A Personal Note From Orion

Welcome, stellar life community! The power to build meaningful connections in our digital age lies in authentic leadership and strategic community building. Today’s episode is a masterclass in authentic community building and leadership transformation.

I’m excited to introduce you to Maayan Gordon, a remarkable entrepreneur and community-building expert who transformed from being “incredibly shy” with panic attacks before Zoom calls to building massive online communities and helping others do the same. Her journey from college dropout to successful entrepreneur and community strategist is both inspiring and packed with practical wisdom.

What I love most about this conversation is Maayan’s refreshing honesty about her growth journey and her emphasis on authentic connection. Whether you’re building a business, growing your online presence, or seeking to make meaningful connections, you’ll discover strategies for community building, personal branding, and mindset transformation.

This conversation goes beyond typical business advice to explore what it truly means to create value and build genuine relationships in our interconnected world. So, without further ado, let’s dive into the show!

In This Episode

• [02:06] – Orion welcomes Maayan Gordon as she recounts how she discovered her passion for copywriting and how this career shift paved the way for her entrepreneurial journey.
• [09:02] – Maayan integrates branding with community building, offering insights on creating a cohesive and engaging community experience.
• [14:54] – Explore the key principles of launching a thriving community as Maayan presents a timeless and structured framework.
• [21:38] – Orion seeks tips for forging strategic partnerships while Maayan shares techniques from her own experiences.
• [28:36] – Reflecting on future aspirations, Maayan talks about leadership growth and becoming more community-centered, even amidst personal life transitions.
• [32:59] – Gain inspiration from Maayan’s personal development journey as she discusses transformative books like Grit and impactful podcasts that fuel continuous growth.
• [37:44] – Maayan shares practical tips for living a stellar life.
• [41:27] – Here’s how you can connect with Maayan Gordon and explore more of her work.

Jump to Links and Resources

About Today’s Show

Hi Maayan. Welcome to Stellar Life Podcast. Thank you so much for being here.

Yeah, I’m super excited. Also, I have to say your studio background looks really, really cool. I love it.

I know. I’ve been struggling with the green screen. I wish I had this beautiful studio, but I’m not there yet. So, this is a virtual background for now. Before we begin, maybe you can share your core story and how you discovered your passion.

I think it looks great. I’ll try to keep it short because that’s a long journey, but I would say the core element of my story is that I grew up feeling very different. Many people feel like they don’t fit in when they’re kids. That was certainly the case for me. I was always really good at school and academic work, but it wasn’t something I was super passionate about. I followed the normal path, tried to get good grades, and then went to college because everyone at my high school did that. 

It’s what my parents wanted. I got to college, and I was really, really bored and a little bit miserable. At the same time, I was finally on my own for the first time. I had all of this new freedom to think differently and explore. In some of my explorations, I found a career path that had never been presented to me, which is copywriting. All of a sudden, I was making $20-$30 an hour writing descriptions for people’s Amazon or Shopify products or writing emails. 

I thought these things were very basic because I never imagined someone would pay me to write their email. It was like a novel concept. I decided to pursue that. I ended up dropping out of college after three semesters. I started by moving in with my boyfriend at the time, who’s now my husband. Needless to say, my parents were unhappy with any of these decisions and freaked out for a little bit. I did that for a while before I got tired of chasing new work and gigs in the freelance framework.

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I decided to start a business because I felt like all of the work I was doing would build the business. I wasn’t wasting time messaging people for three hours or (I think a lot of people can relate to this now) applying for a lot of jobs that I never got. That time just felt so wasted and not productive. At least in a business, all of the time I went working on it, even if I didn’t make money directly from that work, it was going to build something bigger, and that was more valuable. 

I ended up starting my first company when I was down in California. My husband and I used the library at the college that I dropped out of to go in every day and do a bunch of research. We came up with a product idea, which was a smoking accessory, and we wholesaled it to smoke shops all across the US. That business did very well. I started using Instagram and Facebook for business purposes, and I did that with three different companies over the course of the first 10 years of my business. 

