Sterling Proffer

The cycle is dizzying and numbing: The allure of authenticity invites fascination and then, inevitably, skepticism. All along, truth and trust aren’t celebrated; they’re destabilized.

Creators and communities do what they do because they love their world, and they want to invite more people into it. It’s about delivering non-replicable value to passionate audiences. As you scale, you will reach a point where it’s impossible — indeed, damaging — to devote more hours of the day to creative endeavors.

Once you have hypotheses for who is successful and why they are successful, you can hypothesize possible adjacent users segments. This will involve changing one or more of the vectors that you identified.

For the last decade, it has been hard to imagine a world outside of the cultural production service economy. But we are leaving branded lifestyles behind, and stepping into a new world of belief, faith, and meaning. What types of culture is worth creating? What types of people do we want to become? Whether as founder, stewards, leaders, lurkers,... See more