The MFY Manifesto
We believe being a true maker comes down to three things.
Being true to yourself, being true to your craft and being true to your tribe.
Makers pour out their heart into being true to themselves and true to their craft but what many makers struggle with is how to be true to their tribe.
Or how to even grow their tribe in the first place.
We found that there are two barriers that stop makers from being true to their tribe. There exists a psychological barrier and at the same time, there is a technological gap that needs to be overcome. The psychological barrier is the harder problem to solve, so we will address that first:
Many makers (including this author) think or have thought at some point in their life that Marketing is an ugly word (and that the letter M stands for Mean). And Sales? ‘Sales’ is swiftly equated in the minds of makers with “Being a Sell out”.
We have come to believe that it is simply the wrong point of view.
Marketing and Sales got such a bad reputation in the mind of makers because the only examples of marketers and salesmen we frequently see or hear about in media and real life are the aggressive-will-never-leave-you-alone spam pushers and pushy salesmen who trick us to buy things using pressure tactics. The internet and the media have made such caricatures out of marketers and salespeople that we need a new definition for these words, a new mental model if you will if we are to succeed as makers.
We wholeheartedly believe that making and creating without also building your tribe is setting yourself up for a failure that you may only narrowly escape.
We know because we have been there.
So we chose to redefine what marketing means for us as makers:
To make what you built *and* what you stand for, known to the world so that the right people come to join your tribe.
We believe the ideal way to do that is by sharing your journey and your learnings with your tribe and by creating value upfront before you ask anything in return.
Which brings us to our (revised) definition of sales:
It is the process of *building a relationship* with members of your tribe so that they wholeheartedly pay you back for the value that you have created for them.
Sales happen when we build a relationship. Not when a transaction occurs. And the key to building a relationship is trust. In other words, sales is essentially a trust-building activity.
We have come to believe that teaching is the best way to build trust.
And that being who you are and sharing your insights through personal conversations (in other words teaching) is how true makers build trust with their tribe.
So back to where we believe a technological gap exists:
Is it possible to enable makers to communicate with the members of their tribe in a personal and ongoing manner? Even when our tribe has grown to hundreds of thousands of individuals?
Yes, we believe we have found a way! (hint: Chatbots are not the answer)
We are building MFY to enable makers to have personal, ongoing conversations with their tribe, at scale.
Join our tribe to learn more about what we are building at https://MFY.im/makers
We stand for makers, who are true to their craft
We stand by makers who are true to their tribe
Blogger, Artist, Thinker, Teacher
Coder, Crafter, Podcast Maker
We are for Makers, We Make For You.
If work is play and you create to live
You make to explore and teach to learn
If the goal is mastery as you hone your craft
If you share what you learn and grow your tribe
You are a Maker, We Make For You
We’re MFY. Come, join our tribe.