I didn’t have a ton of other business foundations. I had no education in business fundamentals, so I had no idea what I was doing from a financial perspective. We tried hiring in a couple of the businesses and it had some success, but I made many mistakes, like a ton of failure. Fast forward to 2019, I really pivoted from just being on Instagram and Facebook to TikTok and LinkedIn. TikTok exploded for me very, very quickly. 

At that point, I became fascinated with AI because it was very clear that TikTok had a different algorithm than the other social media platforms. I was really learning a lot from TikTok and, at the same time, for the first time in my life, had access to this whole world of entrepreneurship through LinkedIn and started building all of these relationships and having all of these conversations with other highly successful entrepreneurs, CEOs, COOs, and people just in all sorts of different roles.

Community building is a combination of implementation I learned from operating different businesses and creating systems and processes.

That’s also when I got my first business coach and started to develop my skill set as an entrepreneur in a very intentional way. 2020 is when I started my marketing company, and I’ve gone through a series of pivots and evolution since then. I started with coaching and moved into consulting, and that led me to where I am now, where I do community building. I helped build online communities and also did personal brand development because those two things usually support each other and go hand in hand. For me, community building is really a combination of the strategy side that I was doing in consulting with the implementation side that I learned from operating different businesses and creating systems and processes,  and then again, the kind of branding side as to how you’re bringing people into the community.

Wow, that’s amazing. I love that you had the guts to leave your school and just go for it. It’s like what my husband did when he stepped in the middle, and now he’s a very successful entrepreneur.

I would say it was a little less guts. I had almost an emotional mental breakdown. It was finals time in my third semester, and I was taking five very hard classes, even though a full workload in the US is three classes. I didn’t enjoy any of them and knew I didn’t know the material well enough to get straight A’s on all of them. My entire goal in college was to be a veterinarian. Veterinary school is extremely hard to get into, partially because there are few vet schools in the United States. 

It’s very, very competitive. I was like, “Why am I doing all of this? I’m not even going to get in.” I’m just tearfully crying each day. If it weren’t for my husband, I would have dropped out. He said, “Anything that makes you feel this way and is upsetting is not the right choice for you.” I said, “That’s relatively logical, but what?” I took that leap because the other option felt somewhat unbearable.

Smart man. When I was a kid, I wanted to be a singer, and then I wanted to be a veterinarian. But when I understood that being a veterinarian includes blood, cutting, and all that, I changed to zoologist.

That’s so funny because one of the things that helped me realize that veterinary medicine was not a good path for me. I took a zoology course in college, where we had to dissect worms.

I also thought you don’t have to dissect in zoology; you just watch animals.

I don’t know. The course that I took was labeled zoology because I think we were learning about all the different phyla and classes. It was on our test. We had to dissect to identify the different classes and stuff of the animal. It was very upsetting to me to have to cut into even something that was like dead but used to be alive.

How do you combine branding and community building? What’s the connection there?

When it comes to community building, there’s the experience people have inside the community. Then, there’s the question, “How do you get people to find out about and join the community?” Branding, in general, solves the attraction problem, gets people in, and bridges the gap into what the experience inside the community is. A community talks about who it is for and its purpose and mission. 

Those are two of the centralized components of branding. Messaging cannot only attract people, but once they’ve joined and signed up, they have expectations around, “Okay, I know why I’m here. I know the other types of people who will be a part of this community, and they’ll have these shared visions, goals, or purposes for the same reason that I joined the community.”

Branding, in general, solves the attraction problem, gets people in, and bridges the gap into what the experience inside the community is.

Right. I’m rebranding my website right now, and it will look completely different. It’s very bold. It’s going to look awesome, but very different than other websites. I feel like in many personal photos of mine, like tons of them, like I am the brand. My branding coach told me, “You want to go really big on your website so people will see you at your best, and then when you meet them, you don’t have to prove so much. They already know who you can be.” Is that correct?

I think we form opinions about people based on what we see online a lot of the time. There’s the whole first impressions idea. A first impression is a very big deal. It cements how we think about a person, an experience, or a place. A lot of times, people’s first impressions of other people will be online in some way, whether that’s through social media or a website. That experience or exposure creates a foundation and a framework of who we think someone is and how we feel about them. Then, everything else starts to fit into or support that framework. Because we all have one of the biggest, it’s like 30-something different biases that the human brain has, one of them is confirmation bias. Whatever I believe initially, my brain will try and find other pieces of evidence to support that belief. If you can get someone to interact with you, even through a website, to feel like, “Wow, this person’s amazing.” Then, when you talk to or meet them in person, that’s the framework they’re starting from in their brain, which is looking for more evidence to support that belief.

How do you know you’re making the right choice? I feel like I did my best. It is going to launch soon. How do I know that this was the right path or should have been? For example, my old website is more formal, and now the photos are wilder. I did some photo shoots in Costa Rica, and it’s very different. It’s not for everyone, but it feels like a gamble.

I think you’re bringing up a really good point and something super common, which is that whenever we do something new, there’s gonna be fear involved because we are not 100% sure about anything that’s gonna happen in the future. There’s no way to know this is the right decision on almost anything. That being said, getting feedback is a great way to know if something’s the right decision for you. 

I suggest that you and anyone else going through a rebranding process before publicly saying, “This is the new brand,” get feedback from not just random people but the people you’re trying to connect with. This also goes back to an important part of branding: having a particular goal. What are you trying to achieve with your brand? Is there a particular person you’re trying to attract? Is there a particular response you’re trying to elicit? 

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Then, you find a group of those people and get their genuine feedback. If you think about any really large company, they’ll spend a lot of money on focus groups to do the same thing before coming out. For example, I don’t know if this is something like in Israel, but in the US, Walmart just rebranded. All they did was make their logo a little bit brighter. They barely changed anything. But I’m certain they spent a lot of money testing different ideas on focus groups.

Really? I didn’t see that.

And seeing what people responded to, not just random people but people in their target market that they’re trying to connect with and attract, I’d say that’s a really good way to not only see if you’re making the right choice but it also makes you feel way more confident in launching your brand. If you’ve gotten feedback from ten different people, and they’re all like, “This is freaking awesome.” You’re like, “Yeah, maybe it is awesome.”

Yeah, it may be too late for me, though. It’s going to happen anyway. I built communities in the past, but then I dropped them. I’m starting now from scratch. How do I build a very large community quickly and effectively?

Well, you used two words that may or may not be possible for me. So, for the “quickly” part, I think you can be very effective without needing speed. Obviously, it’s going to depend on what we’ll call the assets you already have. Someone with a huge engaged following can build a community much more quickly than someone who does not even post on social media and wants to go straight to the community.

Slowly and effectively.

That will be a lot harder because people don’t know who you are. You can do a lot of stuff in person. If you have an in-person community, you can harness that, too. But if you don’t have many relationships and many people don’t know you, who will you build the community with? Just the way social media works, if you’re starting, your content won’t get shown to many people a lot of the time.

Everyone should start by defining the mission and purpose of their community, whether they have a large or small audience. Why are people joining? What are they trying to achieve? What is the community helping them accomplish? Once you have that, you can map out, “Okay, so based on this mission, who is this really for?” You can start by defining who it’s for first.

The mission will provide many details so that you can be more granular about who will be attracted to this community, who will benefit from it, and who will experience that value. Once you have those two things, you can structure the community. So, if this is their goal for people who value these different things, what does that mean for what I need to provide as a community?

Do I need to be teaching them something? Do they need support? They may need a safe place to be able to communicate. Do they need interaction with each other? What are the things that they need to be able to accomplish this goal and this mission? Then you build those elements. Let’s say you’re building a community for software developers, and you decide the thing that they need is training and information to be able to do it. 

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However, they also need support from their peers to feel encouraged while learning and doing it. You’re going to structure. That means the elements you need to create a course are Zoom meetings where people share their progress and challenges and support each other. That’s what you’re going to launch the community with.

You build the community’s core elements, and then you go into where people have a hard time: they’ll just announce it. You should always have a buildup to launching a community. You don’t wanna all of a sudden just surprise people and say, “Hey, I have this community,” and people have never heard of it. They don’t know what it is. They don’t know what you’re talking about. They don’t know who it’s for. 

So actually, while you’re going through the process of saying, “Here’s what my community is going to accomplish for this type of people. Start talking about that online, right? Start talking about it to people you know in person. Say, “Hey, I’m building a community and really excited about it. It’s gonna be for software developers, and it’s gonna solve this problem that I know that they experience.” Then people are like, “That’s really cool. I can’t wait to see what this is gonna be like.”

You want to have a build-up period where you’re talking about the community, building anticipation and excitement, and starting to connect with some people who might be members. Then you want to do your launch. During the launch, you may want to have different types of incentives or promotions. You could have a founding member discount available for a limited time or for a limited number of people. You could have a bonus offer that is only available for a certain amount of time.

The more focused you are, the more effective you can be in any area.

Let’s say you’re doing a community that is basically a coaching community where you’re teaching people how to improve their LinkedIn. It’s like teaching people how there are lots of LinkedIn coaches that have coaching groups. Let’s say you’re doing this community around, “Here’s how you get better at doing LinkedIn.” Well, the first 30 people that sign up, in addition to all the normal things they get in the community, the content and the Zoom calls, also get a one-on-one hour where you’re personally going through their LinkedIn profile and content and helping them optimize. That could be an example of a limited bonus offer. Then, once you’ve done that, even if you’ve got members, all you have to do is run the community, make sure people are engaged, and grow it. Very simple.

Yeah, very simple. What was your process? Because you build a huge community. How did you do it? What are some things that you will never do in the process?

That’s a really interesting question—things I would never do. I don’t have an answer off the top of my head for that. I could tell you that what I did is maybe not the best way to do it, which is actually that I started with a paid community instead of building a free community first. Actually, I started a free community and a paid community at the same time. I think it is to your point that it is better to go slow and effective and have a really like centered focus. 

I think the more focused you are, the more effective you can be in any area. This is partly just like my personality. I like to do many things at once, which has benefits and certainly has downsides. I launched my free community and quickly recruited 10 people so that I could get feedback and start to learn what was working and what was not working.

At the same time, I launched communities with other people. My core business is doing the strategy and setup and helping launch communities for others. I had different areas where I was able to test and learn from. That’s really the process I like to use. It’s all about having a hypothesis or theory, setting up an experiment, getting feedback, collecting data, and then iterating and tweaking something and trying again. 

Good questions that can help spark our curiosity would be asking about someone’s journey.

That’s a really good way to learn in terms of trying to hit a home run and have the community be super successful off the bat. The more time you can put into the planning and preparation, the better. If you want to launch a book and have it be very successful, like the people who are getting on The Wall Street Journal’s bestseller list, they’re doing months and months and months of preparation. It’s why if you go with a traditional publisher, the book’s not coming out for like two years. 

It takes a very long time because they’re doing a ton of stuff behind the scenes to set up deals, different partnerships, distribution, and promotion. So, it’s the same thing with a community. You want it to go really, really crazy when you first launch it. Well, you’ll have to spend more time upfront, like planning and structuring how you’re going to accomplish that.

How do you contact people and make deals and promotions? My weakness is actually asking people. “Hey, let’s work together. Hey, let’s do this together. I’m kind of interesting.” But I’m kind of shy when it comes to asking people.

LinkedIn is my favorite platform. I find it the easiest to connect with people and get on a call with them. So the way you ask is not in person because we’re virtual, but you want to ask someone to their face, not through a screen. It’s going to be much, much more effective. The first step is getting someone on a call and doing it through the context of, “Hey, I have no specific agenda. I want to get to know you better.” That has to be relatively genuine. 

You can have two dynamics at the same time. You can have goals for which you want to form partnerships and do strategic deals. You can also want to get to know people and build relationships. Those two things can both be true. If you start in the framework of, “I want to get to know you, and we’ll see if it goes,” towards my second goal. If all that happens, I will form a new friendship, learn about you, and see how I can help you. That’s amazing, too. That’s gonna be a win for me. 

So you start with that framework, get on a call with someone, and I would say the element that helps you lead up to the asking part so that it doesn’t feel so scary or icky for a lot of people is just being genuinely curious about the person. If you are genuinely curious about someone else, they will be curious about you. A lot of times, they’ll ask you. If I’m just mesmerized by someone, like, “Wow, tell me more about this thing. That is so cool.” 

Part of getting better is always reflecting on how something went.

Good questions that can help spark our curiosity would be asking about someone’s journey. How did they get into what they were doing? What made them interested in it? That’s usually a pretty cool story. Just keep asking little questions about different details, like staying in that framework of curiosity. At some point, they’ll be like, “Enough about me. Let me ask about you. Tell me what you’re doing and why you’re passionate about it.” And if you then just go, “Wow, awesome.” 

Instead of trying to sell or convince anyone, you get into that framework of genuinely sharing. “Here’s what I love about what I’m doing,” or “Here’s what I’ve struggled with.” But man, it’s been really hard to figure out this component. If you say that genuinely, people will go, “Oh, I can help with that. Tell me, that makes sense. How could I help you?” And then you’re not asking; you’re just communicating to people the things you need without that feeling of, “I want something from them. How do I get it from them?”

That makes sense. I need to do some inner work with myself because I’m usually really curious about other people when discussing myself and my goals. But it’s like different coaching.

Well, here’s the other thing that helped me. You might not believe this, but I used to be incredibly shy and terrified of people. When Zoom first started, I would get panic attacks before calls: “I didn’t know who this person was. What are they going to think about me? What do I say? Who am I?” Like everything, what really helped was just a massive amount of practice. So, I just got on a ton of Zoom calls.

If you have to talk about yourself over and over again, you start getting positive feedback on certain parts. Honestly, in the beginning, sometimes I’d have Zoom calls, and I’d say, “That didn’t go well. That felt like I did a terrible job.” But every now and again, it started out, and I’d say, “Wow, that went super well. That person really enjoyed speaking with me. I thought I was really interesting and had nice things to say.

I would sit and reflect on that. “What did I do to make them like me so much this time?” I think part of getting better is always reflecting on how something went. If it goes bad, I actually try not to reflect because I will just make things worse in my head. I’d go, “We’re just going to try again. We’re not really going to think about what happened. I’m just going to try again.” But when it went right, I’d go, “I did something this time that they really responded to, “What was it?’” 

You start to notice, “Oh, when I told this story, they really liked it.” Or, “Oh, when I said this phrase, I saw their face light up.” That’s why doing it through Zoom, where you can see someone else’s face, is really important. Our faces communicate so much when we’re paying attention to other people. If you can think back or record it, you can do game tapes in the analogy of sports. 

A sports team will watch their game to see where they could improve or when they did something well. You can do the same thing. “That meeting felt amazing. I’m going to flag it and watch it later and try to just notice. Did I do anything that elicited this good response?” Then, in the next meeting, you can try to remember and be intentional about that. But again, I will say it took me a lot of practice. 

Our faces communicate so much when we’re paying attention to other people.

It didn’t happen even with a lot of practice in a month or two. It took a year of doing a lot of Zoom calls in this format, like really wanting to get better and reflect before I saw a dramatic transformation. Obviously, there were little steps in between. It wasn’t just like one day I felt I sucked, and the next day I felt amazing. It was like all the little steps in between, but it takes time.

your focus because you weren’t focusing on what didn’t work. You were like, “Okay, this didn’t work. Let’s just seal that.” When something works, you really focus on that. You focus on success. You’re like, “That’s because then all the energy will go toward success.” And that’s where you are now, which is beautiful. Where do you see yourself in the next five years?

To be honest, I have no idea what my life will look like in five years. I’m in the process of having my first child, and I have no idea what that’s going to do to me. Have you imagined your life five years ago when you had a beautiful five-year-old child? That’s an unknown factor. I couldn’t predict. Also, I’m moving from the United States to Israel. I can conjure up what my future is going to look like. 

But if I had to pick some elements, I would say I’m spending a lot more time with family. That’s part of the move. I have the most relatives in Israel. Spending more time with family makes me a much better leader, which means a lot of different things.

What does it mean to you to be better as a leader? Because, like the way I see you, you’re such a bright light, very genuine, which is super refreshing. It just comes through in your body language, voice, etc. So what kind of a leader do you want to become that you’re not yet today or more of what you are today?

Yeah, I’ve worked on myself for a long time and intentionally. I feel relatively well-rounded, but we can always grow, progress, and improve in any trait or area. Some areas are really important to me in leadership that I want to continue to be better at, and one is just how reliable I am. I think if we’re all really honest with ourselves and 100% of the time do the thing that we said we’re gonna do when we said we’re gonna do it. 

Accountability is more about holding myself accountable and less about other people relying on me.

If I am honest, I may be at 80% or 70%. So getting even 1%, 2% closer to saying, if I say something, 100 % people can rely on that it will happen at the time I said, to the degree I said. And then there’s outperforming that, right? They’re saying, “I’m gonna do this and being able to go above and beyond it,” like the next step after you get almost perfect at it. Reliability is one, and I would say that’s similar but different from accountability. Accountability is more about holding myself accountable and less about other people relying on me. 

That can come down even to a thought process, being more in control of the thoughts I’m allowing myself to have. This is also partially like a very Jewish concept. We can’t help if a thought pops into our head, but we can then decide, “Do we keep thinking about that thought or shift our focus to something new?” And certainly, again, if I’m honest with myself, who knows how much time it takes to think about things that aren’t meaningful or bring me or other people significant value?

I am working on improving the percentage of my thoughts that are meaningful and focused. That’s really, really hard because, a lot of times, that means thinking in the service of other people instead of just thinking in the service of myself. If I only care about how I feel, I will think all sorts of thoughts just to entertain myself that make me laugh or giggle.

I will likely open up my TikTok and scroll through it, just like watching some videos that make me feel good. But if I’m controlling my thoughts to be more focused on other people and what they need, I’m much more likely to say, “You know what? Because I’m thinking this, I’m gonna take this action. Instead of going on my TikTok, I will call a friend and check in on them and see how they’re doing.” We don’t always feel like doing that. I always feel like I am the person who supports someone else.

Leadership is about becoming less selfish or self-centric.

But that’s also the person that I want to become more of. That’s hard, and it takes practice and doing it to shift how you feel and think. The person I am now might be more selfish than the person I want to become. Leadership is about becoming less selfish or self-centric because the word selfish can have many negative emotions for many people; less self-centric and focused on myself and more focused on other people because the truth is I have everything I need. I have my health. Even if I didn’t have my health, I could still feel like I had everything I needed. Other people need things more than I need things. Having that framework and mindset feels good. It feels better than feeling like I need stuff. 

Thank you. It feels good listening to you.

I used to be in that mindset. And growing up, I really struggled. I was very lonely. I had trouble making friends. I felt like things were super unfair in my life. My parents are vegetarian. I was like, “It’s not fair. I’m not allowed to eat meat. The meat is so delicious. All the other kids get to do it.” All sorts of things like, “It’s not fair. I’m Jewish. I can’t watch TV on Saturdays. All the other kids have cable and get to watch Nickelodeon.”

That felt terrible. That wasn’t fun. It wasn’t an enjoyable way to be living. Even if objectively, something’s going bad in my life now, I can sit in that framework of saying, “I’m so lucky. Our tire just blew out on the highway, but I’m so lucky we have insurance to pick us up and tow us.” Back in the day, I would have had to sit here until some other stranger drove by and was willing to help me. Like, “How cool is it? How lucky am I?” That just feels much better.

I love it. It seems like you worked on your mindset a lot. Who are some of your greatest mentors or books that guided you on this journey? Are they still guiding you on this journey?

Yeah, that’s a great question. I certainly did not do it alone. I had a lot of help. I would say a major person who really, really helped me is Jesse Johnson. He was the first person to coach me not only in business but also on many things, like mindset and just how I thought about different scenarios. He was incredibly kind and generous with his time and has one of the biggest hearts of anyone I’ve ever met.

But also, like you said, a lot of books. The first personal development book I read was Grit by Angela Duckworth. It exposed me to the idea of a fixed mindset versus a growth mindset. If anyone’s struggling with their mindset, I highly recommend the book because this concept changed my thinking ability. I used to believe that how you thought was how you thought, and that was a permanent thing.

It was part of you, and it was unchangeable. Then, this concept of a growth mindset is really that however you think it can evolve, it can change based on what information you expose yourself to. If you believe something can change, it can change. It’s this crazy concept that we see all the time in sports, like Olympic athletes, that they’re the least talented and don’t have any advantages. 

Still, they believe that they can be the champion, and they go through this amazing journey, win gold, or accomplish these incredible, impossible things. Like human beings have always done things that literally used to be believed were impossible. So how does that happen? It is because we believe we can, and when we believe we can, we all of a sudden can do things we couldn’t do before. So that was, you know, a huge book.

Two podcasts that really, really helped me early on were The MFCEO Project by Andy Frisella. He’s an entrepreneur who built a hugely successful company in the supplements space. In that podcast, he shared his journey and mindset at different times, how it changed and all the different parts of his journey. Listening to someone else’s journey and what they went through made me feel more comfortable with it because I realized that even someone really successful struggled with the same things I’m struggling with. 

That may mean I can overcome these challenges and become successful, too. But then he also shared new concepts and ideas that I wouldn’t have thought otherwise. One that resonated with me was the concept of approaching business by making friends and, instead of trying to get customers, really focusing on being a good friend to others. If you’re a good friend to someone—again, not everyone—it’s much more likely that they’ll be a good friend to you. 

Confidence is essential in everything we do, especially in entrepreneurship, where there is more failure than success.

What does that mean? It means that you support each other. If you’re willing to help someone, not to get something out of them, because that wouldn’t really be a good friend if I’m only helping you because I want something from you. That’s not really how I would define friendship. But if I’m helping you because I really care about you, then you’re going to support me, too, most of the time. A lot of the time, that looks like a sale or a referral or sometimes what we need is not another client. We need an advocate. We need someone to champion our business and tell the world how amazing we are. That can be a lot better than just a single customer a lot of the time. Just getting all these different ideas about how he was able to go from totally broke and not making any money and build a business from scratch to something really large gave me a lot of tools and information. Confidence is so important in anything that any of us do, but especially in entrepreneurship because there’s more failure than there is success in entrepreneurship. That’s true in everything, but I can only speak from my experiences, which are really centered around business. You’re gonna fail more times than you succeed, which is partially why you don’t focus so much on the failures because then you’ll get stuck in negativity. But also recognize that that’s okay. And it’s not a bad thing to have failures. It’s a normal part of the process that helps us to learn and evolve.

Beautiful. Thank you so much for sharing all this. You’re a very hard-driven entrepreneur leader, and I really appreciate that. Before we say goodbye, I have two questions. First, what are your three top tips for living a stellar life? Second, where can people find you?

I love the word you chose: stellar. That’s not a common choice of words. That’s really, really fun. So I’m gonna take that, because what does it mean to live? I think when people say a great life. I like that you use stellar because I will focus on what makes your life brilliant or shine, like a star. 

If you don’t give up and keep trying, you’ll crack through all these layers of darkness, allowing your internal light to shine through.

Tip number one: never give up more than trying to achieve something. If you refuse to quit and give up, and when I say quit, on yourself. We all have things that we feel drawn to do inside of us. We all have beliefs that sometimes are very deep down and covered up by a lot of doubt, but we have positive beliefs about ourselves, like, I’m meant to do something in this world, or I’m here for a reason. As long as you just don’t give up and keep trying to do that, you’re going to crack through all these layers of darkness that allow your internal light to shine through. 

You don’t have to have to become something special. You already are something special. You are a unique, brilliant, amazing light that was created. It’s just about uncovering things in a way that you can see and others can see. So tip number one would be, don’t give up on yourself. 

Tip number two: let’s go something more practical: find a partner, whether that’s your life partner. There’s no way I could have done this journey without my husband’s support. Sometimes, the support didn’t look like the typical way you think about support in terms of encouragement. Sometimes, the support was getting feedback that I was really messing up. I really needed to improve because I was negatively impacted. In terms of this positive outlook and framework, I used to be a lot more negative and sarcastic. I would use sarcasm as a way to offload stress. I could tell that it would really hurt my husband when I was sarcastic to him. I had to figure out how not to do that anymore because I cared about him. If you can find life partners, not just a business or project partner, but like partners in life. That could be your spouse or a friend. It could be a good friend who cares a lot about you and who you care a lot about. Having that other person is going to help you so much to be able to evolve.

Sometimes, the feedback or support I got didn’t feel like encouragement. It actually felt like I was doing something that hurt him. I was using sarcasm not to feel so stressed, which would hurt his feelings. I realized, “Okay, well, I need to change how I think about things and my attitude so that I’m not hurting this person I care about because that’s really important.” He helped me in my business, right? I think if we have relationships that we feel really supported in and have someone that we feel really cares about us and we really care about them, that propels us in all areas of life. And then, like practical things, if I was having a really hard time because, let’s say, I had a meeting, it felt like it went terrible, and I couldn’t get out of my head.

All I could do is think about how much I suck or how awful it feels to try and get better at doing things. I felt like I couldn’t get out of that mindset or that feeling myself. I could talk to him and say, “Hey, honey, I’m really upset, and I don’t know how to feel better about this meeting I had. It felt like it went so bad, and I’m never going to get good at meeting people, and no one will ever like me.” He could say nice things that make me feel better or at least take my mind off it. 

A first impression is powerful. It shapes how we view a person, an experience, or even a place, leaving a lasting mark on our perception. Share on X

Third, always be learning. Make sure you read podcasts, go to lectures, or use whatever format you like to learn, but always learn new things.

Love it. Amazing. Where can people find you, learn from you, and join your community?

My website is maayangordon.com. You can also connect with me on LinkedIn, my favorite platform. My website links to my community, so you can also find it there.

Amazing. Maayan, thank you so much for sharing everything that you shared today. It was a pleasure getting to know you and learning from you. Thank you so much, and good luck with your move.

Thank you so much for having me.

Thank you, listeners. Remember to refuse to give up on yourself and keep trying. Find a partner and always be learning. This is Orion till next time.

Your Checklist of Actions to Take

{✓} Build anticipation and excitement before launching a community. Talk about it online and to people in person.

{✓} Define a clear community mission and purpose. Ask the following questions: “Why are people joining? What are they trying to achieve? What is the community helping them accomplish?”

{✓} Focus on genuine relationship building. Start with no specific agenda, just to get to know people better.

{✓} Practice consistent self-reflection. When something goes well, reflect on it: “What did I do this time that made them like me so much?”

{✓} Structure community elements strategically. Based on your community’s goals, determine what elements you need: content, support, interaction, or training.

{✓} Create launch incentives. Offer different promotions, such as founding member discounts, limited-time bonus offers, or exclusive access opportunities.

{✓} Build reliability as a leader. If you say something, people can rely on it to happen at the time and to the degree you specified.

{✓} Maintain a growth mindset. However you think, it can evolve and change based on what information you expose yourself to.

{✓} Focus on serving others. Shift from self-centric thinking to being more focused on other people. Approach business by making genuine friendships rather than just getting customers.

{✓} Dive deep into community building or personal brand development. Find Maayan Gordon at maayangordon.com. You can also reach out to her through LinkedIn.

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About Maayan Gordon

As a community-building expert, Maayan Gordon specializes in helping entrepreneurs, thought leaders and businesses create thriving online communities that drive engagement, loyalty, and revenue.

With 14+ years of experience generating millions in revenue and connecting with audiences across platforms, she has cracked the code on turning followers into loyal customers — and I’m passionate about bringing that expertise to your brand.