Before Paragon I had spent my whole WoW career on Twisting Nether. I started raiding mid-Burning Crusade and by the time WotLK was released I was running my own guild with 20some finns in it. International guild of course, but with heavily finnish core.
After recruiting Jobim The Guild Destroyer I merged with the same core to another guild on my server and we managed to reach the wowprogress top20 page shortly after ( coincidentally thanks to Paragon and especially Anaram sharing the secrets about Anub with us at a party ).