How I Built This with Guy Raz - Cultivating a creative community with Tina Roth-Eisenberg of CreativeMornings

Episode Date: June 1, 2023

“Who you hang out with determines what you dream about and what you collide with.” - Seth GodinYearning to find community as a Swiss transplant in New York City, Tina Roth-Eisenberg was so moved by these words that she transformed an old office into a fresh co-working space for creatives. From that space, Tina would incubate her would-be biggest project yet: CreativeMornings, an event series that brings local creatives together, which has since grown to over 200 chapters around the world And best of all? It’s totally free to attend. This week on How I Built This Lab, Tina shared how her design career morphed into an unintentional, yet completely inspired path to entrepreneurship that spawned several successful businesses. Plus, she shares her perspectives on why community and collaboration are key when it comes to building new things.This episode was produced by Carla Esteves and edited by John Isabella, with music by Ramtin Arablouei. Our audio engineer was Brian Jarboe.You can follow HIBT on Twitter & Instagram, and email us at [e-mail] Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

This podcast is brought to you by Squarespace. I talk to entrepreneurs all the time who are looking for a way to upgrade their digital footprint. Well, whether you're just starting out or you're scaling your business, Squarespace is the easiest way to build a great website that stands out. It's an all-in-one website platform that gives you everything you need to claim your domain, showcase your products, and get paid. Anyone can use Squarespace's cutting-edge design tools to build an online presence that truly reflects what makes your business special.

There are templates, intuitive drag-and-drop editing, and even an AI-enhanced website builder. Then, Squarespace's built-in analytics tools help you make smarter business decisions. Review website traffic, learn where to focus engagement, and track revenue all in one place. Looking to grow your business, Squarespace even offers fast, easy business financing

through Squarespace capital. Go to Squarespace.com slash built for a free trial. And when you're ready to launch, use offer code built to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain. Loans issued by Celtic Bank and serviced by Stripe, all loans subject to credit approval. This show is in partnership with Airbnb. This past summer, I took my family to Vienna, and it was incredible. We spent our days wandering the old streets, stopping for coffee and pastries, visiting museums, and just soaking up the history of one of the most beautiful cities in the world. And one of the things that made the trip so special was the home we booked on Airbnb. It had tall windows, beautiful old details, and plenty of space for all of us. And being in that home on Airbnb, right in the middle of Vienna, walking distance from so much of the city,

made it feel less like a visit and more like we were actually living there. Plus, taking a trip is the perfect time to host your space on Airbnb. Your place with all of its personal touches and its amazing location could make someone else's vacation even better. Your home might be worth more than you think. Find out how much at Airbnb.ca.com slash host. Hello and welcome to how I built this lab. I'm Guy Raz. So back in 2008, Tina Roth Eisenberg got tired of working alone at her home office. Tina's a graphic designer by training. And she knew a bunch of other. designers who felt the same way. So that year, she rented an old office in Brooklyn and turned it into a co-working space, and she invited a bunch of friends to join her. Now, what happened next,

as she remembers it, was magical. Conversations flowed, ideas were germinated, collaborations forged. The ideas exchanged over lunchtime conversations actually inspired multiple business ideas for Tina, including Tatley, a temporary tattoo company, and To Do, a simple, a simple, to-do list website. These conversations were everything Tina had hoped for. And so she started inviting other people to the co-working space to join in. Those meetups morphed into something Tina called Creative Mornings. Fast forward to today and Creative Mornings now has more than 200 chapters around the world

that host free monthly meetups and talks. Tina was born in Switzerland where she studied graphic design. And not long after she graduated from college, She decided to move to New York City. When I graduated at 25 from graphic design school, I saved enough money. I was like, I am going. I have enough money for three months. I'm going to try to find an internship.

And I got on a flight. All right. So you get to New York. You're in the early 20s. You get, I think you get an internship in the city at a design studio. Yeah, it was pretty magical. I had one interview lined up in a small design studio in downtown Manhattan. And that interview was 16 hours after arriving in New York.

And after five minutes of walking into that studio and talking to Matthew Waltman who ran it, he looked at me and said, you will never leave New York. You will marry a tall Jewish man. And you got yourself an internship and set me down. Wow. And did that all happen? Yes. It all happened. Even tall?

