After running The Anvil and my own company Quasi for a while, I wanted to build a new community of founders at Purdue. To do so, I had to build a brand from the ground up, market it, and get founders to actively participate as they built. I created a new online community for ongoing discussions, learning, feedback, and shipping products to market. My LinkedIn launch post received over 20,000 hits, and within days, over a hundred founders joined. As we gained traction, we expanded to hosting large-scale events, further accelerating the community’s growth.

Purdue Founders had proven two things: a bottom-up approach to community-building was desperately needed on campus, and people across disciplines sought an environment like Catapult where they could develop meaningful products and projects.