Six people in 2011. Five thousand by the time I handed it over.

There were six of us.

No club, no league commitment, no stadium, no players. What existed was a conviction that Indianapolis should have professional soccer and a suspicion that waiting politely for someone to provide it was not a strategy.

By the time Indy Eleven played its first match on 12 April 2014, the Brickyard Battalion had become a registered 501(c)3 with a membership in the thousands — and had been part of the movement that helped make the club happen at all.

What you actually do with no product

You cannot market a team that doesn't exist. So we didn't. We built the only things available to us: reasons to gather, an identity worth adopting, and visible evidence that demand was real.

Gatherings before there was anything to watch. Watch parties for other people's football. Brewery relationships. Chants and a name and a scarf. A steady, public accumulation of proof that an audience was already here and simply had nowhere to go.

That last part mattered more than any of the rest. The argument for professional soccer in Indianapolis stopped being a projection and became an observation.

Countless meetings, tireless hours, and building enthusiasm — all while trying to raise a young family.

What the growth actually cost

The part worth being honest about

This was volunteer work. Hours upon hours of it, with the sole purpose of bringing professional soccer to Indianapolis, alongside a job and small children at home.

I mention that not for sympathy but because it's the mechanism. Communities aren't built by campaigns. They're built by a small number of people who keep showing up for a long time before there's any evidence it will work — and the growth from six to five thousand is a record of that persistence, not of a clever tactic.

Why it made me better inside the club

I later joined Indy Eleven as VP of Marketing & Strategy, several seasons in, to rebuild a marketing function that wasn't working.

Having been on the supporters' side first gave me something I could not have acquired any other way: a precise sense of where the line sits. What a front office can encourage, and where encouragement becomes interference. What reads as genuine, and what supporters would call plastic.

Nearly everything I built afterwards — the XI Century Club, the theme nights, the youth pipeline — was shaped by having stood on the other side of it.

What transfers

• Demand can be demonstrated before it's served. Visible community is the most persuasive business case available to an unproven idea.
• Identity scales further than product. Six people with a name outgrew a market with no team.
• Longevity beats cleverness. Three years of showing up did what no launch campaign could have.