He was a tall man? He was a tall Jewish man. Yes. Wow. It's like a crystal ball. He's like, you're going to stay in New York. You're going to marry tall Jewish man. man, you're going to work in design.

He's a bit psychic. So, right, so you end up, you know, taking this job. And what kind of design were you doing? I was an extremely multiverse designer. I was able to do print, and I taught myself HTML and web design. And so I was like a typical Swiss Army knife. I could just do it all. But then very quickly became the web girl within that small design studio.

Yeah. I know that you at that time in those early days, you would, I mean, New York was probably this incredible, I mean, especially from a design perspective, because it's a center of design, one of the global centers of design. You were exposed to all these kind of creative people going to parties and going to art shows. And tell me about that world that you landed in in New York. Oh, it was incredible. It was still the dot-com hey days. I remember I made a really, really small salary and could barely afford, you know, living in New York City. But thank God for all these free Internet parties at these Internet startups. It was a magical time when the web was sort of, you know, exploding and everybody thought it's going to change the world forever, which it did to a certain extent. But I feel like we have similar hypes right now, you know, around just recently NFTs and then now AI. and just reminds me a bit of that time. In 2005, you started a blog, which is still going, which is, for people haven't seen, it's awesome.

I love it. It's such a great blog. And it's called Swiss Miss, not the Coco. You are a Swiss person who's a Swiss Miss. It's a great name. Do you ever get any grief from Swiss Miss Coco? Oh, no. Never.

You know, I actually got the trademark for events and. design related things and my lawyer thought he was really, really bold and they agreed to it. They said, if you put in there that you will never sell any chocolate related products were okay with it. It's pretty wild. Yeah. Yeah. In my heydays, they really missed an opportunity to partner with me because I had like

two million readers a month at the time. Wow. And I sent them so much, I mean, so much traffic because everybody put in Swiss Miss without a desk. Yeah, yeah, it was pretty fun. That's what happened to me. I was like, huh, I typed in Swiss Miss and I was like, wait. Swiss and Miss Coco, wonder what their website looks like.

It's a great name. And this is like early blog days. This is like still kind of the GeoCities era of blogging. Tell me about that blog. What was the idea behind starting that? Well, I, you know, I was just a curious designer working in a design studio at a time. And every morning I will come in and I would spend a few minutes sort of seeing, you know, what's new on the web. It was such an exciting time because the web was such a playground.

It was not a self-promoting universe as it is now. It was just really playful. And I just love discovering new products or websites or typefaces or whatever it was. And I was like, I need a place to kind of keep my personal archive to go back to it and find it again. And so I just started a blog for myself to sort of have my personal archive. And a few months in my friend said, do you ever realize that people are linking to you? Do you ever look at your stats? And then I realized that my personal archive was actually not that personal.

And obviously that was very exciting when I realized that people are enjoying what I'm sharing. And it was just cool sort of things from the design world. Mm-hmm. Yeah. I mean, I have a very distinct and specific taste, I would say. Mm-hmm. And I feel like now more than ever, I personally really appreciate sort of, I call them gardens on the on it, where people carefully curate them with their taste, with their lens on the world.

Yeah. And that's what I'm trying to do. And it's just cool that people can tap into it. Yeah. All right. So you're working on your blog, Swiss Miss. Again, love the name. And meanwhile, you're working at this design firm for, I think, a pretty long time, right?

And it was, I mean, you were there for a long time. But I guess in the mid-2000s, something happened in your career, which would eventually lead you to creative mornings, which we'll talk about in a moment. But what was going on at the time? Well, actually, the big thing that happened was in 2006 or 2005 when I became pregnant with my daughter, my first kid. And I had some weird introspective moment going on with an angelic choir coming down of saying, hey, Tina, it's time to start your company. So I started my design studio when my daughter was born. And then through that, I intuitively wanted to create a space for people like me so they are not alone at home. And this is before co-working spaces were a thing.

I just had a hunch that there's people like me out there who are creative, who are entrepreneurial, who are, you know, sort of believe in living a creative life and who want to surround themselves with kind and heart-centered people. And so I built the space and I said... Where was this space? This was in Dumbo. It was very cool. It was like a white box, yeah, in Dumbo, Brooklyn.

