🔴 Building an 80K community that pays its members

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Communities work best when they don’t require one central figure facilitating every interaction — this is how they last for years and years.

This week's guest is Tiffany Yu, author of The Anti-Ableist Manifesto and founder of Diversability, a community that has grown from Georgetown's first disability-focused student club to 80,000 people across platforms.

In this episode:

— Natalia Pérez-González, Assistant Editor

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When Tiffany Yu launched Georgetown's first disability student club in 2009, gaining even 30 members felt ambitious.

It’s since grown into Diversability — an award-winning social enterprise comprising 80,000 people across platforms, elevating disability pride. Like many other college clubs, Tiffany's had a simple original goal: create a space where students with disabilities could connect and build camaraderie.

Today, it’s run with a sophisticated community business model:

Before the pandemic, Diversability had expanded to eight cities solely through in-person events. After COVID shutdowns, Tiffany moved the community online, and its reach skyrocketed. Virtual gatherings connected people in towns without disability communities, providing a salve for both the geographic and social isolation among the millions of disabled people living in places where they'd rarely — if ever — meet others like them.

For Tiffany, the creator economy hasn’t just offered visibility, it’s provided infrastructure. A democratized system that’s allowed disabled creators to control their narratives while building sustainable livelihoods on their own terms. "Inclusive content is smart business," she says, and the data backs it up. Nielsen research shows that disability-inclusive creator content outperformed others by 21.4% in media value and received 20.5% more interactions.

This accessibility-first approach isn't just inclusive — it's strategic. Content designed for screen readers, captions, and multiple formats reaches a broader audience beyond users with disabilities. People consuming content without sound, those with slower internet connections, and non-native speakers all benefit from accessible design choices.

Where traditional media historically portrayed disabled people through "heroic superhero or pity narratives," creators now control their own stories. Tiffany’s content about living with a paralyzed arm reached 11 million views on YouTube — broadening access to an authentic disabled experience rather than one filtered by institutional or corporate portrayals.

In 2021, when she began creating disability content about living with a paralyzed arm, she earned $55,000. In 2022, she doubled that to $105,000 before scaling back to focus on writing her debut book, The Anti-Ableist Manifesto. Now, brand partnerships account for 90% of her revenue, with the remaining 10% coming from speaking engagements and digital products.

I joined this episode as a co-host for the second time! Here are a few things that stuck out to me throughout our conversation.

Connect with Tiffany on LinkedIn, TikTok, and Instagram.
Learn more about Diversability.

Economic empowerment has always been central to how Tiffany defines community — especially for a demographic that faces unemployment rates twice the national average. She doesn’t measure success solely by member counts or engagement metrics, but by whether her community’s getting paid.

Since 2021, her Diversability Leadership Collective has secured nearly $40,000 in paid gigs for its members, ranging from $250 content gigs to $12,000 speaking engagements. This metric alignment creates a sustainable retention strategy — when members make money, they stay longer and refer others.

Her three-tier model shows how to create value at every level while building sustainable revenue.

Tiffany's free Facebook group serves a specific function: peer-to-peer support that doesn't require her direct involvement. Members answer each other's questions, share resources, and provide mutual encouragement. This reduces the support burden on her team while creating value for people who can't afford the paid tier.

The free community also serves as a funnel for the paid tier, but more importantly, it demonstrates Tiffany's commitment to accessibility. Not everyone who needs community support can afford it, so the free tier ensures broader access, while the paid tier funds infrastructure that benefits everyone.

This setup enables the free tier to be a resource — a place where members could solve real problems independently, rather than just offering samples of premium content. Members can experience the community’s core value proposition before committing to any paymemts.

When brands approach Tiffany for partnerships outside her expertise, she redirects them to community members. When speaking bureaus need topics she doesn't cover, she connects them with relevant members. For higher-value opportunities, Diversability takes a small commission.

This network-sharing model maximizes every incoming opportunity. Instead of declining requests outright, Tiffany redirects them to appropriate community members. This generates:

The key insight: tracking every opportunity that comes your way, even ones you can't take, and building a database of member skills so you can quickly match requests to the right people. Tiffany's transparent approach to commission structures — taking cuts only on higher-value deals where her introduction creates significant value — builds trust while generating additional revenue streams.

Tiffany regularly brings in brands, speaking bureaus, and opportunity sources to present directly to members, turning community programming into a pipeline for paid work. The $68/month membership fee isn’t just for access to events or resources, but to her professional network and active matchmaking between members and income-generating opportunities.

This approach reveals what makes communities truly valuable: they become more essential when they facilitate business relationships rather than just knowledge transfer. While educational content can be found anywhere, exclusive access to decision-makers and active deal-making creates ongoing value that justifies recurring payments.