What Happens When Your Side-Project Suddenly Needs to Sustain You
There is this overwhelming feeling spreading through millennials that we can and we should make a living doing the work that we love. But what does that really look like?
In March of 2014, I published the first interview on Ways We Work. People have connected with it in ways I never anticipated. I started the project because being a young professional myself, I was seeking mentors. I wanted to find out what others in my community were doing, and how they were doing it. By sharing the interviews, I aimed to make it a resource and a source of inspiration.
For me, it has been one of the most fulfilling parts of my life for the last year. Preparing interviews, meeting amazing people, learning how to grow it and help it evolve has been both the biggest reward and challenge. I know it has the opportunity to grow into much more than the simple blog it started as.
So now, I’m going all-in.
It’s happened fast and it’s happened messy. Four months ago I left a job I loved for a job that I thought would be a step in the right direction. Instead, it left me feeling miserable.
So I’m doing Ways We Work full-time. I’ve wanted to do this for a long time, but I was holding off: thinking I needed more time, more money, a bigger audience. But I realized, the only way to get more of those is to fully invest myself, so that is literally what I’ve done. My only “investor” is my savings account, and for the last month I’ve taken the occasional freelance project to keep myself afloat.
I want to have honest and candid conversations with people about how they do the work that’s meaningful to them. So often we hear from people when they’ve launched, hit a milestone or when they’ve failed.
I want to hear from those who are in the thick of it. I believe that we should be able to talk openly about what’s hard without it devaluing the work that we do.
In addition to myself, my friend Matt Quinn is joining me as a partner. Together we’ve been working on some amazing new content and a brand-new site that launches at the end of the summer. We’ve secured our first sponsor and are actively looking for others.
What this means for readers
It’s important to me that sponsorship is valuable to both the sponsor and the readers and it should never detract from the content. Sponsorship will allow us to produce better quality and more in-depth content. It will let us explore other topics, avenues and maybe even new mediums.
What this means for sponsors
We want to tell the stories and first-hand accounts of how people do meaningful work. Sponsoring the project shows that you believe doing meaningful work is important. It’s an opportunity to connect to the thousands of readers who are infinitely passionate about how both individuals and teams do the work they love. A chance to show your audience, current employees, and prospective hires that you’re a team that supports doing the work you love.
Currently, there are three main ways you can support us:
Sponsor an Interview
Conducting, transcribing, editing and publishing great quality interviews takes time. By sponsoring an interview, you allow us to create better quality content, simply because we can focus on giving it the time and effort it requires. Every Wednesday a new interview is published and shared to thousands of readers.
Sponsor a Collection
Collections are something I’m personally very excited about. They will allow us to publish new interviews more frequently and highlight professionals in specific industries. They will also give life to past interviews and allow readers to easily find and read about others in their field. Sponsoring a collection lets us produce content where there is something for everyone.
Spotlights
Matt and I have spent the last couple months meeting some incredible teams in both Waterloo, Toronto, and San Francisco. Spotlights mean spending hours with a team, photographing them as they work, interviewing key team members and producing a full piece dedicated to how they work. Every spotlight we’ve done has quickly become some of the most popular content on the site. These are so much fun to do, and require a lot to produce. We feel so much excitement from each team when we visit and they’ve proven to be a fantastic way to show potential hires a candid look at what life is like as part of the team.
If you’re interested in sponsoring or want to work together — send us a message.
You can see all the Twitter love here.
This is the work that’s meaningful to me, and I’m excited to dive in.
If you already read Ways We Work, I made a quick reader survey here — if you’ve got 5 minutes I’d love to know your feedback. There could also be a $50 Amazon gift card in it for you — just sayin’.
Also huge thanks to Chantal Jandard (@chantastique) for editing this post with me!
