Introduceyourself: Entrepreneur & Marketer with artistic tendencies and a deep respect for the natural world

Hi Steemians! My name is Saadi, and I signed up for Steemit a couple of weeks ago after @benleemusic piqued my curiosity with his posts on Facebook and I'm finally getting around to posting after lurking for a while.

Here's a bit about me:

I live with my partner in a beautiful valley in Northern NSW, Australia just inland from the coastal tourist town of Byron Bay.

I have lived a slightly unconventional life. My parents were part of the original hippy movement that settled in this area in the 70's and met through their shared interest in Buddhism.

From a young age, I was exposed to the environmental and social justice movements tagging along with my parents to Deep Ecology workshops, Heart Politics conferences, retreats, protests, festivals and many other activities that were left of centre.

This upbringing fostered my interest in environmental and social justice as well as a love for the arts, especially music and poetry.

I became a parent very young (17) and spent a good chunk of my life as a solo parent, and now at 40 I'm an empty nester and my children are 20 and 23!

As a young parent in a regional area looking to support my family, I discovered the internet back in the dialup days and taught myself web development, then marketing and I made a living building websites and offering marketing services for many years.

In early 2015 I helped some friends with the marketing of a new beekeeping invention, Flow Hive and the project became the 5th largest fully funded crowdfunding campaign in history at the time, raising over $12 Million USD in 8 weeks.

Flow has kept me very busy over the last few years as I stayed on to run the marketing team and help establish the business. When we launched it was just 5 of us in a shed that one of the inventors lived in, and now the business has over 30 staff and more than 50,000 customers in over 130 countries.

_{Flow Hives at Sunrise- Flow HQ}

It's been an amazing experience to be part of growing a business on that scale and to be a part of introducing so many people to beekeeping, which is an ideal hobby to foster awareness of our connection to the natural world. Telling the story of this has been one of the most rewarding parts of my work, and I have been privileged to work with some amazing filmmakers to do this. Over the last 3 years, the content we produced has been viewed close to a billion times across various social media channels, which blows my mind! Here is one of my favourites:

Along the way, I found time for some other projects, including helping to run a crowdfunding campaign that raised over $230k for an indigenous youth mental health initiative and working on the commercialisation of a new composting invention, which will go to crowdfunding very soon.

From January this year, I took a step back from my role at Flow and now work with them as a consultant. I'm currently focussed on the commercialisation of Subpod, a modular subsurface composting system that processes organic waste with no odors, pests or mess and can scale to suit situations from the single household to an entire housing development.

<sub>Subpod

Subpod Prototype in Use</sub>

We will be crowdfunding the Subpod in early March, and if you want more information please sign up for email updates here.

Its an exciting project to be a part of, and I hope that through it I will be able to help more people appreciate the amazing world of worms, microbes and the soil food web we owe our existence too.

I'm lucky to now live on the property my parents bought when I was 10, as they moved to the coast a few years ago.

_{My Partner Exploring our Creek in the Wet Season}
It's special to be connected to a piece of land for so long and to see the forest spread out from the gully to reclaim the top paddock. It reminds me that given time natural systems are resilient and have an amazing capacity to heal.

Outside of work and property maintenance I enjoy reading, playing music (Guitar, Uke & Harmonica), writing (especially poetry) and exploring whatever subject I'm feeling curious about which could range from ecology to economics to psychology and beyond. (I can never seem to find the time to learn about all the things I'm interested in)

I hope to use Steemit to share some of my writing from over the years and hopefully as a prompt to do more. Thanks for taking the time to read my rambling introduction. I'll leave you with some book and music recommendations.

A Few Books I Like

• Rag & Bone Shop of the Heart
• Scale
• A New Path to the Waterfall
• Doughnut Economics
• The Invention of Nature
• The Earthsea Quartet
• Thinking In Systems
• The Hidden Life of Trees
• The Body Keeps the Score
• Drawdown

Some Musicians I like listening too

• Eric Bibb
• Chris Smither
• Ozomatli
• The Tallest Man on Earth
• Michael Franti
• Sam Cooke
• David Dondero
• Darren Hanlon