What made you want to get involved with Connectd?
Alixandria Adams, Advisor, Artfol: For the couple of years before my Connectd relationship, I had been thinking about what was next for me. I knew it wasn't a reinvention of myself, but I was looking for another way to use the experience I'd already built, and how it would segue into something else. I was introduced to Connectd when they first launched in the Americas, and I joined because I was curious about advisory work and wanted to understand what this whole founder community was really like.
I completed the board advisory Connectd Academy, which gave me a really good foundation, but I'm someone who learns by doing. At some point it's about getting out of the classroom and working with a real founder on a real business. That was the appeal of Connectd for me. They gave me a solid foundation, but they also gave me a path for taking what I'd learned and actually doing it in advisory work.
How did you navigate your next steps and align your value proposition following the Academy course?
Alixandria Adams: The way the platform works is that once you make enough progress with the Academy and finish it, different things start to open up and unlock, and you can begin to explore them. Having real clarity about what I thought I brought to the table, and then finding a company where what we cared about genuinely matched, was really important to me. So I spent time looking at all the startups.
There was a wide variety of things, and you can give Connectd the pieces and parts that matter most to you. I know what I'm good at, but I also wanted a business I could be genuinely interested in, with a sweet spot around community, culture, and maybe social impact. If I was going to spend time with somebody every week, I needed it to be something I actually cared about. I loved the connection that was made, because it checked off a lot of those pieces, and I really enjoyed the experience.
What was it about the placement that felt worth leaning into?
Alixandria Adams: It was really interesting. I wasn't expecting to be matched with a company about digital art specifically, and that came as a welcomed, unexpected surprise. When I was introduced to Stefan, the founder and CEO of Artfol, I liked him immediately. He's such a diverse young professional, a full-stack developer on one side, but also a designer, an artist, and a founder. He built a platform for the community he's actually part of, a social network specifically for digital artists, community-first and made for artists by artists. That immediately interested me.
It has its challenges, because the kind of thinking that makes a good artist isn't always the kind that makes a good business owner, so we got to really gel on that. Stefan founded Artfol in 2019, and since then AI has been rapidly reshaping the creative landscape in particular, so the idea of a platform that protects, celebrates, and acknowledges human creativity felt especially relevant. We came from different backgrounds and different generations and brought completely different skill sets, which meant we had a lot to learn from each other. I've enjoyed every minute of it.
What did you prioritise in the first month, and what trade-offs did you help the team make early on?
Alixandria Adams: I practise what I really believe in, which is that when leadership comes into any situation, even a meeting, having a curiosity and discovery mindset is most important. There's an expectation that someone with a lot of experience will come in and prescribe what you need to do. Some people work that way; I don't.
Artfol wasn't an MVP. It was already built with an established community. So I didn't walk into the room thinking, "What can I change? What value can I offer?" but rather, "What do I need to understand? What has Stefan built? What does the community care about? Where are the opportunities, and where does Stefan want to take this? What's really getting in his way?" The first few weeks were about curiosity and discovery, asking each other a lot of questions and getting to know one another.
Once I understood the landscape, we could start looking at priorities, because one reality of building anything is that everything feels important. It's really difficult for people to say, "This is important but not urgent." By the time we met for our second session, the priority from the first had shifted, and Stefan started to feel like he was all over the place. I told him, "No, you're not all over the place. These are all genuinely important things. We've just got to make a plan and think about what needs to happen first to get you to the next step." That worked really well for us.
What did collaboration look like in practice?
Alixandria Adams: We made a decision to show up for each other every week. We set a repeating calendar invite for 12 weeks, with the flexibility to move it if something came up, and we did meet every week for three months. They were real working sessions. Each week Stefan would bring a list of questions and problems he was trying to solve. Some weeks we'd be at 30,000 feet, other weeks deep in the weeds. We worked across business planning, organisational development, audience identification, growth and engagement, go-to-market strategy, revenue strategy, all sorts of things that had been swimming around in his head but weren't on paper.
The weekly rhythm was really important, because we couldn't solve everything in one conversation, but we could keep picking things up. As the 12 weeks evolved, the priorities became more defined. That consistency gave us trust with each other and a way to see the needle move. It was really collaborative and consistent, and the outcome is that we built trust and a genuine relationship.
What is a conclusion you helped the company reach?
Alixandria Adams: The impact I've had is really about clarity, prioritisation, and bringing another perspective to the table. A lot of the value was helping Stefan connect his vision for Artfol with what actually needs to happen next. He was so close to it, and I was so removed from it, so there was a lot of challenging each other. We did some deep diving on who his target audience is.
A perfect example: he was launching a marketplace where artists could not only have community but actually sell their wares and transact. This non-AI digital artist community does a lot of commission work, so the marketplace was designed for taking commissions and communicating with buyers. He had a few existing community members transition into the marketplace, but I asked him, "What about the buyers?" We had this really interesting conversation about whether it was our responsibility to have buyers as part of the target audience. Ultimately I said, "If the artists don't bring their own buyers and you're not doing anything to attract buyers to the marketplace, then the artists won't succeed, and the marketplace doesn't work." Simple things like that, that he hadn't fully thought through.
In the initial three-month engagement, which is now finished, rather than ending the relationship we decided to move our weekly sessions to monthly connects. That's a metric of success for me, a qualitative one. We both made the conscious decision to stay in this together.
What advice would you give to a fractional leader venturing down this path?
Alixandria Adams: I'm going to stick with this curiosity theme: start with curiosity, not answers. You understand business-oriented answers, but you don't know their business yet. You're not walking in the room feeling like you have to prove how much you know. You're there because you know a lot, so have the confidence in yourself to know that. And you're sitting across from someone who has been thinking about their business and knows their product and community better than anyone, certainly better than you.
Your experience matters, that's why you're there. But listening first is probably the biggest thing I'd say. And not just listening, but asking questions. Challenge when it's useful. Get into the weeds when you need to. And be prepared to learn something yourself.
How did the Connectd platform bring value to your journey?
Alixandria Adams: The platform brings value because it connects two macro communities to bring value to each other. When you're a few decades into your career, it can feel like you'll just keep doing the same kind of work. A lot of corporate roles are like that. Connectd allows this connection between the two, which is surely why it's called Connectd. And then they create community amongst the startups and amongst the advisor community as well. It's a really interesting platform, and I'm really happy they found me, that I found them, and that I got to meet Stefan as a result.
Alixandria Adams, Advisor, Artfol
