A community of personal assistants
Battered Black Book is a community of personal assistants — PAs to pop stars, actors, and some of the wealthiest families and family offices in the world. It grew out of a recruitment business that placed PAs for a living, and that noticed something about the people it placed: the job is demanding and often isolated. PAs work alone, frequently for principals who aren't even in the country, and they're asked tricky questions all day long. Between them, though, they hold some of the best address books anywhere.
It started as a Facebook group
So BBB began as a private Facebook group where those PAs could share contacts and answers. It worked — the peer-to-peer instinct was real. But the club BBB actually wanted to build was bigger: vetted partner suppliers sitting alongside members, ready to be called on. And a Facebook group was the wrong home for that. Members' privacy couldn't be protected once commercial partners held their Facebook handles, and the whole community sat on a platform BBB didn't control.
A members' club with rules
On Disciple, BBB built its own private members' club, as an app. Members bring their questions to the community's Q&A feed. A directory of vetted partners sits alongside it, and partners promote what they have — an offer, an upgrade, a last-minute cancellation — in a marketplace space of their own, so the main feed stays about members. Partners are in the room, but the room has rules: sharing a BBB handle is nothing like sharing a Facebook one.
A club that runs on its own terms
Years on, BBB is one of the longest-standing communities on Disciple, and the club runs on its own terms. Partners pay for membership and host the community's events — funded by the partners, in venues worth turning up to, and they get business from doing it. Members ask each other for what their bosses would otherwise pay a concierge service thousands a year to find. And the community that began as a free Facebook group has become a paid membership: partners subscribe, new members now join as subscribers, and BBB's pitch is increasingly to the bosses themselves — membership as part of a PA's benefits package.