A white box on the East River. And wow, talk about build it and they will come. It was like a warehouse that you rented and you built it. built it out inside? It was just like a very raw office building, you know, was no heat, the bathrooms was just shitty. I'm sorry. It was horrible. I had to organize the cleaning, but I didn't care. I was just like, you know, let's be scrappy. It's fine. You wanted just to be clear, and you wanted a place where like five other people could come every day and like work if they wanted to, but just also, because you were working from home. This is before people

work from home. Exactly. But this is what you did. You were pre-work from home long before everyone everyone else cut on. But you were sort of thinking, hey, there are other people like me, creative people, they work from home, they're not interacting with other people like me. They didn't have an office space to kind of throw ideas around. Let's do something. And this was the idea. Exactly. And I just had a hunch

that really magical things will unfold when you are surrounding yourself by people with similar values and sort of a creative outlook on life. And it was exactly what happened. Like our lunch conversations were magical. And this was originally, it was called, you call

Studio mates, right? Yes, we called it studio mates, and we attracted just the most magical, smart people on the internet. Like, it was just, like, when you can turn around or, like, just have lunch every day with people that are extremely driven and smart and working on super exciting projects, that is, it's like a little mini TED talk every day for lunch. And everyone kind of basically paid a fee to obviously cover rent, right, I imagine. And it was just not a, it doesn't sound like this was a money. money-making venture. No. It was designed to just be a...

And how did you find the people, like... I mean, I'm assuming you had some friends that you're like, hey, you want to join up and, like, work in this place with me every day? Well, I was lucky because I had my blog. I had an outlet. And I feel like just over the years of running my blog with so much integrity and heart and generosity, like, there was just, you know, a trust that people had in that I would also equally, you know, curate a physical space. as I'm curating an online space. When I was reading about the reason that you gave for how you originally came to this idea,

I guess you had read a quote from Seth Godin. I love this quote. I'm going to read it. And it basically says, who you hang out with determines what you dream about and what you collide with. And the collisions and the dreams lead to your changes. And the changes are what you become. That's so true.

Change the outcome by changing your circle, he wrote. And so I guess that quote really applied here. were you were thinking, well, yeah, let's, let me surround myself with people who are thinking in creative and different ways. I mean, your environment matters. Yeah. You know, what do you, the people in your environment dream about pushes you. And I think that's what the world needs.

We need to gently push each other to think bigger, to think bolder, to think in new ways. And that's what my co-working space does every day. We're going to take a quick break, but when we come back, how Tina Roth Eisenberg went from operating a single co-working space in Brooklyn to launching Creative Mornings, an event series that brings creatives together in cities all around the world. Stay with us, I'm Guy Raz, and you're listening to How I Built This Lab. Welcome back to How I Built This Lab, I'm Guy Raz, and my guest today is Tina Roth Eisenberg, a serial entrepreneur who, among other ventures, opened a co-working space in Brooklyn back in the

mid-2000s that eventually sparked the idea for the well-known event series Creative Mornings. All right, so you've got this group of like six people coming in, bringing in their lunch, chatting, sometimes working on their laptops. But there's something happening. There's an energy in this little office that you put together. And I guess this sparks an idea that would become a much, much bigger thing and that we know now is creative mornings. But tell me the origin of that. What was the initial spark? Well, so as I started seeing just the magic that unfolded by gathering these creative, heart-centered humans in my co-working space, I realized just how much that puts fuel into my personal jetpack.

Like, just human connection is what makes me thrive. And, you know, my desk was literally on the East River looking at Manhattan. And, you know, in moments where my heart was bursting out of my chest because what we created was so magical and so beautiful. I kept thinking there's so many more out there. And so I became, I call myself a human gatherer at heart. And I was like, I want to gather them all. I want to create an opportunity that we can, you know, open up the circle. And also just to backtrack for a second, when I moved here in 1999, I literally did not know one soul here in New York.

I was really wondering where my people were. Yeah. I was like, where are they? Where do I find them? And my salary was so low. I could not afford industry events. So it's also kind of like I wanted to build the community I wish existed when I first moved to New York. And so it was a bit of a combo of hunches.

