FRIDAY 9th MAY

Hi, I’m Gaz. And today, Friday 9th May, is quite the day for me personally.

I’m launching GROUPED: a curatorial media stream that is, in essense, the type of content that I would want to read and consume, and I’m pushing this out into the world where I believe a niche audience will find it organically.

And then later this evening, I’ve got my wife attending a surprise birthday party for her 40th, at our favorite local pub, and she honestly has no fucking idea and I am fizzing about seeing her reaction. She HATES surprise parties.

Back to the affairs at hand: GROUPED is the 2nd natural step for me to obsess over as I launch and grow my curation-focused venture GROUP GROUP.

I began my founder journey with GROUP GROUP with a services approach for multiple companies, mainly focused on working 1:1 on marketing & brand-building & PR & other forms of growth projects, with technology founders.

Now, as I complete my experimentation phase to see what work I actually enjoy doing at this stage of my life, my next steps personally entail scaling down my services offering to only working with a client or two at a time, and thus move into the creation and curation of an audience-led-growth phase of content life (I’ll explain this a bit more below)

For me, education is my priority and passion, and I hold a belief that this is more important than ever, if I’m to remark on the presence of excellent learning environments and good content when I entered the technology world to build a new career a ~decade ago, and then compare that to where we are today in 2025 (lacking).

So, the ‘ED’ in GROUPED is my definitive nod to the importance of providing some free insights to a group of people that need it, as I get stuck into building out the GROUP GROUP house of brands.

Starting right now with the curation of a series of articles and interviews and reports on industries, products, platforms, people, trends and more, as I profile some incredible creators and builders providing something of substance that I think people should know about, but who might not necessarily be the most frequently spotlighted, as they go about their business building some amazing companies and projects.

I hope to curate a media entity that provides a tad more substance in the world than the range of utter slop that we so frequently consume in our social media feeds, and I’m confident an audience will find GROUPED as I do it.

On: Audience-Led-Growth

I’ve noticed multiple people articulate publicly that they have a belief in this AI-explosion era, that ‘taste’ will be a defining attribute for people to lean on, whether referencing content creation, or brand-building, or other.

At some point then, some curation of taste needs to occur, so this is my effort in doing so, as so many have done well before and many more to come will explore. (See long-time do’ers of this, The Creative Independent 👇️ )

Particularly if I am to reference the tech/startup world I exist in (in Australia mainly), there can be some incredibly low effort, poorly designed, un-thoughtfully curated content pushed out frequently, and this creates habits of profiling the same companies/people time and again, rather than give a truer insight into some really interesting and thought-provoking technology and projects that deserve to have a greater share of the spotlight.

I’ll talk more about my thoughts on the startup world’s obsession with the broad-stroke term of ‘community’ shortly, but I believe there is merit in questioning how this is positioned and communicated, and instead, hone in on the emphasis of niche communities.

But, reverting back to GROUPED; I have one main goal to project as I build an audience made up of multiple sub-audiences that share a similar interest to me in technology’s overlap with culture-shaping, and the role education & storytelling plays in exposing that, providing a resonance and affinity for people as they find their people:

Create a curated platform that can attract an audience of people who enjoy existing in the niches, and demonstrate that the overlap of creativity and culture plays a key role in influencing industry growth across a range of them, with technology and $capital$ helping to accelerate that rapidly as a trend emerges.

Challengers and Builders

For those taking note of the GROUPED design treatment pushed out (thanks to the incredible Sydney-based designer Carl Whitbread), you’ll notice the use of iconography as a main logo feature:

A fingerprint, deliberately intended to represent the builders, the people who put their hands together and create something from nothing, with grit, resilience and smarts.

You might find that a little basic when explained, but I love to remind anyone that will listen, that incredibly often, the reason for new ventures or new categories of substance emerging and growing is due to the builders - the technologists, the designers, the strategic work at play.

So GROUPED for me is definitely an emphasis on those builders, rather than profiling people who obsess over building profiles for themselves.

These builders, who create substantial products and companies, and potentially even movements, are the ones to platform, and that to me provides all the inspiration I’ll ever need to use GROUPED as the vessel to shine that spotlight on them, no matter how niche they might be.

Why ‘GROUPs’?

As someone who has frequently launched various initiatives in the technology/startup/creative world, I’ve become quite used to being tagged as someone baked into the ‘community.’

It’s not a categorisation I enjoy, and I’ll talk more about that in a future article as to my thoughts on the highly frequent use of ‘community’ in the startup world, but my TL;DR on the matter is that I already have a community (where I live) and I instead focus on enjoying growing niche audiences of a few people working in very specific disciplines (nothing better to me than seeing a bunch of music-tech people nerd out at a social gathering together)

To me, creating ‘GROUPS’ feels natural, and also points towards some future new brands I’ll build with GROUP GROUP, highly likely to centre on investing in and growing a range of companies in specific industry verticals.

But, returning finally to the importance of education for me, I see the importance of GROUPED beginning as this media arm now, and that is what I will focus heavily on building, and building in public.

Then in the near future, moving even moreso towards an actual education offering, in both virtual and IRL form.

Lastly… here’s what’s on the way

I must very quickly mention that I have had a LOT of supporters on my personal journey as I have gotten to this point of GROUP GROUP, launching the GROUPED publication and then the next arms of the business in June, July, and September 2025.

They’ll know my appreciation as I let them know personally, but it’s good pause for thought for me to think about how the ol’ career has evolved to this point, then visualise the next run at it.

GROUP GROUP is most definitely a way for me to focus on others, rather than just a lot of ‘me, me, me’ and ‘I, I, I’

So with GROUPED, I’ll be focusing on the following topics of content:

Niche Creation, Rule-Breaking Brands, Tech Ecosystem Reports, Venture Studio Models, Impact & Sustainability, and, even, something that leans into Pop Culture & Technology.

It’s quite easy for me to curate the varied streams as it’s where I have been focussed on commenting on for years now!

It just now happens to be pulled together into one tight little package, over in my own little weird corner of the internet.

I’ll throw in some events and podcasting and various special stuff too, but I look fwd to hearing your take on GROUPED as it evolves, and more interesting storytelling emerges.

Oh, and don’t worry at all. There will be plenty of humour injected.

I am still a bit of a rascal, after all.

GROUP on,

Gaz

A TOUCH OF CURATION FOR YA