Brand and growth strategy to help a Vancouver events platform shift from a one-club dominant event host into a thriving mosaic network of people building community for one another.
When I joined, Flock Social Club was throwing events, and Flock Social App was just beginning to open up as a platform for others to host their own events.
Confusing, right? We got these questions all the time. The two identities were getting tangled, and that was costing platform growth. Because people couldn't cleanly separate "the club that hosts parties" from "the app where anyone can host and discover events," Flock wasn't being seen as somewhere to find events beyond the ones we threw ourselves. We could only kind of explain it better when we likened ourselves to:
First, we had to make it known what the greater Flock app stood for. Compared to our competitors, we're created specifically to counter the problems we encounter in Vancouver: commonly known as cliquey, flakey, and civilly cold towards newcomers and young adults just entering the workforce. Yes, we have our run clubs and tech hubs in Vancouver, but every interest and hobby deserves a home and an audience.
Our brand ethos met our brand tone in a way where a heartfelt mission is executed in a way that resonates with our target audience of 20-30somethings: warm, fun, and Gen-Z.
We made our messaging and visuals clear. While the warmth in our tone lives throughout, Flock fonts and graphics are used specifically for our own events, while we turned the spotlight to the brands of other communities — to highlight the diversity living on our app, and encourage conversations that publicly answer the distinction between club and app. We put real weight behind highlighting other communities — shoutouts, community highlights, and more.
Even as Flock's own events sold out fast, there weren't enough other events on the platform to catch that overflow demand. We suspected hosts were staying away too, worried they wouldn't get credit for their own events on a new platform so associated with one club — defaulting to the status quo of Eventbrite or Google Forms instead.
With Bryan, our Founder & CTO, working overtime building the mobile app, we needed our efforts to pay off, fast. While Jess, our Founder & CEO, was working outbound outreach hard, I wanted to dig into the root cause instead: what was actually the bottleneck to growth?
I ran user and market research for both of our customer bases — the attendees, and the community hosts — via in-person conversations at events, direct outreach, and online engagement. The team's instinct was to keep improving the end-user (attendee) experience. My research pointed to the community hosts.
See, I was thinking:
So the real question was: with so many engaged, willing attendees showing up again and again, why aren't more of them becoming hosts themselves?
The answer came down to four consistent fears:
Afraid no one will show up
Don't know how to begin planning
Don't know how to market an event
Don't know what to host in the first place
My initiative was to bring down the barrier to hosting while elevating what it really means, in a way that resonates with local pride: it's not just hosting an event and building a community — it's creating a Vancouver you want to live in, making it a little less lonely for everyone.
To surface pain point #1 at scale, I launched a highly-engaged Instagram Stories series asking the community:
I asked the community a follow-up: if those fears were gone, what communities would they actually start? Then I published the engagement numbers behind each idea people threw out, turning it into a validation platform for people with ideas — addressing pain point #1 — and providing sparks of inspiration for those who don't — addressing pain point #4. It was genuinely fun to watch it play out.
On the logistics front, we started connecting new communities to venue resources and to more seasoned hosts willing to share their own playbooks — addressing pain point #2. I put out a series of event marketing education videos, teaching the community how to plan and promote their own events based on what I knew from the strategy side — addressing pain point #3.
Directly attributable to that campaign, 17 new communities joined Flock, one of the most notable being The Pickleball Club, which now has 600+ members. TL;DR, lowering the barrier to hosting worked. Hooray!
Over my tenure at Flock, from July 2025 to March 2026:
Since then, Flock has grown to over 8,000 users today, and has expanded nationwide, with new communities popping up in Toronto, Ottawa, and Montreal.
Flock has also added a new meetup feature for casual, impromptu hangouts.
Please keep supporting Jess & Bryan on their mission to make our cities less lonely ♥ Follow @flocksocial.app on Instagram, and download Flock Social App on iOS and Android today.