And that's how the idea for Creative Morning started. You knew something magical was happening. I'm just curious. What was the magic happening in that space that got you to think, hey, we need to expand this out? Like, what were the, was it conversations? Was it ideas? What was going on? There was just goodness and a sense of possibility in the air and a playfulness. And we had that. We were working hard, but we were also having a really good time.

And I just felt energetically that the world needs more of that. Yeah. So you guys decide, hey, let's have an event here. And you just put it on your blog, like, hey, we're going to just create a people come by this address? Is that what you did? Mm-hmm. Yeah. And it was just like, it was like, just come by and we'll hang out. There was no agenda. Yeah, it was just breakfast. Let's hang out. Right. We fill a room with gentle strangers and we'll just meet each other and chat. And this was in September of 2008 at this space in Dumbo. And how many

people showed up? I think about 55, 60. Yeah. All right. So cool and a bunch of people coming in. And did magic happen? Was it like all these creative people in this room and then just sparks were flying or not quite? Well, funny enough, the first one we had in our space and the elevator was broken, the bagels were stale. And I was like, well, I'm taking notes. This is not great. And there was no talk, which I realized made it very networky. I don't know. I don't think it was magical, but people were excited together. Yeah. I think whenever there's a pure intention in gathering, humans, people are somewhat buzzing. Yeah.

Yeah. All right. So they show up. And there was no agenda. So how did you feel about it? I mean, did you feel like, oh, we should do this again? Or maybe we should rethink this or what? Well, you know, the beauty of being a trained designer is that I think in a prototypey mindset.

And I will never take this for granted because oftentimes when I work with people that did not sort of come out of a creative space. they always think that they have to create something and it needs to be perfect. So to me it was totally fine. I was like, okay, here's the things we can improve. And to me, it was clear that I'm going to keep going and keep prototyping and keep chisling away at it. And so I just kept gathering humans every month. You know, it was such a simple concept. Once a month, breakfast, and a talk.

And a talk. Okay, so you decide it's not enough to just gather people. Let's have a presentation about something. Yes, it was a really interesting. interesting project. But I think the magic that I started realizing that was unfolding is people really loved seeing into other work environments. So the first few years, we were hosted at agencies, design studios, or even within six months, we were hosted at Google, which really, to me, was an indicator. Okay, there's something happening here. If Google invites us in.

Yeah. And it was entirely, I mean, this was launched through your blog, and it was just an idea. Like, I mean, of course, there were in our TED talks, for example, which are very kind of, you know, more formal and people have, you know, sort of a set amount of time. But the idea was these would be very informal talks and we just, you would just do one and people would come and there'd be free breakfast and it was free and that would be it. Yes, yes, absolutely. And what I realized very quickly is that giving people a chance to share their. gift is a really beautiful thing. And then me telling them, hey, you are going to get, I don't know, 100, 150 people's attention, their time. What are you giving to them? What gift are you unfolding for them on stage? So you start this in September of 2008 as a one-off and decide,

let's keep doing this monthly, this monthly gathering, and we'll call it creative mornings. How soon before you were like, you know, maybe we should like incorporate this and, you know, and make this formalize this thing? Well, I would say the big moment was when I received an email from Ben Chestnut, the co-founder of Mailchimp. Who has been on how I built this? I know, I know. I know. He's become a good friend since. So he contacted you, what, just a few weeks or months after you launched?

Four months into launching. So apparently he read my blog and he emailed me and says, hey, my team, like literally, it said, my team would poop their pants if they saw as team up. So can I support you? Wow. And I remember sitting there going, I don't know. And I just emailed back, do you want to pay for breakfast? And he's like, deal. And so it was beautiful. The journey of sponsorship or partner, I call it partnerships started with Ben. And you just put up a sign that said like, supported by MailChimp. Well, no. See, that's the beauty. that I then got connected to who at the time was the head of marketing, who's still there and still involved in a lot of things at MailChimp. So I was connected to him and I was like fully prepared to hang banners and do ads and whatever. And he goes, Tina, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. Like, I'm going to send you some t-shirts and some monkeys. Let's make this fun. Wow. And just from out of the gates, I mean, I could not have had a better partner in showing me that just like I believe, you know, radical generosity is a thing.

