Stay Motivated on Your Journey: Engage in Our Community and Build in Public! 🚀

Hello there lovely peeps! 👋

As you know we are in between two tournaments, #Nostrasia hackathon ended successfully with countless amazing projects and we are so proud of all of you!

#LegendsofLightning is running full power until December and we are following your beautiful journeys with pleasure.

We decided to make this post and give some useful advices for all of those in need for an extra boost. Burnouts and lack of motivation are most of the times unavoidable in the maker's process, especially if we lost a tournament or didn't get enough interactions with our project, or went trough any kind of defeat... Keep your heads up! Everything is a part of the learning and growing process! So, let's start learning how to solve these problems. ✍🏻

Today we are going to talk about Motivation, Community and Distribution! ✨

Without a way to get feedback, or reach users it’s easy to demotivate ourselves with a whirlpool of questions like:

Is this a good idea? Will it work out? Will anyone care?

So how do we prevent all of this second-guessing that keeps haunting us every time we make a mistake or think we reached a dead end?

Let’s take a step back and think about distribution. Distribution isn’t just something for logistics. We have to think about this, even if we’re building software, because you can’t only win with the tech. As a developer, you can put your whole body and soul into the best project you ever made and upload the project on Github, yet not get any views or feedback.

Why? Because if you didn’t build or engage with communities around you, how can you expect for someone to find your project?

Many of the most successful companies, and open source projects understand the importance of community. Whether it is a chat room or social media presence. Even founders who have a huge audience have easier time getting their ideas validated because they have a set of people ready to validate and criticize their ideas and assumptions.

Now , you may not necessarily have the skills yourself to build an audience and keep them engaged so here’s some tips we put together:

Getting feedback 💬

Building social presence is crucial, especially if you're starting from scratch. Using platforms as BOLT.FUN allows you to connect with likeminded people and build a loyal community and possibly find someone to build your projects with.

Sometimes when we’re new in a community, we are afraid to interact with more experienced people or people in general, but that is exactly what we are supposed to do.

So don’t be shy! Here are some suggestions that can improve your interactions, communication and visibility:

• Share your ideas: You can easily get inspired by someone’s insights and be encouraged to turn your working effort into a reality

• Ask questions: Let go of that fear of asking when not understanding something, no one knows everything. With asking questions you can learn about new disciplines, open a dialogue or a conversation with multiple people, be inspired to do something new and create connections.

• Put your audience first: Don’t ask what you need, find out what potential users need.

• Share your PPP’s: With sharing your weekly/monthly plans, progress and problems, you’re creating a deeper connection with the audience and the community. With often updates about your journey, you are not just presenting your trail of thoughts, you are inviting people to be a part of the project.

• Create content on multiple platforms: In order to reach wider audience, expand your visions to other platforms. Think of the social platforms as a way to distribute beyond your existing audience. You can repurpose your content in a form of a video, podcast, newsletter etc.

• Get Support: If you are tech-focused, working alone, or too busy to manage content creation and distribution, consider finding a co-founder who excels in communication or hiring a community manager.

Marina, JeffG and Gsovriegnity did a live presentation with some very useful advise on how projects can benefit from launching to an already established audience, and that you need to build that up.

Gsovriegnity and JeffG had a lot of useful advices and we strongly suggest you to watch the full presentation, but here is one useful quote from Gsovriegnity that we should all focus on:

“Think about what success means. It can change over time as you learn, but at least set some goals for your launch.”

Questions for you:

Did you maybe find a creative solution related to these topics that you would like to share with others?

Do you need an advice from a more experienced colleague on how to distribute something or engage with the community successfully?

Do you need a safe space where you can talk about your feelings and doubts regarding your projects or creating in general?

Create a discussion in the comments, ask questions! We will provide you every answer that we have, and if we don't know something, this is a perfect opportunity for makers to help and engage with each other. 🤝