The community operator who made Milly "redundant"

Ece is the Community Operations Lead at Generalist World, a professional community serving 43,000 free subscribers and 670 paid members. With a background in industrial engineering, she transitioned through corporate roles, hospitality, and B2B events management before discovering her calling in community building during COVID. Previously, she led community initiatives for freelancer platforms and spent several years consulting on community operations and event strategy before partnering full-time with Generalist World founder Milly. Her work has scaled International Generalist Day across 34 countries and developed member-led programs like job search councils, portfolio career labs, and experiment clubs.

What you'll learn:

Some takeaways:

Community building is fundamentally slow and collaborative, not a quick-launch marketing channel. Unlike social media campaigns, communities must emerge organically with early members rather than being planned and executed top-down. The strongest communities start when founders build vulnerably alongside members instead of claiming to have all the answers. Businesses expecting fast returns will fail; this work requires patient investment over years, not quarters.

Niche peer communities provide essential support that broader networks cannot. Generalist World members consistently describe joining as "relief," revealing how much pressure they carried from not fitting conventional paths. Close friends and family, while supportive, often lack context for specific professional challenges. Specialised communities become critical infrastructure, not optional networking.

The best community metric is connection density between members, not engagement rates. Track how many members connected directly, made introductions, or collaborated—not event attendance or post counts. Community leaders should facilitate member-to-member connections rather than personally solving every problem. This "many-to-many" model creates exponentially more value than "one-to-many" content distribution.

Member-led programming scales impact while building deeper ownership. Generalist World members independently launched job search councils, portfolio career labs, and book clubs—often arriving with complete documentation already prepared. The team's role became servant leadership: supporting volunteers rather than designing everything. This requires establishing deep trust first, which cannot be rushed.

Small teams achieve outsized impact through "win-win-win" thinking and life-first planning. Three people run International Generalist Day across 34 countries by ensuring every initiative serves members, partners, and the organisation simultaneously. They deliberately schedule major initiatives around personal life events rather than forcing life to accommodate business. This sustainability-first approach prevents burnout and maintains enthusiasm.

Community cultures need both consistency and experimentation to avoid stagnation. Pure consistency becomes monotonous; constant new initiatives create chaos. The partnership between visionary idea-generators and operational realists creates productive tension. This year's planning emphasised perfecting existing programs rather than launching new ones—a maturity shift from earlier "save the world" ambitions.

Sustainable community leadership requires prioritising life first, profit second, and impact third. Prioritising impact above financial sustainability leads to burnout and business failure. Prioritising profit above wellbeing damages health and relationships. In community businesses, leaders must maintain personal satisfaction to authentically serve members—the work is relational and cannot be sustained through obligation alone.

Breaking into community work requires emotional alignment over credentials. The clearest indicator you belong in community roles is experiencing genuine joy (a "butterfly feeling") when two people you introduced become friends. If that triggers jealousy instead, this work isn't the right fit. Start small: bring three people together, identify the unique value, then expand gradually.

Where to find Ece

Where to find Milly

Generalist World resources:

🙏 Special thanks to our podcast producer James McKinven! (get in touch for all your podcast needs, he’s really great!)