Getting the network off the ground

After reaching a couple important milestones, time to document what has happened so far..

I’m in several online groups, some I pay access for. I started spending more time with the paid groups as I noticed a higher quality level of people in those groups. These people are really struggling to figure something out. I found out you get a lot of feedback if you open up, and that input helps refine your focus. So organizing my skillset into a path that made sense seemed to be creating my own online paid community.

So I create the Bluegem network out of my passion for helping others and developing businesses. I’ve always mentored junior developers and lived around struggling artists that should be more well-known than they are. I’ve always studied what others are working on and how they execute. I have been able to relay that helpful advice to others to help them along their path.

I struggled with several choices about tools and who I might recruit. There’s a common term for this option fatigue: analysis paralysis. So after several months and one member lined up, I decided it was taking too long and that I should go for it in the simplest and quickest way forward. I resolved to use turnkey pre-built tools instead of building my own custom tools and not going with heavily optimized solutions but opting to pay for a better user experience.

Launching half-thought-out worked well to get some momentum but didn’t mean I got to skip all the decisions I needed to make. I had to run the organization, host the calls and figure out the missing pieces simultaneously. I also decided to invest in the business, taking additional training courses and coaching that I wouldn’t have typically done. I have found a lot of great people to give me feedback. One of the great lessons I’ve learned is that having a lower bar to get something out there is ok because you can continuously improve it through iteration.

By writing and talking to people more and more, I’ve developed these habits, which make them easier to do in the future and have unlocked other possibilities and ideas. Combining our need to market ourselves with wanting to help our members market themselves, we have decided to create a digitally distributed free magazine. It will serve as a time capsule around what everyone was into it and excited about during this period and hopefully tease projects in development. In addition, we hope to highlight some of the best ideas, visions, and creations we can find in this magazine.

Helping our members with their projects and reducing their burden to execute their projects should increase the chance of success of their projects. Many hands make light work. And what’s hard for you is not hard for another, so we found swapping tasks is key to accelerating progress on these projects. For example, we’ve helped our members raise their seed round of funding for one project.

In the future, as we have more time and resources, we also aim to produce a podcast that will help get these more engaging stories out to a broad audience. We found that some independent builders get so focused on building something great that they find it hard to take a breath and build awareness of their project. Such elements like the podcast can take an hour out of their month and help them get more enthusiasm, feedback, and motivation to continue their taxing journey.

One of the hardest things about creating a new project from scratch is battling between holding the vision and eliminating doubt. Sometimes you can be your worst critic; however, at this point in the project, I’m very proud of where our community is. The network is growing very nicely and definitely will shape into something special. If any of this sounds appealing to you, come consider joining us. You might pay for a podcast, but they can’t tailor their information directly for you and your situation and project. You might pay for an artist’s Patreon to get a look behind the scenes, so why not take a look behind the scenes at many projects at once. The luxury of the Bluegem network is the small community where everyone knows your name and what you’re working on. Come join us.