Building Warsaw’s English-speaking scene, one creative workshop at a time

Elliott is a UK native living in Warsaw and the founder of Warsaw Creative Club, an international community and social club, and Warsaw Supper Club, a dinner club for deeper connection. He started it as a side project in 2025 and went full-time less than a year later. He’s now hosted around 100 events and sold over 950 tickets. I spoke with him about building a community where none existed, especially as a newcomer.

Zelda: You started Warsaw Creative Club in 2025 as a Brit living in Poland. What were you hoping to find that didn’t exist?

Elliott: I started Warsaw Creative Club partly because I wanted to find those communities and they weren’t here, and partly because this was my way to integrate with the city. I’d thrown myself in the deep end by moving here, and starting a community was how I made it home.

A lot of the event ideas I run are ones I’d seen happening in other cities that hadn’t happened in Warsaw yet. For example, our monthly vinyl listening party, where people hang out, drink wine, and listen to a record together, was inspired by seeing its success in other cities, and thinking “I want to participate in something like this too!”.

The first meetup was 16 people in July 2025. It just kind of blew up from that point onwards. I went full-time at the start of 2026 because the more events we did, the more obvious it became that the demand was there.

You’ve grown to over 100 events in less than a year, which is crazy! How do you actually plan and run a great event?

When I first started, I had this anti-agenda mindset. I thought, no one wants to be bossed around, it’s going to be a free-for-all, people will just meet in a room. That didn’t suffice. I realized that people do want direction. People need an experience.

Now I design every bit of it. Take the movie club. It starts with choosing the film, then I watch it ahead of time and think about the themes, what we can talk about, what the Q&A might cover. Then on the night, I stand at the door and greet people personally, pour their first glass of wine, take their names, try to make them feel included. With the supper club, I do all the cooking. The hosting too. I think about every second of the experience, from the expected awkwardness at the beginning to the spacing of people so the conversation isn’t concentrated in one part of the room, to the wine pairing.

Size matters too. We have one event called Human Hours that’s somewhere between a discussion club and group therapy: eight people in a circle, talking about deep themes like belonging or making decisions as an adult. That one is limited to eight on purpose because the intent is intimacy. For most other events, the sweet spot is between 20 and 40 people. If you get past 40, it starts to feel unsocial. There’s a difference between busy and overwhelming, and people can feel it.

What’s the work of getting people to come back? You mentioned it takes three visits to feel part of something.

The biggest indicator of success for me isn’t ticket sales. It’s whether people come back.

The most common question I get from new attendees is, can I come on my own, or should I bring friends? Most people come on their own. The first time you come alone, it’s awkward. The second time, you start to recognize a few faces. By the third time, people recognize you, and you start to feel part of it. That’s when a community starts working for someone, around the third visit.

So when I think about whether an event was successful, the answers come in layers. Pre-event success is selling tickets, because it means I’ve marketed the concept correctly and people understand what I’m offering. During the event, you can look around the room and just tell whether people are having a good time. But the real measure is what happens after: do they come back, and do they bring someone next time?

You’ve said it’s been hard to get Polish venues to take you seriously. Walk us through what it’s like building partnerships as an outsider.

Honestly, this is the hardest part of doing what I do. The rejection rate when I contact venues is about 70%, including being never called back.

Polish businesses are quite risk-averse. I speak some Polish, and if I reach out in Polish there’s a slightly better chance of communication, but often they just don’t understand the concept and don’t want to put time or money into something unfamiliar. Now, money does the talk, in the sense that the partnerships I do have are ones I’ve earned by showing up again and again with paying customers and demonstrating I can bring revenue to their venue.

Part of why this is hard is that Warsaw isn’t a city people stay in for very long. People come for work, stay a few years, and leave. I’m not the first person who’s tried to build an international community here. But a lot of those attempts last six or seven months and then burn out. So now that we’ve existed for nearly a year, people are starting to take it seriously. They can see it’s sustainable, that there’s revenue and growth. That’s just the challenge of starting anything new: you have to deal with rejection longer than most people are willing to.

You spent a long time feeling guilty about charging for community work. What changed?

There’s an idea floating around that community should be free, or done at cost, or out of love. And I bought into it. I worried about how to compensate the people helping me, whether I should be paying everyone equally if I was making money.

Now I have a clear framework. I pay hosts for events I can’t run myself, and I send them a document that lays out exactly what I expect. They’re not just managing the event, they’re managing the brand and the vibe. That clarity means we don’t get confused between my vision and theirs.

A big part of how I market and communicate is staying very human. If you look at my account, you can see there’s a real person behind what’s being made. I’m open about the process and what it takes. Because if someone attends an event for two hours, it’s really hard to understand that two weeks of work went into that. So I try to make it visible. And what I’ve found is that when people really value what you do, they’re willing to support it financially. I’m very grateful for that.

What would you tell someone in another city who’s thinking about doing this?

Honestly, just go for it!

You’ll start with a couple of hundred followers and you’ll worry about whether you’re going to be one of those accounts that’s stuck at 200 forever and dies out in a few months. The answer is just to keep going. There’s so much space to build community for everything: for reading, music, run clubs, anything. There’s a thirst for connection out there in every city.

When something doesn’t work, I try not to view it as a failure. I view it as a marketing or communication problem. I don’t doubt the idea. I ask: how can I communicate this better? What isn’t translating? Because if it’s a cool idea, the question isn’t whether it’s worth doing. It’s how to help people see that it’s worth doing.

And finally, perseverance. At first it’s going to be difficult. There’s a general lack of trust, and turning up to an event run by a community of 20 people can feel like a stretch for someone. But eventually it’s 200 people, then 300, and you’ve built something that’s there for the city, not just for you.