I mean, Mailchimp was literally the patron of the creative community. The things they have enabled generously is just unreal. Wow. All right. So you have a sponsor and you're doing these. And how are you curating the talks? Were people reaching out to you and saying, hey, Tina, can I talk this month? Or were you reaching out to people?

And what did you say, like, what did you look for in a talk? I was reaching out to people. But I have to admit, man, I look back now. I kind of cringe at my curation a little bit. That's fine. But I guess this is where we see growth. Yeah, this is where we see growth. Well, I was just, in the beginning, it was extremely design heavy, of course, the speakers

because I was still running a design studio. And so the talks were mostly design-centric. And I just, you know, I think I just had an antenna out, like, who would have something interesting for this community to share, period, to the point where I remember when I thought I have to stop running it when I was pregnant with my son in 2010. And I thought, I'm going to go out with a bang and I'm going to ask my dream speaker. I never forget when I walked up to Michael Beirut of Pentagram at this event. And I said, Michael, I'm Tina.

I run Creative Mornings. Would you give a talk in January? And he just said yes. And then he gave such an incredible talk that I figured that's the universe telling me I can't stop. So I didn't stop. And Pentagram's a big design company. Yes. I should mention it for people who don't know.

Yeah. They're as renowned as it gets. And I guess also that year, that summer, you went back to Switzerland for the summer and decided to put on a creative morning event just kind of for fun there. Yeah, I sort of didn't want to have gaps in hosting it because it's just an event once a month. So I boldly decided to reach out to the Freituck company. It's like the coolest company in Switzerland. They make bags out of truck tour. Oh, yeah.

Oh, I know this company. Yeah, out of billboards, right? actually truck truck tarps. Yeah, it's a cool company. Yeah, super cool. Oh, my God. And I reached out to them to the founders like, hey, do you want to speak and do you want to host us? And man, they hosted us in their factory. It was the coolest thing. And we just, yeah, we did it. I mean, it was just me. I remember flying in with my kids. And I was like, look at this. You can be so scrappy in putting on events. Like, that's what I want the world to know. Like, don't overthink it. You know, scrappy is where it's at.

And were you video recording these too? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. So you were videoing them and putting and you were putting the videos up. But it seems like the community that was showing up to these things would not let you stop this. Like you wanted to kind of put this to bed, but they did not want that to happen.

Yeah. That's what I started feeling. And that's, I have to say, that's a really amazing feeling when you start something and you start realizing you can't really stop it. Yeah. Because people, people start to become. dependent on this. And really it was just initially, and I mean, you did a couple of these one-offs in Zurich, but really it was New York. It was in New York where you were based. You'd do them once a month. But I guess people started to come to you even in Zurich and they were like, hey, we want to

keep this going in Zurich. Is that what happened? Yeah, the second time I brought it to Zurich, this young man, Daniel Frye, he basically cornered me with the whole team. And he says, like, we're not going to let you go until you tell us that we can bring up. this to Zurich. And I mean, he said it very kindly. And I was like, okay, so lean into this. And my gutches told me, like, Tina, figure it out, figure it out what do you would mean to let people run this and sort of create the container for it, that it's protected yet free, sort of asking myself, what are the non-negotiables? What do I need to tell someone that they keep the spirit of it alive, but yet I give them enough freedom to put their own stamp on it? All right. So you basically,

people are like, hey, I want to start a chapter. And then other people are like, hey, can I do one in L.A.? And just, first of all, how did you initially feel about that? Were you like, I don't know, it's just too much for me to manage? And like, what was your thinking around that? Well, to be very honest, I was super scared. I was very scared. But I also know that when I'm scared, that's when I need to really pay attention

because that's where the growth happens. And I had to ask myself, what are you scared of, Tina? And what I realized is that what I have created was so deeply personal. It's a real extension of my values, of how I want to live my life. I believe in living a very generous life. I believe in gathering humans. And so to me, it was like, what if people don't keep that spirit alive? What if it becomes an event that doesn't feel good?

