Starting a project is like having a child. You and/or you and your (business) partners believe in some sort of truth or opportunity that you want to bring in to the world. Some just fail to have the foresight to protect yourself and others from the inevitable responsibility of raising a new start-up to maturity in this economic and social climate (much less the virality of innovative ideas).
Rather than choosing to invest in a promising pre-seed or full-blown enterprise, you thought to yourself, “Could you imagine if we did this instead? I bet I could build this. I know someone who’s been dying to put all their efforts into making something better than what we grew up on.” Some even role-played their hearts out starting small businesses and calling themselves ‘entrepreneurs’ and CEO’s (before they could tell you what either meant), and others just screwed around with whoever greenlit their 30 second pitch and wound up with a little day job they never asked for.
But while many went out there early trying to launch hype-train after hype-train on whatever capital they’re able to drop, not knowing how they keep ending back where they started, others have grown past the simple desktop SIM games and MLMs.
Real founders:
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evaluate their assets and expected workload
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plan sprints with their designers and engineers and do market research
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take the time to reach out to advisors and mentors
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schedule retros
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learn how to better communicate their ideas with each other and with their audience when things get rocky and when things take off
Good parents:
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evaluate their assets and make time for their work and personal lives
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make friends in the community and look into schools and social programs
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visit medical professionals, therapists, and spiritual leaders
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take time off for themselves
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work to communicate in healthy and constructive ways with each other and with their children in good times and bad
Journaling and mental wellness check-ins are always a plus for individuals, but making sure you and your team are values-aligned and vibing ultimately takes priority when it comes to getting your project off the runway and into the stratosphere.
A business is not an island
You and your co-founders, your team, mentors and advisors, your audience and peers all around you – these form the ecosystem of a project’s community. Just like it takes a village to raise a child, a business requires deliberate consideration in order to thrive in a world over-saturated with bad ideas, and easy access to a soapbox and megaphone. Community building is the future of business. It’s no longer a zero-sum game of winners and losers – we’re in the transitional period between then and now where our generation is taking the careful steps needed to move away from survival of the fittest mentality and towards sustainable, socially conscious building.
The decentralization of power and influence from financial institutions and big businesses allows for small competitors – builders and creators, to compete on equal footing where previously it would’ve been either impossible or financially unsustainable to reach consumers and/or new markets. But now, the opportunity for great ideas in one place to reach eyes in another is a matter of message amplification and deliberateness of focus, rather than strict litmus tests of capital or connections. You no longer need to be a king, scholar, or brash adventurer to work and do business on the other side of the world.
Building a community to get that message out, however, is still an uphill battle. Algorithms dictate on many platforms which messages get amplified and which never see the light of day. Subscriptions and follows are only small factors in what ultimately shows up in your feed, vying for your attention against ads, trends, and other attention seekers. You might not know why you’re learning about an NFT project that seeds funds for pepper research, but it popped up on twitter and suddenly you own 5 spicy uno PFPs.
The many and the few
While what you ultimately decide to spend your money on is entirely your own business, the mechanics which helped you arrive at that point are often closely guarded trade secrets by advertisers and their constituents. There is virtually no transparency guiding how and what platforms will recommend to you based on your previous search and activity histories, as well as geographic and biographic identifiers that you might unknowingly have given to them without your consent. Organic community building is aided or impeded (depending on your perspective regarding these algorithms) by these practices, whether you like it or not, and the (seemingly) complex mathematics underlying everything remains shrouded in mystery, governed only by 3rd party proprietary equations and profit-seeking advisory boards.
While the village can raise a child, if the village is dictated, so are its possible outcomes. Whether you’re a lottery winner or you’re doomed to fail from the start, a project’s ultimate success shouldn’t be predestined by market trends or algo-driven execs maximizing profits. It should be by the quality of its community and the conscious choices of its metaphorical parents that a project just barely makes it past proof of concept, or becomes the next sensational platform. That form of community doesn’t design its winners and losers. It creates space for ideas to thrive, partnerships to form, and organic relationships between skill sets and passion projects to better synchronize. And by creating this space, we get away from the mindset that greed is good and that wealth and influence need to be hoarded to be classified a success.
It takes a village to raise a child. It takes a community to raise a village.
We value: trust, transparency, integrity, flexibility, compassion, commitment, quality
‘Spilnota’ means ‘Community’ – Synergising Ideas and Communities