Barbeqoo
2012-2018
Last updated
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2012-2018
Last updated
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One place that connects the people that create the world.
In 2012 I've become bothered by designers putting Visual, UI, UX in front of their titles as if to exclude the core responsibility of their job - to solve problems. The more I looked the more I realized the seclusion of creative disciplines affected all arts and crafts. We've had bubbled micro-communities that limit their perspective in the vein of specialization. Polyglottal creativity was dying and auteurism was with it.
I wanted to have creatives of different disciplines get out of their bubbles. Let's have the painter converse with the musician and the video game dev chat with a woodworker. Let's bring everyone into a backyard and have, as Australian would put it, a good ol' Sunday Barbie.
Delving down the rabbit hole other common issues plaguing the creatives came on top - discoverability, rights attribution, individual contribution, and monetization. The public celebrated the work first, the artist second, and had them live off exposure.
Look... I was solving my own "problem." Making your personal view of the world is a good base for an entrepreneurial vision, but it makes for a horrible problem statement. Before I realized this I went on a journey that had me fail repeatedly, for the better (growth) and for the worse (time wasted).
Nip it in the bud. Cut the issue at the root. What is the lead-up to any creative published work? Well of course the iterating, even before that the gestation of ideas, executions, and opinions, and even before that an initial observation.
Can I make it easy to record the moment and the path toward the end result? Would making the notes along the way organically, as it happens, rather than retroactively solve the problem? Quick to solutions I thought behind the scenes turned marketing content turned audience is the way to go.
I've situated the approach as a niche social platform sandwiched somewhere between Twitter, Patreon, Steam Communities, and the plethora of specialized forums, like Indie Game Dev, or Dribbble. It was the wiki for your project to preserve ideas as they developed and at the same time a way to connect with other creators, collaborators, fans, press, and even early investors. By journaling your process from the start this was fixing the discoverability, monetization, and individual contribution and attribution.
Out of thin air, I've dreamed up several personas for each product pillar.
Creators, who do the work.
Visitors, who do the discovering, often turn to Fans and paying Supporters.
Documentors, who like to contribute to the project, but have no hard skills. Creators famously don't like to document, especially when doing the work. Today these would be your Moderators and Community Managers.
Mentors, who support the growth of creators, by sharing their knowledge. Mentorship is often hard to get in unsaturated locations.
Angels, who get the early view and pick of selected work through funding the creators directly.
In 2015 I pitched this big idea to a mentor in Techstars and learned the hard lesson that it's too much too quickly. If the core of the idea was the behind the scenes, I was told to create a blog that would aggregate BTS and see if that grows. While I agreed, I was all ready to build this company, not start a little tiny blog and play a blogger. Today I see that was the right advice. Ultimately I agreed to a full-time position at the time, which ended transforming my life, so my choice didn't matter as much.
In later years I've revisited the idea a little wiser (not by much as I would hope for) and scoped it down to individual features. Out of the bag, I picked the ability to get feedback on your work, which I replicated from what I saw happening organically on Twitter/Dribbble. A quick way to provide feedback for the creator seemed useful. Once more I got busy with life and that's where I finally left the grilling in the backyard behind.
Fast forward to today.
I have seen the behind the scenes movement take off in various capacities. NoClip successfully built a business around long form documentaries about videogame development. Youtubers with introspective on the creative work ranked up billions of views. Formula 1 made a Netflix spectacle by unmasking and profiling the up-until-then boring race show. All this tells me people are hungry to know more about what goes into creativity and excellence.
Some things are much better. The spectrum of private, public, personal, and professional life has been detabooed and wildly accepted. The idea of normalcy continues to disappear.
The hard skill barrier to being a contributing creator has been lowered tenfolds. As long as you have access to a smartphone and the internet you have a free power machine for creativity, distribution, and monetization channels. You can go from 0 to 1 within a day.
This freedom comes at a cost. The issue of discoverability and monetization of the bottom 90% of creatives continues to permeate the algorithm-driven social media, upon which individual creatives are dependent. As Patreon said in their latest announcement:
Over the last decade, algorithmic feeds have made it easier for creators to go viral but nearly impossible to make lasting connections. That means creators can’t predict who or how much of their audience they’ll reach with any given post. They have no reliable way to stay in touch with their communities or earn a dependable income from their work.
The idea of individual contribution has been completely transformed by a culture that celebrates copy-of-a-copy-of-a-copy norm, and memefication. The perpetual content machine of more and more, without substance or long-term tangible value makes everything temporary. There's more content than ever misconstrued as creativity or art.
Then there's the AI revolution. The generative moral dilemma aside I hope it will bring the idea of polywork into reality. AI excels where people fail to understand the many slight complexities, that make the spectrum of life. My biggest hope is to see the decentralized fragmentation of the creative world, where creatives are not forced to make derivative "content" to feed the machine to feed themselves, and where artists can focus on sharing their unique view of the world.
Everyone loves a list of hot lessons learned. This project has been near and dear to my heart for a while, especially because it allowed me to fail over and over, leaving me always a better product thinker.
Big ideas are surprisingly simple. The more time you spend thinking, the more you are wasting not validating through execution. Make small, show and talk to people yesterday.
Building a product is not about the interface, not early on at least.
Vision is not a problem statement. As a creative, you have the luxury to impose your vision onto the world. When you are building a company you are doing it or the other people to solve their problem.
Below is a bit of a dumb of various ideas. Lots of the thinking happened over countless physical notebooks, lost my many moves between continents.
