Build an organization and you’ll start projects that will need to be dropped. Focus is hard, but as creative ideas spiral, you’ll to trim. By instinct, I’m much better at starting something new, than focusing on the best of them — so I’ve made it a resolution in recent years.
In five years of building what has become Technical.ly, we’ve tried plenty that we dropped to get closer to the model we have, first starting with Technical.ly Philly. There’s a lesson there in developing your organization: try to stretch, drop what doesn’t work and refine.
Here are some of the projects we tried, dropped and learned from:
- Neighborhood Correspondents: Though initially with my then-girlfriend for her hyperlocal, I was proud of our concept to train locals who attended community events and felt the model could be grown to Technically and beyond.
- Technically newsletters: In 2009 at launch, we dumbly, and wrongly, overlooked newsletters when we first started Technically, focusing only on RSS feeds and putting more time into social media. I wish we went the other way.
- News Inkubator — We pitched a funded accelerator and business incubator focused on niche local news sites that would share services, and mentorship. We wanted to push more to try to develop earned income strategies.
- Switch Philly: In 2010, we launched an early startup pitch event that we debated hosting more regularly. It’s funny now, but we wrongly guessed that there weren’t enough startups, and not enough interest to do something more regularly. Now it’s common to see monthly startup pitch events, and we missed an opportunity to do that.
- The67thward: In 2010, we stood up a website (using Yahoo Pipes!) that playfully replaced the place “New York City’ with “The 67th Ward,” a silly play on a previous New York Times story that called Philadelphia “the sixth borough.”
- PROAN – In 2011, Philadelphia Regional Online Advertising Network was our attempt to gather independent local media. We thought we were going to do the same in other markets but the effort just wasn’t worth squeeze, so we went on our own.
- Ph.ly: In 2011, we first acquired the domain to spin up a Philadelphia URL shortener, and did a similar thing in Baltimore. I spun up a cheeky curated newsletter of Philadelphia links, and got a few thousand subscriber but it was too far from our focus so we set aside. Someone is going to eventually do this.
- Connect Philly: In 2012, we launched a tool to find internet connectivity, as our contribution to close the digital divide. Many listed were rec centers and libraries, but there were other resource centers. We wanted to do more but it needed much more data curation.
- Philanthrophilly— A niche site dedicated to nonprofits and social work in Philadelphia, before the launch of Generocity, which we amusingly later acquired and then sold off. My interest was in hosting high-end events to gather philanthropy leaders.
- Coding classes — Our Developer Conferences currently feature morning coding bootcamp classes that we have discussed could be their own standalone focus. The point here is there’s a gap between more rigorous computer science programs and more vocational need. More on our events