Early 2023: Updates on my side projects and plans for the year

Each quarter is a great time to look at progress and update goals, or celebrate wins.

For SmartCatholics, LegendFiction, and DreamAgain, I'm evaluating where to focus.

I'm almost a month into my new job, so I've backburnered this marketing community. I have some breathing room to build, which is good.

(The letter N doesn't mean much. Just very cool AI art I generated with MidJourney.)

SmartCatholics

My biggest focus for the last two years has been to find a partner who can launch an academy. To finally evolve SmartCatholics into a learning platform.

This month, my cohost from the Pope Francis Generation podcast, Paul Fahey, launched his foray into an academy - Father's Heart Academy.

It started as a brainstorming session, me asking him what it would be like for him to host workshops and summits online, and keep spending time with students.

We created a payment structure and a membership fee, designed a logo and marketing scripts, and announced it. Paul created a schedule of upcoming workshops based on studying papal documents.

We've just launched the academy ahead of the first workshop. I'm looking forward to seeing how it all goes. Finally, SmartCatholics will have a mentor, or a guardian angel, dedicated to teaching and creating value.

I also can put my email list to better use. I recently culled it from a bloated 20,000 who never opened to 6000 who were active within the last few months. I know I haven't been very consistent in emailing each week, mostly because I didn't have much to share. This should improve open rate percentages, since most of those emails never really wanted to be on my list.

The community has been at a standstill for a while, in terms of following its own mission. A few well-meanijg and mega-posting members have been setting the tone. Testing this academy space with Paul is a massive step in a good direction.

And I'm already seeing interest from another theological rebelpowerhouse who may want their own academy after the summer. That's exciting.

The key here is to build this asset - a marketing engine that brings creators regular access to members.

We can finally start doing smart stuff.

My next challenge is to see if I can find an intern or raise funds to hire a social media manager. All the content, creativity, and activity we are up to is gated, ‘airgapped' from social networks. Creating a strategy to share content will help with organic reach, and boost confidence with speakers that its easier to join my structure than start from scratch.

LegendFiction

This community has been humming along nicely. Growth has been slow to little since the convention.

My intent has been similar to SmartCatholics. Partner with creators to offer professional development.

I've been building fast friendships with mentors, graduates from JPCatholic university who love writing. They're spending time shadowing the community and engaging with members, hosting write-ins and meetups.

So my plan is to network their efforts and workshops together into a Legendmakers Academy.

I like the name for 3 reasons; it pairs well with my YouTube interviews with authors, 2) speaks to the kind of author and their content, and 3) feels ludicrously dramatic, which is our approach.

I'm working with them to schedule a year of workshops, either one-off events, or multi-week cohort sessions. They're pretty happy to huddle together and figure out a calendar.

Assembling this as a series does a couple of very cool things:

1. LegendFiction can help authors get better at writing stories and novels, and build their confidence in getting published. That's massive.

2. I can reach out to friends and partners who are publishers. I know they get a bunch of unsolicited manuscripts that they reject for several reasons. Some of the key ones is that the author is undeveloped. Offering a menu-based academy for such authors is a way to directly help publishers and grow our community. The publishers have no interest in hosting their own communities.

3. We can promote this academy on social media, and to any authors or publishers out there. LegendFiction members get deep discounts, obviously. The benefit of the LegendFiction member fees being so affordable is that they can stack workshops, or develop as they want.

4. The mentors have access to a growing stream of members, so they don't need to worry about marketing. They can think more about teaching, and creating content for the blog, social media, podcasts, or YouTube. All that acts as top-of-the-funnel outreach to ladder writers into our space.

Another new feature I've been playing with is AI art. It's been a ton of fun to play with and create inspiring artwork, and I'm very interested to see where the debates on this go, so that we can all benefit from the tool while respecting artists.

I've sprung for a MidJourney subscription and been teaching myself prompt engineering the last month or so. It's just incredible how easily it creates visual content that stokes imagination.

I've been working with my legendary social media volunteer to change our social media strategy away from purely promotional content about the community and our convention. I want to feature more of the thought leadership in our blogs, podcasts, and videos. I also want a mich bigger focus on sharing AI art and flash fiction challenges, because it's fantastic for social engagement.

As we keep getting better, the third part of this flywheel marketing trinity is to help make marketing feel easier and more exciting, because beginners and veterans can tap into our buzz and we can feature them.

As you can see, the process and thinking is virtually identical for both brands. I'm testing the same strategy in real time at the same time, and learning from one to apply to the other.

I'd love for my social media manager at SmartCatholics to create new, inspiring art of the saints and Catholic themes. That way our profile can put out fresh, beautiful, devotional content.

These strategies are also what I'm field-testing with my day job at HeroicMen, looking for content and leadership from the coaches, creating social strategies for daily posting, and seeing how we can inspire engagement with our community.

So that's whats been on my mind! The major way that all this works is that I'm partnering with other people who are enthused to get going. The skills I have are clearing the way for them to dig in and do work.

It's a lot to stay on top of, but doesn't feel unmanageable. In fact, I've finally taken a leap and started my own substack to give vent to a deep passion project, sharing the books I read and the things I think about renewal in Catholicism: catholicfrontier.com

No idea where that goes, but I’m beginning to see that one way I take action is to create a clear focus for a specific kind of action. A single website to talk about all kinds of issues feels like a glottal stop. I can't move, because the audiences for each topic is so diverse.

In my case, I've launched communities where I see holes in the market, and substacks as pressure valves for specific themes. It's easier to get going and keep going now.

Thats all I got this quarter! We'll see how it pans out.

What have you been working on?