I built a mental health community on Slack called 18percent.
At its peak, it had over 18,000 members and nearly 2 million messages. But it didn't start that way. It started with a Slack channel and maybe 20 people I knew who cared about the same thing. I had no plan to build a massive community. I just wanted to create a space where people could talk openly about mental health without judgment.
I've built 6 companies. Landed 200+ media features in the New York Times, BBC, Forbes, TechCrunch, Bloomberg, and Good Morning America. All without spending a dollar on PR agencies. But 18percent is the one that changed how I think about growth. Because it grew in a way I never expected.
Most people assume I grew it through marketing. Cold emails, social posts, ad campaigns. That's how I grew everything else. But 18percent grew through partnerships with crisis hotlines. And that wasn't some strategic master plan. It was me noticing a gap and filling it.
Here's what I figured out early on. Many people calling hotlines like Crisis Text Line weren't in immediate danger. They were lonely. They needed someone to talk to. They needed community, not crisis intervention. And the hotlines knew this. Every call from someone who was lonely but not in crisis was a call that could have gone to someone who actually needed the line.
So we became the referral. When someone called and what they really needed was ongoing peer support, the hotline could point them to 18percent. It freed up phone lines for emergencies. And it gave people a place to actually belong.
We partnered with NAMI and the National Eating Disorders Association too. Same dynamic. They had people who needed long-term community support, not one-time crisis calls. We had the community. The growth engine was a genuine win-win where both sides got exactly what they needed. By the time we had 530,000 messages on the platform, the partnerships were doing all the heavy lifting. No ad budget. No growth hacks. Just a real solution to a real problem.
Then something happened that still surprises me.
Slack's free tier had message limits. Members couldn't search old conversations or save important threads. For a mental health community where people shared deeply personal things, losing those conversations felt wrong. These weren't casual work chats. People were opening up about depression, anxiety, eating disorders, loneliness. Losing that history meant losing something that mattered to them.
I didn't have the budget for an enterprise account. So I did the only thing I could think of. I tweeted at Stuart Butterfield, the CEO of Slack, and asked for a free upgrade.
His chief of staff reached out within an hour. They set it up that same day. No press release. No big announcement. Just a CEO who saw what we were building and decided to help.
That moment taught me something I keep coming back to. You don't get what you don't ask for. And the bigger the ask, the more likely someone important is going to respect the fact that you made it. Most people never ask because they assume the answer is no. The answer was yes in under an hour.
We monetized through education, not advertising. I built a self-paced course on Teachable that taught people how to support others through mental health challenges. It was about 5-7 hours of content. Completers earned a peer-to-peer support certification and joined a private community of graduates. That was the business model. No sponsors. No ads cluttering the Slack channels. Just genuine value that people were willing to pay for.
The lesson I keep pulling from 18percent is this. The best growth doesn't look like marketing. It looks like solving someone else's problem while solving your own. The hotlines needed fewer non-emergency calls. We needed members. The Slack CEO wanted his platform used for things that mattered. We needed the upgrade. Every growth milestone came from finding that overlap.
I use this same thinking in everything I build now. PressPitch AI doesn't grow because I run ads. It grows because founders have a real problem, finding the right journalists and pitching them without hiring an agency, and the tool solves it. When the product genuinely solves the problem, growth follows.
>> If you're a founder and your growth strategy is just "post more and run more ads," pause. Think about who already has the audience you want. Think about what problem you can solve for them. That partnership is where the real growth lives.
What's a partnership or ask you've been putting off because it felt too big?
Hit reply and tell me. I read every single one.
Zach
P.S. If you want to land press, podcasts, or speaking gigs without an agency, I built PressPitch AI to do exactly that. 200+ features came from this system. Check it out at presspitchai.com.
P.P.S. If you want to talk through your growth strategy one-on-one, let's connect: zachschleien.com
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