We Were Never Just Events

By Hannah Jewel Clark

This all started with a blog. Not a dot com — a dot blog. That's Why We Are.

I was living with roommates. Someone looked at me one day and said, "You're being too hard on yourself." I took that feeling — that shame spiral, that loneliness, that quiet ache of not knowing how to just be — and I turned it into something. I started writing. I started talking. I started creating spaces where other people could bring those same feelings and not have to carry them alone.

That was the seed. How To Be Social grew from it.

For years, it grew through events. Rooms full of artists, entrepreneurs, creatives, humans — people who needed each other. And those rooms worked. They sparked something real.

But 2020 made one thing undeniable: events alone are not enough.

The group chat is not a side feature

Right now, the most alive part of HTBS isn't a ticketed event. It's a group chat.

Inside that chat, people promote their events for free. They ask questions. They share resources. They help each other navigate not just their creative and entrepreneurial pursuits, but the full experience of being a human — relationships, decisions, hard days, big dreams. It functions like a forum, except the people inside it actually know each other.

And it costs nothing to be there.

You can't just join, though. The group chat requires a personal invite or attendance at an HTBS event first. That's not gatekeeping for the sake of it — it's curation. The quality of a community is determined by who's in the room and why they came.

Anyone can come to the events. Getting into the group chat means you've already crossed a threshold. You've shown up.

What Stay Social LA confirmed

Our last event had a double booking. In almost ten years, nothing like that had happened before.

I communicated transparently. I adapted in real time. I collaborated with everyone involved, even while knowing I'd have to let some people down — and that some of them deserved better. That's true, and I'm sitting with it.

But here's what the night confirmed: the community stayed. People connected. We raised over $500 for the fundraiser. The contributors who showed up gave everything they had, and I'm committed to honoring each of them in the right way, at the right time.

A perfect event doesn't show you what you've built. A hard one does.

The model that's emerging

HTBS is becoming something more layered than an event series. Here's how it's taking shape:

Open door: the events. Anyone can come. That's always been true and always will be. The events are the first point of contact — the room where the spark happens.

The inner circle: the group chat. Invite only. Free to be in. A living, breathing forum for people who are serious about their lives — creative, entrepreneurial, and human.

The education layer: the video series. We're building a series that takes you from starving artist to creative entrepreneur — and the next chapter, from creative entrepreneur to art investor. This is the exclusive, premium layer. The knowledge that took years to learn, made accessible in a structured way.

The local infrastructure: city leaders. I'm working on identifying leaders in every city where HTBS does events — people who will run smaller, recurring gatherings. Ten to twenty people. Weekly, biweekly, or monthly. Capped and intentional. Because weekly rituals build deeper bonds than occasional big moments ever will.

The long-term vision: a board. HTBS needs governance, not just a founder. I'm building toward a board — people who believe in the mission and can help steward it for the long term.

What this is really about

People need each other. Not abstractly. Concretely, in rooms, in chats, in cities, in conversations that change how you see yourself.

That's where this started. A blog post. A roommate's words. A feeling I didn't want to waste.

HTBS was never just events. It was always infrastructure for human connection. We're just finally building it like we know that's true.

Hannah Jewel Clark is the founder of How To Be Social and the ecosystem builder behind The Jems Universe and multiple creative businesses. More at ByHannahJewelClark.com