PencilBooth Reflections - 7 Weeks In

Just reflecting on the last seven weeks since we launched PencilBooth, it's been a realllllly interesting time and thought I would share some observations and reflections.

(Apparently LinkedIn has a maximum character count for posts. I never actually wanted to write a proper article, but only found this out after the fact. This feels way too formal, but here goes...)

• The dopamine rush that comes from launching something is very real and very dizzying. I think this is why I have a total of nine full-time jobs at the moment. There is also no bigger crash than seeing things move slower than you hope. 
• I find it impossible to not take it personally when so many people say they love your thing, but then either never sign up or enter use it. This happened all the time when I was running Is Not Magazine. Everyone adored the fact it existed and that it was on the wall, but nobody ever read it. (I can prove it, ask me how...)
• This is the first time I have made something and have actually done research and talked to potential users. I look back through my fingers in horror at previous failures where I thought I could just use my intuition. At the same time, I don't think I would ever do something again that wasn't some kind of direct extension of our work at Jacky Winter. This is just the hyper-sensitivity at play - It's so hard to get negative feedback on something you are excited about, but I think I get it now.
• I'm investing a lot more time and money than I am really comfortable with at the moment, and not too sure why. Apart from the aforementioned dopamine high, it's just really fun to build something from scratch, mostly because I am out of practice and simply bad at it. After running Jacky Winter for sixteen years it feels good to exercise some different muscles, and it feels important to do things that will potentially embarrass me as I get older. Like writing this post for example.
• Speaking of getting older, I really think that email is still one of the best tools that we have, and so many things are needlessly complicated. A newsletter might not be the sexiest bit of tech, but it's incredibly effective and intimate. A lot of people still don't actually get what PencilBooth is (and we're working on that), but the ones that it does click for, it clicks in a big way and seeing that is really validating and fun.
• It's absolutely mind boggling to see how the *actual* needs of artists have been widely ignored by most platforms, especially given the fact that most platforms are selling advertising against their content and pocketing 100% of the fees. This has however opened up some new thoughts for me on better ways to potentially monetize content that can actually empower artists, and I hope we get the chance to explore that in PB sometime soon.
• Curation is just another word for restraint, and I think we absolutely need more of it. I love the fact that you can only send four images in PencilBooth at a maximum time of once a week, and with very limited captions. It's not super sophisticated, but it does take so much pressure off sending a take. Being actual users of the platform helps validate this as well.
• That said, for a relatively unsophisticated product, we seem to have an inordinately long roadmap of feature ideas...
• An engineer from Substack signed up to our waitlist and I still think about the fact that Substack or MailChimp could easily build what we have done in a weeks time with their resources. (This happened somewhat with a previous thing we made, replier, and the email app Superhuman) At the same time, I genuinely don't think they could re-build the great community of creatives that we have gathered together so far or have a better founder-product fit than we do.
• In a few weeks we're going to turn billing on and see if this actual has any legs. Part of me feels that reason artists have been so neglected is that they actually don't represent a huge market that can scale very big. This is okay with me. If we can just cover our basic overheads, it'll still be a worthwhile pursuit. At least we'll have a great way to run the Jacky Winter newsletter, which was the reason we built this whole thing to begin with! 
• That said, it seems like people are genuinely excited about this, which in turn gets me more excited. It's also been amazing to see how non-illustrators have been considering using the platform.
• Whoa! There is sure a whole lot of dumb money sloshing around out in the world. I'm still picking my jaw off the floor from some of the quotes we got to do some user acquisition ads and how much brands actually spend on advertising. This has been a real wake-up call being on the other side of the fence.
• In the last seven weeks I have literally onboarded every single user by hand, personally. Mostly at night. At some point around a month in, I got a real bad feeling, like I had climbed a really high ladder and was looking down and getting vertigo... I was doing too many things and something had to give. The capacity of our minds to hold vast amounts of information is staggering.
• Success means absolutely nothing to a mind that is always grasping and ill at ease. I am dedicating this post to my friend Simon Goodrich , who is a living example of what it means to face true adversity and groundlessness with bravery and compassion unlike that I have ever seen. When I get too high up on that ladder I remind myself that all of this really doesn't mean anything at all, but it's still a bit of fun. But I probably should be doing something else maybe.

I've never really shared this kind of stuff before, so this is a bit of an experiment! Felt cute. Might delete later. x