So I was afraid it would reflect badly on me. But then I also realized that I'm a big believer in trust breeds magic, that trust is the biggest compliment of all. And if you set people up right and obviously do your homework, the people that asked me originally, I just knew they were really good people. Also, what I've learned over the years is that these were people that were in service of community. There's type of humans that are just showing up like that.

And so in the end of the day, day, I leaned into the discomfort of it, you know, sort of, I'm also sometimes someone who just closes my eyes and says, like, oh, I hope it's going to go, okay. Denial is a good thing. We're going to take another short break, but when we come back, more from Tina about giving up complete oversight and control and letting others start Creative Morning's chapters all around the world. Stay with us. You're listening to How I Built This Lab. Welcome back to How I Built This Lab. My guest today is Tina Roth Eisenberg, the entrepreneur behind Creative Mornings. It's a free event series for creatives with more than 200 chapters all

around the world. All right, so 2011 really was a turning point. You have like a chapter opens or a Creative Morning's group opens in L.A. and one in San Francisco. And from there, it really began to, I guess, expand organically. And as that happened, right, how did you start to think about managing it and, you know, and kind of organizing it and making sure that you could protect the brand. Or did you, or maybe you didn't worry about that. I never really worried that much about it, to be honest. What I realized is that I needed help. I am good with system to a certain extent, but then I kind of am not good in maintaining them. So I needed someone to really think through the processes of what this means. So I was very lucky to get introduced to this,

really smart young man and I hired him part-time. And I literally just set him down at the co-working space and said like, hey, here's an inbox full of emails of people wanting things from us or wanting to collaborate or starting a chapter. Can you figure out systems? And he was just incredible. And he helped me systemize what creative mornings is and how we work from four chapters to 111. Wow. He was incredible. And so as you were growing, right, when somebody said, hey, I want to start a chapter, what were the parameters that you gave them? And what did you say to them as they said, okay, well, this is what it is? Explain to me how you explained it to them.

Well, basically, we told them what the non-negotiables are. If you want to become the ambassador to host of a chapter in your city, and there's only one per city, you have to commit to putting on an event once a month in the morning for free. you have to find sponsors to make it happen. You have to tape the talk. You have to upload the talk. To the YouTube page, right? At the time, we used Vimeo.

Okay. And it's always free. Everything's free to go. Yeah, everything is free. Yeah, the events have to be free. So we basically told people, you have to organize a local volunteer team. You have to organize your group. You have to get them excited.

You know, I would say a host invests probably about 40 hours a month into putting on the events. Yeah. But I also was very quickly able to articulate and saying, like, this will make you so visible within your city. It will make you a leader in the creative community. You will be seen as someone, you know, who gathers the creative community. And it really attracted the people that just saw the currency in that. Yeah.

Is there a guiding principle around creative morning talks? I mean, is it like, like in general, it could be somebody just coming and talking about their life or somebody talking about something cool they did or somebody talking about how they created something. Is it is it bad and more? It's completely open. For me, what it just needs to be is like it needs to be hope inducing. It needs to be inspiring. I really don't care. And if I'm really honest, I don't care about the talk that much.

I edit the talk because I didn't want. want people to feel like they're in a networking event. But where my heart really opens is the half an hour when we have breakfast, when people start talking to each other, or the minutes of audience engagement that we, like, we have learned from our chapters around the world, how to engage the community. Like there's, there's things that we have integrated into our events now before the talk and after the talk that make people talk to each other or get to know each other. And if I'm really honest, I believe we're in the business of connection. Yeah.

And not in the business of talks. Ted does that really well. Yeah. You know, it's amazing because it is a for-profit company, Creative Mornings. But really, I mean, it's certainly not running on like a, you're not a, you're not like capitalist sharks here. I mean, it's free. The fee to join is, I don't know, there's no fee for somebody to start a chapter, right?

No, it's completely free. I mean, to be honest, the fact that we exist a way we do and the sheer size globally is a miracle. I mean, we are a nine people team running a global organization on an extremely scrappy budget. Wow. But that is possible because the power is into collective, you know. And they're volunteers, right? Yeah. And these volunteers are kind of curating and organizing these events monthly in their cities.

And they're doing all the work of like finding a space, finding some company that will give them a free space and finding a sponsor to pay for the breakfast and then getting the word out. And I know you've got a Creative Morning's website so that there's a way to find these. But it's really it's a totally distributed volunteer-based organization but with a small professional staff in New York City. Yeah. I mean, radical generosity is our business model. Yeah. You know, and you couldn't pay a PR company to help us get to this reach. But when you have so many people invested and they pour their hearts into it, that is unmatched.

It's just unmatched the energy. And also the one thing that I was lucky enough that Bill Uri, who wrote the book, Getting to a Yes. He wants. Yeah, he's given TED Talks. Yeah, sure. Yeah, he's wonderful. I met him at a very tiny conference. I was invited to to speak at, and he was sitting in the audience, and he afterwards came up to me and said,

do you mind me telling you why, what do you do works? And I love nothing more than people reflecting back to me in their own words, what I'm doing, because I'm so into sauce and it's just so intuitive what I do that sometimes I'm like, I don't have the words for it. And so I was like, yes, please. And he said, you know, what you're doing is based on non-transactional giving. You're inviting people in to your space. But if you were to sell, a ticket, then it's a transaction. You buy it a ticket, you expect a good coffee and a breakfast and the talk and if it's not good, you know, like, and then it's done. The transaction is over. But when you create an invitation that is just so generous and then when you come to our events, they're so, you're basically wrapped in a blanket of love. People are so upbeat, people are so nice, you leave that space going, how can I contribute? How can I be part of this? How can I, you know, like it's an invitation to contribute. And I really think that's the magic, the magic sauce of Creative Morningza. And how do you finance the operations of professional staff? Because there are

people who are employees who have to, you know, kind of administer it from New York. How are they, how is that financed? Well, thanks to the support like companies like MailChimp, who, by the way, is insane. They have been our support of 14 and a half year straight. Anyone who does partnerships probably goes, what the heck right now? Because that is unheard of. And so the way I've been able to run this for the last 15 years is because we had what we call partners like MailChimp. And they were basically mostly big tech companies like, you know, base cams, square.

workspace, WordPress, Wix, Adobe, you know, giving us a slice of their marketing or brand budget and supporting us. What is really interesting, what is happening now, and this is also one of the reasons why I became a full-time CEO just recently is that just the landscape of that, that business model is changing and we're trying to figure out sort of, I believe that the future of Creative Mornings is community-led and community-supported. So we're trying to sort of shift a business model into what creative mornings actually always should have been. So the business model is shifting to accept more community-based support.

And presumably, you own Creative Mornings, right? Yes. And so is, I mean, I have to assume that from time to time, people may come to you and say, hey, you know, you should do this or that, or you should monetize this or that, or you should you know, publish books based on on the talks or you should, you know, charge money or something like that. I mean, is there a world where this becomes a, you know, where you would be okay with it becoming a money-making venture? Yes, if it feeds back into the system. And if it's, the money-making itself is based on making the community better. And I can give you an example

with what I mean with that. When the pandemic hit, and we realized people are really hungry for connection, we obviously moved to online gatherings, which I would have never done before, ever, because I believe in real connection happening in person. And it was a real moment of realizing I had blinders on. So we moved our chapter events to Zoom and very quickly realized how we can translate the magic of creative warnings to actually online events. But we also moved something that we.

we called, and we were experimenting with here, mostly in New York, which were called field trips, small community-led workshops. We moved those to Zoom 2, and they have been growing massively. It's basically what I envision they will turn into is the world's most radically generous peer-to-peer learning space. And I don't know if you've seen it on our site, but we have about 10,000 people show up every month for community-led workshops from how to do SEO, to make pom-poms, to stretching, to like, you name it. We have about 20 events a month, of which each one of them average has 450 signups. And also, we had big tech companies come to us and say, like, hey, can we do some organic field

trips where people like sort of, you know, we onboard them onto, like, we did this with Adobe Express with their software. And they're so not webinary. They're so like grassroots and beautiful. And I'm starting to sort of see a business model emerged that is a literal win-win for everyone involved. I mean, one of the things that we didn't mention, and I should mention, is that in the midst of starting creative mornings

and how it kind of grew and expanded, you also created two other businesses. One is called To-D-D-E-U-X-D-E-U-X-D-E-U-X. to do it's an app that's a to do-lis and the other was you started a temporary tattoo company called Tatley. Were those, I mean, do you think those came out of these creative gatherings, these interactions, those ideas? They came out of my co-working space, the original.

