When Community Building Becomes an Industry

Six months of Bloom

This April, somewhat by accident, I started the Bloom community. Every month since, I've checked in on whether we're actually heading in the right direction, and somehow six months have gone by. A quick summary of where we are: we've run about 40 offline events, big and small, and worked with global tech companies like Anthropic, Snowflake, Datadog and Nebius. About 7,500 people have signed up for at least one Bloom event so far. At this point, I think most office workers in Korea who'd count as AI early adopters have heard of us and signed up for something at least once. Our Discord community has grown to 3,500 people and is pretty active.

I'll share this publicly for the first time: right now, Bloom's only real source of revenue is a B2B product that helps companies with their marketing. Every company has different goals, difficulty and expected results, so the terms are different every time. We started making money in earnest around June, and our cumulative revenue so far is about 85 million won (roughly $60,000). About half of that is profit after outside costs like venue rental, catering and video production. On a monthly basis, that works out to about 20 to 30 million won (roughly $14,000 to $21,000). But once you factor in salaries for the three of us and the cost of running our app and website, we're still around break-even or slightly in the red. (YouTube revenue has started coming in too, but it's still tiny.)

Still, things clearly feel different from before. A B2B event used to take a long lead time and a lot of persuading. These days the go/no-go decision comes very fast. That means every B2B event still feels like a test, with the pressure of "we have to make this one as good as it can possibly be." On the other hand, as our internal protocols and systems settle in, the effort it takes to prepare each event is slowly going down. We used to rely mostly on outbound sales. Now inbound inquiries keep growing, and we're using our resources more efficiently.

As our brand awareness and reach have grown, our sponsorship price per event has gone up too. There must be some fixed LTV per user and CAC per channel, so the price can't go up forever. But for now, I feel there's still so much room that I can't even tell where the ceiling is. I heard secondhand that someone was surprised to find out that one of our recent events, which we thought was priced pretty high, was actually "the cheapest option on the market." Maybe we just don't know the going rate yet, since we're new players in this market. Or maybe we priced things relatively low because we work mostly through partnerships and promote through the community channels we've built, so apart from outside costs like catering and filming, we spend almost nothing on marketing.

Either way, I think of this as the entry fee a new player pays to get into a new market. We're sticking to a value-for-money strategy: keep costs down and push quality as high as we can. That's one rule our team doesn't bend on.

Why the influencer market caught my eye

Our results aren't really the point of this post, though. If you only look at it as a solo business, community can be a pretty good line of work. The barrier to entry is very low. You don't need a license or expensive equipment. You can design your cash flow in several ways: charging per event, adjusting venue fees, bringing in B2B ads. You can grow a community without a big upfront investment and get plenty of chances to adjust your business model along the way.

But Bloom is a for-profit company, and a VC-backed startup at that. For a company like that, making community its main business isn't an easy choice. We have to prove it's sustainable, and we have to show growth.

This is where I got a hint from the influencer marketing market. What makes influencer marketing interesting is that the idea of an "influencer" barely existed in the past. Only celebrities who appeared in mass media, backed by huge production budgets, could play anything like that role. That was less a market than a series of one-off deals between big companies with huge budgets and a handful of celebrities with enormous influence. Since the number of suppliers (celebrities) was so small, it made a kind of sense that a single TV commercial could cost billions of won (millions of dollars).

Then social media platforms appeared and took off, and the idea of the micro-influencer was born. Put simply, the supply side became overwhelmingly diverse. Mega-influencers and celebrities still get paid a lot and still have mass influence, but now deals happen easily between small companies and small influencers too. I think that's the point where a collection of deals started becoming a market. As more people joined, the market matured and the whole pie got bigger. Alongside the influencers themselves, an ecosystem of tools and platforms grew up to support them: data measurement, creative work, filming equipment and so on.

Here's a hypothetical scenario I keep thinking about. Imagine that in the very early days there was only one social media influencer. Say that person decided "I'm taking this whole market for myself" and kept any other influencers from emerging. With no competition, they'd have enjoyed steady cash flow from a monopoly for a while. But with no new creators or advertisers coming in, the growth of the whole market would have been capped. And because the market stayed small, the ceiling on what that person could earn most likely wouldn't have moved much either.

Now think about the social media influencer ecosystem we actually see today. Especially in the US, a lot of influencers share their know-how freely. Some sell their own marketing courses or promote tools they've been sponsored by, but at a deeper level, I get the feeling they want more players to come into the game. I used to see it as plain bragging. Lately, I get the impression they're preaching this ecosystem pretty sincerely.

I think the deeper motive is "I want to grow the market I work in." There will be more competitors, but as more influencers and brands join, they hope some of the marketing budget that used to go to TV, newspapers and radio will flow to the platforms where they work. In other words, they figure that being a top player in a bigger market will bring them a much bigger slice of the pie than whatever a small monopoly could. Since they have the first-mover advantage, they're probably also confident they'll grow naturally along with the market.

Social media influencer marketing has now clearly become an industry. More money keeps flowing in, the number of players keeps growing, and global tech giants like Meta, TikTok and YouTube were born on top of this market. They'll keep strengthening their platforms and systems to protect their businesses. From an investment point of view, the very bottom is already behind us, but the timing still looks attractive enough.

Bloom shouldn't be the only one

Now to community building, the world I jumped into. Honestly, I'm not sure how different social media influencing and community building really are at their core. If I had to draw a line, social media reaches people more widely, and community reaches them more deeply. Either way, both run B2B businesses (corporate ads, sponsorships) and B2C businesses (paid memberships, subscriptions, product sales) on top of their influence and audience, so the structure isn't very different.

