in a newsletter or an event… she works with them to really understand their goals.

• Why they want to work with Design Buddies?
• What's working? Well, what's not working?
• How can we help tailor something for them to help give them value?
• And also how can they help us as well?

So she treats sponsor less as a sponsor and more as a partner who joins forces to co-create something of value.

3. Money is a plus but it’s not everything

Grace prioritises relationship building.

That’s why she’s not hesitant to work with startups who don’t have funding to pay for sponsorship but have a mission that she believes in. If she feels like what they're doing is important for the larger design community, she’ll partner with them.

Even with the sponsors who pay, she doesn’t expect them to simply pay the money and be done with it. She recruits their help in non-financial areas as well like finding speakers for events or getting jobs for her community members.

How to find sponsors

Now I understand, if you want to take a more active approach to finding sponsors. So I asked Grace how to find good sponsors to partner with.

Her response -

1. Find out what tools people are using in your community and what tools are they excited about.
2. Find out the people on the marketing team from those companies on LinkedIn and reach out to them.
3. You can be like, “Hey, I run this huge community of 5000 members and a lot of people in our community are very excited about learning about your tool. We would love to collaborate on something to just see how we can help each other.”

Keep it simple as that and just hop on the call to see what their goals are and how you can support them.

How to build an engaged community?

Now we come to the heart of it all - an engaged community.

Starting a group chat doesn’t mean you have a engaged community. You need to understand what people want to get out of it and make sure you design a community to address their needs.

How do you do that? Here’s Grace’s playbook:

Build for yourself and don’t try to please every member

Grace started Design Buddies because she wanted a place to make design friends and learn design together without feeling judged. This was important to her because she was a new designer. She wanted a place with fun, casual vibes rather than the stuffy, corporate professional vibes that existed in the communities she was a part of.

So Grace’s advice for you?

“Don’t be afraid to experiment yourself and seeing what works out”.

Her compass is a combination of:

• being curious
• being authentically who she is
• and, experimenting along the way

Remember that as with any product, you can’t satisfy every user. And you should not strive to do that either.

Grace receives a lot of positive DMs about Design Buddies. But sometimes she also gets messages where people say “Design Buddies sucks!”

When Grace asks this, the naysayer often says that it's too like chaotic or too casual. And that’s exactly the vibe that she is going for!

So don't feel the need to build a community for like every single person. Not everyone is your target audience. As long as you make decisions that benefit the majority, you will keep moving forward.

Start a newsletter to expand your reach

Not everyone is going to join your chat. And even fewer will engage there.

Grace said that she has 5-figure amount of lurkers versus like 3-figure amount of talkers in the community. But the most important realisation? Majority of the attendees at their in-person events find them through newsletter and social media.

So start a newsletter for your members.

And most importantly, cultivate leaders in your community

“Without them, I don't think Design Buddies would stay alive.”

Creating a volunteer/leadership program that works is like unlocking those extra balls in Breakout. Suddenly you are making impact at level you hadn’t imagined earlier.

People who are already super active in your community are great candidates for being your community leaders.

Grace’s approach has been to create an environment where the right people find her instead of the other way.

A key part of that involves supporting them. If you can’t pay them for their time, get creative about understanding their goals and helping them achieve those goals.

• Are they looking for jobs?
• Are they looking to add something on their portfolio?
• Introductions?

Make sure you understand what they are looking for and see if you can help them.

If you can’t find an arrangement that mutually benefits both of you, know that it’s better to pass on the opportunity.

The only way it can work is if this experience be valuable to them.

If you would like to see Grace in action, join ​Design Buddies​ or follow ​Grace​ on LinkedIn. She is a force of energy.

You can also check out our complete interview here: