Welcoming Sian Simpson to the Atto team

We are very excited to have Sian Simpson joining Atto as our Community Director. She’s an award winning global businesswoman, community builder and Founder of Public Rally. She’s worked with thousands of entrepreneurs over the last decade helping them to grow their businesses, and expand into international markets. 

She’s done some cool stuff like starting Public Rally, running Kiwi Landing Pad for five years, helping grow the community from 200 to 6,000 people, hosted over 300 events in five countries, moonlights for SaaStr interviewing their conference speakers every year and she also ran codefree hackathons across America, to help people with ideas bring them to life without needing to know how to code. 

On a personal note, she lives on an island off the coast of Auckland in New Zealand and is often found tending her veggie and herb patch, paddle boarding, reading young adult fiction and playing video games when she’s not working.  

We asked her some questions so that you could get to know her better as our new community director: 

Last year you hosted a session on community building, which the inaugural batch founded really valuable. What is community to you?  

To me, community is bringing people together over a shared mission or purpose. I love helping to connect the dots between ideas, people and problems. It’s important to realise that community is not an audience, it’s much deeper than that. There has to be a value exchange that's meaningful and authentic, without being transactional, if you get that right, you’ll have a sustainable, successful and amazing community where people actually want to belong. 

What are you hoping to achieve with Atto? 

I want to grow female founders and love being involved in the early stage startup community. Building things is really fun, and so is connecting people, helping them bring their ideas to life, and giving them the confidence to do so.

In the near future, I want there to be lots of female founders, rather than exhausting the list of names people can come up with after 10 or 20. We can do better than this, and I want to contribute towards the Atto mission of making that happen. 

You were instrumental in building NZ's startup ecosystem globally and building the programming, curriculum and community at Kiwi Landing Pad. What did you learn from this experience? 

I was there for five years, so I would say I learnt a lot. Key themes would be: 

• You can achieve a lot by yourself if you have the drive, vision and determination to make it happen

• Consistency is key with content, community and pretty much everything 

• People love being part of a like-minded community

• Giving back is a really important piece of the startup community. 

• There are lots of different ways to build and scale teams, learn as much as you can, but ultimately follow through with what you feel is right for your company, and listen to your team. 

• Don’t be your own blind spot. Sometimes we get in our own way, I’ve seen this countless times with founders. Everyone in business has to grow, the best founders are curious and confident and don’t know it all. 

• Make sure you have great relationships with your ecosystem, it’s important to not be fragmented

• Last thing would be, do your research, and always be talking with customers. 

 What tips do you have for first-time female founders wanting to take that next step in their entrepreneurial journey?

I started my new company in the middle of the COVID19 pandemic, I’d been thinking about it for over a year. Based on this and the current economic climate, I believe that there has never been a better time to start a company. There is more support, better tools and a changing world with problems ready to be solved.

Ultimately the tips I would give is: 

• Get started

• Be consistent 

• Have a vision and execute

• Do more then you talk 

• Surround yourself with awesome people

• Believe in yourself

What are some startup resources or blogs you recommend the Atto community checks out?

At Kiwi Landing Pad we did over 100 webinars, there is a rich library of content covering Sales, Marketing, Product, Customer Success, Community, Investment and Founder Stories. 

I love CMX for all things community management, Sales Hacker for all things B2B Sales, and SaaStr for all things SaaS. I’m a regular consumer of Refinery29 for women related content. 

As a content strategist, I keep an eye on a lot of brands as I’m always looking for new and cool ways of creating and presenting content. I like to be inspired. Some of the best content for business at the moment is being created by brands like Qualtric, and I love hubspot's academy.  

I tend to read the news a lot lately, and scholarly journals, trend reports and personal finance blogs. 

Ultimately as a founder, google is your best friend. Next is your network. 

 Where can we find you?

You can find me on Linkedin, Twitter or my personal website.