Last Updated on November 16, 2020
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About Bryan Pham
Today we got a chance to catch up with Bryan Pham, the founder of a popular Facebook community called the Asian Hustle Network. As of this posting, 28k+ Asian Hustlers are part of the group and the community has had a few successful live gatherings in addition to a very active group.
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What inspired you to initially start the Asian Hustle Network?
In 2018, I started organizing Real Estate meetups in the Bay Area that quickly grew to over 1,000 members in 1 year. I was very inspired by bringing together like-minded individuals and wanted to bring everything I learned back to the Asian entrepreneurial community. It wasn’t until our trip to Japan in April of 2019 that when we were walking around the Meiji shrine in Tokyo that we were very inspired by reading all the wooden tablets on the wall about people sharing their stories from all over the world. That really resonated with us, and we really wanted to find a way to incorporate that into the community we wanted to build. But at this time, we had no idea what this idea was going to be and which platform we wanted to use. Around the time I returned to the United States that I got invited to a large Facebook group called Subtle Asian Traits that I learned about the influence of starting a Facebook group. I was still very hesitant about creating a group in fear of being in the public eye. It wasn’t until late October 2019 that Maggie and I attended a conference in the Bay Area and realized how underrepresented the Asian community is in media, corporate and investment ladder that we decided it was our final push to start Asian Hustle Network.
How did you get the first 1, 10, 1000 community members?
We started out by inviting our immediate network of friends and created a strong mission statement at the very beginning clearly stating our big audacious goal which was reaching 1 million members by the end of the month which didn’t happen but exponentially fueled our growth. Our main focus as the beginning was to ensure quality and build a sense of community where it was safe for us to share our stories, ideas and ask for help within the Asian entrepreneurial community.
What advice would you give to people starting their own communities from scratch?
My advice for those who are just starting out with their community is to create focus at the very beginning, set big audacious goals and a big vision. It’s important for new members joining to understand our why and why we are so passionate about wanting to accomplish that particular goal.
What is something you’ve learned from starting Asian Hustle Network that you felt wasn’t obvious before?
One thing I didn’t realize before creating Asian Hustle Network was how much the founder’s mindset, personality, interests, and maturity would be reflected back into the community. It’s very important to continue to grow personally in order to take the group to the next level. As the group founder, you are essentially becoming the brand of the group and members will look towards you to uphold your own values so make sure you know yourself deeply in order to be able to provide as much value back to the community.
How did you go about putting together your first physical event?
Starting the very first AHN event was pretty nerve-racking but we knew that we wanted to provide as much value as we can to our community. It is a part of our core values to give first before receiving. We started out thinking that the first event would be casual with roughly about 25/30 members showing up. We ended up with 260 RSVP members and plenty of others that wanted to come out. We had to switch members last minute to something much bigger. The support of the community has been overwhelmingly positive. We create a checklist of what we needed and asked members to help us with their expertise. Honestly, we couldn’t have done this event without them.
Advice for putting together an epic event on a budget?
In terms of budget, my advice would be figuring out what you would need in order to make the event very successful and work backward to see if there are members willing to sponsor for that niche. Anything else that can’t be sponsored we would look to raise money from the community via Patreon.
Anything you’d like to plug?
AHN is looking to further our vision by helping Asian entrepreneurs become more represented in mainstream media. We are looking to create highlight production videos to fly around the world to share back the inspirational stories back into the community. Please support us through Patreon or GoFundMe!
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