Oddly, though, I can't think of many markets or companies that put "community building" front and center. I've heard of places in Korea like Munto (a social club platform) and Trevari (a paid book club service), but I haven't been to them myself. There are probably plenty of similar models overseas, but I've hardly ever seen a mega-influencer like MrBeast work under the title of "community builder." Maybe community builders turn into social media influencers at some point, or maybe they all just get lumped together under the broad label of "influencer."

Anyway, here's what I want to say. If Bloom wants to survive as a successful community, at least in Korea, it can't be the only AI community builder. We need many more communities like ours. More community builders means more event hosts and more attendees, more suppliers and more demand. Personally, I think something like 10 percent suppliers and 90 percent demand is a healthy ratio. (Roughly one person covering ten.)

Seoul has the infrastructure, but not the variety

Seoul's public transit is as good as any city in the world's, and it's densely populated. When I was studying abroad and looking at Korean college students back home, that big-city infrastructure was what I envied most. Students can easily meet people from other universities, and even if you're not a student, office workers and all kinds of people can join offline meetups much more easily. I can't think of many countries with better infrastructure for meeting in person than Korea.

What's funny is that nightlife (the bars, clubs and lounges around Itaewon, Hongdae and Hapjeong) is hugely developed, while the gatherings you could actually call "communities" cover a pretty narrow range of topics. I think part of it is Korea's long-standing obsession with education, and a lifestyle centered on offices and classrooms rather than leisure. Even when people get together, I often see it stay a one-way study session or swing all the way to clubs and drinking.

A few years ago, I went to a startup meetup abroad. The space didn't feel like a typical office. It was pretty open. One speaker gave a talk first, and then attendees freely asked questions and kept the conversation going. On the surface it was a lecture, but instead of sitting in rows at desks, people sat around on beanbags and stools, and it felt much more equal. It wasn't two hours of listening to a lecture. One hour was the talk and the other hour was casual sharing of opinions. It felt very different from the events I'd been to before, and it left a big impression on me on the way home. Back then, I never imagined that I'd someday be the one up there speaking.

To sum up, I think there are roughly two reasons community life never got more sophisticated in a city like Seoul, with all its density and transit. First, most gatherings are built for lecture halls and hagwon-style spaces (hagwon are Korea's private cram schools), so they naturally get stuck in one-way delivery. Second, the most popular interest in Korea isn't AI, investing or startups. It's still studying for certifications and preparing for exams. People's time and energy go there, so communities built on a variety of tastes and interests have had relatively little room.

Comparing education systems across countries doesn't mean much on its own, but when I think back to high school in the US, the picture was a little different. School ended around 2:30 p.m., and students did the sports or club activities they'd signed up for, hard, until 6. After dinner, everyone split off into study groups. In study lounges, dorm rooms, the library, with a teacher, in groups of students or alone, people ran their own sessions in a fairly self-directed way.

The specific way of studying isn't what matters here. You need a variety of topics for supply to show up naturally and meet people's needs. And for topics to get more varied, a format that allows two-way conversation works much better than a one-way lecture. For real two-way discussion, everyone knows the "two-pizza rule": seven or eight people at most. I believe these small units add up, connect with each other and grow into bigger communities.

What Bloom is doing about it

That was a long detour, so let me come back to Bloom. Here's the summary.

First, for the Bloom community to become a sustainable business that also makes sense from a VC's point of view, we need to keep growing explosively. Just maintaining our current results isn't enough.

Second, that growth is hard to create with our own cash flow and sales pipeline alone. We have to grow the pie of the market we jumped into. The whole category of "AI community" needs to become familiar to many more people and become an area where many more companies spend their budgets.

Third, to grow the pie, the most important thing is more suppliers. In the short term it may look like more competitors, but I believe that the more new hosts and communities there are, the more chances a wider range of people get to dip a toe in, and the whole market grows in the process.

To help this along, Bloom is going to share the community network of about 7,500 people we've built over the past six months. Until now, only we hosted events, under the Bloom brand. From here on, we plan to let anyone open a Mixer or an Event on the new Bloom App. If you want to host a gathering aimed at AI early adopters, you won't have to start from zero. We want you to be able to start from one, inside the Bloom community.

I hope many more AI community builders show up this way. For individuals, it's a way to build a personal brand without much risk and to test a small revenue model at the same time. For the market as a whole, more suppliers will mean more money flowing into the community space. That money will in turn create more high-quality gatherings, which will draw in more people. Social media influencer marketing grew into the huge industry it is today, and I hope community building also grows into an industry, beyond a handful of deals (like the partnerships we currently do with a few big companies). Along the way, I think there will be big enough opportunities for us and for all the other community builders who jump in with us.

The gathering you can open on the Bloom app right now is the Mixer. It's the small, two-way format I described above, built so that anyone can host or join one. Hosting or joining a Mixer takes a 20,000 won (about $14) monthly subscription. I mentioned that community businesses have both B2B and B2C sides, and this is Bloom's first try at B2C. Hosts can't charge their own attendance fee yet, but we plan to open that up too. Once you register a card, your first one is free, so come sit in on one, and if it clicks, try hosting the next one yourself.

Go to app.bloomworld.ai, sign up as a member, and you can start building a community right away. A lot of people ask me these days which gatherings they should go to. My answer is: "Just start one yourself." The start is the hard part, but this market is still close to a blue ocean. Like the early YouTubers, people who start now still have a real chance to grow fast. Bloom wants to stay close by and help in a variety of ways so the market can keep growing.

Originally written in Korean on Brunch, October 10, 2026.