This is a draft so I don’t have to feel bad if it’s not perfect.

This isn’t a bad thing!

I originally started this blog with the idea of creating a place for VB community, but I didn’t have enough content to launch my vision so I settled for a personal blog. Over time it’s expanded from a place to just air my thoughts to a place to think about marketing moments.

First I was prototyping potential contributions to Microsoft’s Roslyn repo. And then, when I decided to build my own mod it kinda served as a project landing page and a crowdfunding engine and I think that’s been bad for both me AND the VB community.

It’s been bad for me because everything I write or show comes with tremendous perfection to be substantial, complete, polished, regular, consistent, etc. But I’m not really a marketer. Working at Microsoft I developed a sense for the power and pitfalls of communicating from inside a mega corporation but this isn’t the .NET blog and my posts aren’t instantly seen by 100k people.

Further, I started my Patreon to help me deal with a personal crisis that has mostly passed. In fact, for months (if not the last year) I have been actively pausing my Patreon to prevent charging folks. You can only pause for 1 month at a time and I was late last month and some folks got charged who I’ll refund when I can. But I’m not executing as a full-time or even part-time content creator and while I do make content I don’t think that’s the arena where my skillset is best used.

But most importantly, I suck am a flawed human being and while I’m learning to be compassionate with myself about that it’s very important to me that my personal shortcomings–whether they be mental health or discipline or whatever–not be the weak link in reaching as many VB enthusiasts as possible as quickly as possible. Last year I concluded that the absolute most important thing the VB community can do for itself right now is to find each other. Not features, not funding, not campaigning, or any specific action. We need our own rolodex as a resource for ourselves and I don’t want consideration of financial support of me or a project to at all be a factor in spreading the word.

There’s just a lot of information we don’t know about ourselves and we cannot rely on others to figure it out.

And on a personal note, it would do me a world of good if I could know there was some forward momentum in the community independent of my performance. To know that if I’m sleeping or dealing with a family crisis or changing my medication that there will still be important things happening would take some pressure off and give me some much needed dopamine.

I’ve been looking into some community platforms/CRMs we could use. It’s critical that we (the community) own our own data. But it might be something extremely simple in the beginning–a mailing list or something. I’ll post more on that in the future though.

This weekend I’ll figure out how to move my existing patrons to the free tier. I thank them for every drop of their incredible support these last few years while I’ve been losing my mind. It absolutely made a difference when it mattered most–specifically regarding my healthcare. Now it’s time to take some next steps.

This does NOT mean shutting down the ModVB project (in fact I’ll be moving the center of gravity for that to GitHub where it always belonged). I’m just decoupling components of the system for better scalability!

With gratitude and hope,

-ADG