hibernation of the midwit content

Hey!

Some updates.

We started this journey with the idea of being open and honest about our lives, both the good and the not-so-good.

We've been struggling to keep up with a regular posting/recording schedule.

Life has been...well, life.

Madisen's been adjusting to a new chapter after leaving Hugging Face, and Renée's been juggling work, family, and moving house (seriously, both of us- four times in a few months!).

We've also both been dealing with personal stuff, like separations, illness and divorce.

On top of that, we're learning as we go.

Big list of missteps 🔥

-creating content that wasn't what people expected (& that we had to not-release or take down.)

-spending more than we could afford on operating costs/subscriptions before we had an infrastructure for accepting payments

-being too process driven/ not testing enough in the wild

-shiny object syndrome

-fundamentally, we aren’t a SaaS, we don’t know our business model. We aren’t optimising for speed, nor growth, nor “adoption and scale”. So… our experience isn’t particularly relevant in navigating what to do next.

what’s not an issue

-being remote

-being in different countries

-being bootstrapped

-co-founder alignment

-the commitment to working together long term, whatever that means

-the hours involved

what is an issue

-current tech recommender systems/algorithms forcing us to create “content” at a speed that isn’t sustainable for two humans who are trying to be long-termist. (**no time to work on meatier research if we’re pumping out tiktoks).

-how we monetise/fund our efforts (whether donation based, consulting contracts or events partnerships)

- a bit of analysis paralysis regarding what content to make. we know nothing much about our audience demographics.

We do know a little (thanks to Posthog for our analytics)

We’d chunked up our topics into

-digital commons (policy)

-internet history

-governance

-community building research

it’s a bit of an ikigai for business situation, where we’re realising we do not want to talk for the sake of it.

                                                       **this aint it**

We'll be back soon, but for now, we're taking a step back to recharge- with the aim to return to proper scheduling in September- as a research and development non-profit for exploring the internet.

We’ll still be around (Renee on Slack, via email, DMs) but sporadically as we take time to integrate what we’ve been learning into practice + work on making a less “midwit” content and partnerships strategy.

Love,

Madisen & Renée