They were both ideas that basically happened over lunch. And then, you know, my personal rule of like, the best way to complain is to make things. I just can't really stop myself. I really like to figure things out. So I kind of created them and then I had to maintain them. Yeah. I don't know how to stop. So you started this temporary tattoo company called Tatlee.

And basically it's designers who designed the tattoos. Well, the basic idea was that my daughter would bring home these hideously designed temporary tattoos from birthday parties. and they were an insult to my Swiss aesthetic. So I just, as a joke, said, I can make this better. And I asked my designer, illustrator, artist friends to come up with some cool temporary tattoos. And, you know, I was a web designer. I could just create a website and put that, you know, put about 16 designs online. And it was pretty wild to see after years of me celebrating other people making cool things on my blog.

For the first time ever, I actually talked about something I made. and that I was selling. And that was a real moment when that printer started printing orders. And at the first day, we had about 150 orders coming from all over the world. And was like, okay, we're on to something here. And so while you were kind of watching

this Creative Mornings thing really explode, which has had a, you know, obviously a global impact, you were running this temporary tattoo business. Yeah. You know, when you say it like that or whenever people ask me about it. I mean, it sounds so silly. Like, I did not wake up one day thinking I want to run or redefine the temporary tattoo space,

but I did. So we very quickly became sort of the, you know, the high-end temporary tattoo brand. And then I kept running it up until last year. And to be very honest, not knowing how to get off this carousel. Like, that's one thing that I think a lot of founders do not talk about. But you know, it's easy. I mean, to me, it's easy to build a thing. It was much harder to get off the carousel.

Yeah. You sold Talley to Bick, the company that best known for pens last year in 2022. And so, and did that change your involvement with Creative Mornings? Did you kind of double down on your involvement? Yes. I mean, the reason why I wanted to sell it really came out of the pandemic as well. Because, I mean, like all of us, we probably had a bit of a interesting. inspection moment and what became really clear to me is while I love Tattley and all the companies I've built, Creative Mornings is really my legacy and the closest to my personal values and what I believe

in and something I, you know, I believe we need to leave the world a little better than we found it. And I think Creative Mornings is my contribution to that. And so I really wanted to be able to focus 100% on Creative Mornings and before I wasn't, before I was, you know, sort of scattered all over the companies. And so now I'm 100% CEO of Creative Mornings. So where do you see Creative Mornings? Like in, you know, I mean, these are free events. They happen all over the world. It's usually one talk once a month. Is that essentially what it will be in your view in five years, 10 years from now? Or do you see it as something different? I actually think Creative Mornings is just getting started. And I always try to explain it in a way that

I want Creative Mornings to be an organization that no matter where you're at in your discovery of that you are a creative person, we have something to offer to you. I want Creative Mornings to either inspire you or help you find your people, help you find your community. I see Creative Mornings a bit as like Church for Creativity and as a friendship. and an academy for living a heart-centered life, there's just so many ways that creative mornings is helping people up-level, helping people step into their fullest potential, making them realize they're safe,

there is a better future. And when I say I really think we're only getting started is because the amount of ideas we have, what we can build and what we will build, is pretty phenomenal. Awesome. Tina, thank you. you so much. Thank you. That's Tina Roth Eisenberg, founder and CEO of Creative Mornings.

Hey, thanks so much for listening to the show this week. Please make sure to click the follow button on your podcast app so you never miss a new episode of the show, and it's totally free. This episode was produced by Carla Estevez with editing by John Isabella. Our music was composed by Rumpteen Arablui. Our audio engineer was Brian Jarbo. Our production team at How I Built This includes Alex Chung, Casey Herman, Chris Messini, Elaine Coates, J.C. Howard, Liz Metzger, Sam Paulson, and Carrie Thompson. Neva Grant is our supervising editor. Beth Donovan is our executive producer. I'm Guy Raz, and you've been listening to How I Built This.