Projects
I'll do my best to list any projects (and some of their history) I've worked on over the past 6 months here. What constitutes a project? It's a rather loose definition. If I'm actively thinking about it lots and it may manifest itself in the real world in some form, I'll likely list it here. It doesn't have to be a business or make money...
20Skaters Hockey
This is an active business I started over a decade ago. You can find out more at 20Skaters Hockey.
Well over a decade, I had an idea after watching many of my friends continually lose money running weekly pickup hockey games for their friends. Would players pay for their pickup hockey online, ahead of time to secure their spot?
Most pickup hockey games are run like poorly run not for profits. My icetime costs $200. I want 20 players so I'll charge $10 each. Then I email, text, phone people to invite them. I get promises from 20. As we step onto the ice to play, we seem to only have 15 players because 3 forgot all about it, another fell asleep on the couch and one just hasn't answered. The organizer is in the hole $50 and has NO way to recover it. You can't charge more next week and for some reason, no one ever offers to pay for the pickup they didn't show up to.
That pattern can snowball week by week, leaving the organizer in the hole for hundreds, even thousands. I bought myself some icetime. I built an html page for a game page, indicating when and where we're playing and who's playing. That page had a paypal buy-now button for players to pay. When someone paid, I edited the html page and ftp'd a new version to the server in order to fake a live working application.
I sold those early games out and moved on to building the real deal. As of today(May, 2024), we have over 8000 registered hockey players, have helped organizers recover over $500,000 in sub fees and helped to run almost 10,000 pickup hockey games.
ThreeFortyNine Coworking
I created ThreeFortyNine Coworking(349) back in 2010. For well over a decade, the sign outside our building read…Work For Yourself, Not By Yourself.
At its heart, 349 was a Guelph based community of entrepreneurs, freelancers and telecommuters. A lot has changed in the world since we closed the doors of our physical building in March 2020. All these changes have me feeling that we need more communities rather than less. It seems we have more people working by themselves today than ever before.
What's next?
Fork Your Company
I have a long-standing theory to apply the metaphor of software forks to organizational design and change. I'm exploring how to release that theory into the wild. You can follow along at Fork Your Company.