Day 72: Show & Tell Community

I was reflecting on my post from yesterday and how much I’ve enjoyed having a community of people who care about my work and can give me useful feedback in real-time. It’s quite motivating being connected to people who want to help you succeed.

I happened to stumble upon this discovery by joining the Hacker Fellowship, and I want to provide the same space for people who’d benefit from this. Especially in the upcoming weeks/months, it’ll be quite nice to have a sense of community since many of us won’t be going out much for the foreseeable future. So I’m going to start one!

Here’s what I have in mind right now:

Name: Show & Tell

What: A micro-community for makers to share their work and exchange feedback

How: Slack channel + weekly demos over video chat

• Each project would have its own dedicated channel where people who are interested can join. I’ve found that having a group of people who have opted-in to providing feedback makes it much easier to ask for second opinions because you don’t have to worry about bothering people who don’t care. The goal is to bring together a group of thoughtful people who are happy to help each other with product decisions, design, marketing, content — anything!
• Once a week, we could have a live show & tell session over Zoom where people can signup to share updates. I’m not sure whether it’d be better to have short updates from everyone or big updates from a few people, but I’m leaning toward the former. Each presenter could get 5 minutes to share updates and have Q&A so that lots of people can participate and stick around for the whole thing.

I’m going to keep this small and invite-only to start with because I’d rather have a community of 10 people where everyone knows who everyone else is rather than a group of 100 or 1000 where there might be so many people that there isn’t much of a sense of community. It’d be easier to create a culture of open sharing when you know and trust everyone.

I’ll be reaching out to a small number of people whose work I follow and love, but I’m sure I have a ton of friends who have stuff they’re working on that I just don’t know about. I’d also like to open it up to people who I might not know yet. If you read Road to Ramen (well you’re here so I guess you must), have projects you’re working on (can be anything, but it must be your own project, not work you’re doing for a company you’re employed by — I imagine most people will have tech-related projects, but anything that you’re working on is welcome, including blogs, YouTube videos, making physical products, etc.), and are interested in joining, fill out this form!

I’m planning to limit the initial batch to a small group of people in order to get that nice intimate feel, but once things start rolling along, I’d love to slowly grow the community. I think this could be something amazing, and I’m really stoked to give it a shot!