Startup Baddie

The CommunityPlaybook.

A 5-hour workshop that turns community into your customer intelligence and growth engine. You leave with the playbook to run it.
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What is this? Is it for me?

Most brands only talk to their customer at two moments: when they ship something new, and when something breaks.

The decisions that follow get made on an outdated understanding of who that customer is and what they need now. And the longer this pattern runs, the further your business drifts from the people you are trying to serve, often without anyone in the building noticing it has happened.

Real-world community is the fastest way to fix that, because a room designed on purpose gives you what no survey or sales call ever could: the way your audience talks when no one is selling to them, the things they react to in the moment, and the needs they have that they cannot quite name yet.

The Community Playbook is the 5-hour workshop where we turn that into a working system for your business. By the end of it, you walk out with the framework, the format, and a step-by-step plan ready to run, all built around your audience and your goals.

What this is for

  • You are going to market and still guessing at the message
  • You have run events that went well in the room, and you still cannot point to a thing in the business that moved because of them
  • You want community to drive revenue, and you want to understand how to set it up so it does
  • You are building for a customer you do not know deeply enough yet to bet the next quarter on

How this works

  • One 5-hour workshop, in person in NYC or northern NJ
  • You bring openness, the willingness to ask and answer hard questions about your business, and clarity on who you want in the room. I bring the framework, the method, and the reality checks.
  • We build your plan together, in the room, from start to finish
  • You leave with your Community Playbook in hand, ready to run

You leave with

  • Clarity on who you are for and the gaps in your business's understanding of that customer
  • Your first event, designed around the Community Flywheel
  • A capture system across registration, the event itself, and the follow-up, so the room becomes your intelligence engine
  • A six-month roadmap with three event templates you can pull from
  • An honest read on visibility versus conversion, with realistic timelines for each
  • Your Community Playbook: the strategy, the gaps to listen for, the assumptions you are testing
The 5 hours
The Community Flywheel

Belonging builds trust. Trust reveals insight. Insight shapes what is next.

01

Where you are now

You walk in already knowing who you are for and the problem your business is solving for them. This is where we get the articulation crisp and start surfacing the gaps in what your business knows about that customer, because those gaps are exactly what community is going to fill.

02

Spark Belonging and Earn Trust

The first half of the Community Flywheel. We work through how your audience lowers its guard, what you are willing to do in your space to make that happen, and then what your brand is uniquely positioned to give them that is worth more to them than what they are giving back to you. Different audiences want different things. Founders want connections and intros. A health audience wants safety and privacy. The exchange has to be honest about what you bring.

03

Listen Closely and Shape What is Next

The second half of the Flywheel, where the room becomes your intelligence system. We map what gets captured and when. At registration: the open-ended questions and the data points worth asking for up front. During the event: what the people working the room are watching for and writing down. Afterwards: the short follow-up that turns the room into next steps. Then we work through how what you heard moves into reports, into the right teams, and into the design of your next event (because the learning has to leave the room to become something).

04

Visibility versus conversion

Most brands run their events as if they all serve the same goal, and then get frustrated when nothing converts. We separate them. Which events build presence and recognition. Which events are designed to move someone closer to buying. And what an honest six-month timeline looks like for each. This is also where we get into your budget reality and what an event spend gets you, so the work that follows this room gets judged against the right outcome.

05

Build the plan

We design your first event end to end, map out a six-month roadmap, put together three event templates you can pull from, and walk through how to evaluate them so you know whether an event worked the way you needed it to. The heavy lifting gets done in the room and the work after the workshop is execution. You walk out with your Community Playbook in hand: the strategy, the gaps you are listening for, the assumptions you are testing, and a calendar of next moves.

What to expect

What to
expect

  • A plan you can run as soon as you walk out of the room
  • Clarity on what to build, what to test, and what to ignore
  • A straight answer on whether you have community, or a marketing channel with friendly people in it
  • A clear way to measure whether community is doing what you set it up to do
  • The framework, the format, and the playbook in one half day
What this is not
  • Not a Slack channel with "community" in the name
  • Not a one-off panel you film and post
  • Not a room built to extract value from your audience
  • Not a someday plan. You leave with moves on the calendar.

Want ongoing help running it once it is built? That is Advisory.

About Ashley
Ashley Jefferson, founder of Startup Baddie

Hi, I'm Ashley.

I help founders and brands put the customer back at the center of the business, and use community as the engine that drives growth.

I have spent years building rooms. F3, the community I built for founders, funders, and fractional leaders, has brought together close to 2,000 people across New York, New Jersey, LA, SF, and Austin. I co-founded B2B Haus, a people-first B2B events brand that debuted at SXSW.

Before this, I worked in product at JPMorgan and Prudential, and I have an MBA from NYU Stern. I've watched too many brands guess at who their customer is, and that guess shapes the product they build, the message they take to market, and the way they try to grow. Closing that gap is the work, and community is how I do it.

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Investment

Two ways
in.

The Playbook, one on one
$3,000 solo founder or co-founder pair

The full 5 hours with me, focused entirely on you and where community plugs into your business. You bring the messy version of your thinking, and you walk out with your Community Playbook in hand, ready to run.

The Playbook, your team
$7,500 founding or leadership team, 2 to 6

The full 5 hours with your team in the room together, which means you skip the part where one person comes back from a workshop and tries to brief everyone else into alignment. By the end, your team is on the same page about who you are for, what you are testing, and the six months of community work in front of you.

In person in NYC or northern NJ. Limited spots, by application.

Startup Baddie

Stop guessing. Get the Playbook.

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