Hi dear readers
After a bit of a break from the project I’ve decided that I won’t be renewing the URL for the site 😦
It’s a sad decision to make but one that is overdue, running the site is about $10 a month and I can’t justify the expense. Once the plan expires the blog will still be up at wordpress.com/sketchykids I believe.
In some ways this represents some kind of an end of the Sketchy Kids project to me. Getting a website was one of the main ways I had of making the project ‘legit’. So here I’ll write a post mortem as it were.
Originally I came up with the idea of Sketchy Kids in a social entrepreneurship class in college. As a musician myself, I knew many creative people in my network and many other plain entertaining characters. I felt if we all banded together, we could create a special place. A platform for artists and by artists.
As I built up the site I gained partners and friends and we collaborated on the site. We searched out all the opportunities we could by making platforms on every social media, doing events and even developing our own TV show. I spent tons of time making posts, doing outreach to artists, and doing all I could to make the project a success.
I think it was a combination of factors that led to this place. I should’ve kept at it and posted more consistently. I also had some personal family problems that gave me no energy to work on anything. In some ways the original idea was flawed, because even if I built a great platform of content it didn’t translate to having an audience big enough to support the project. I thought that by featuring artists, they would share the posts and bring in their audience into the fold. Maybe I wasn’t altruistic enough because this did not happen. Many artists who were excited about being featured didn’t share the posts even. I am not sure why, maybe I was too controlling with the site and didn’t give my partners enough ownership. It could be I just chose a hard area to work on. Or lacked the connections to be successful.
That isn’t to say I view the project as a failure. I feel that helping artists and making them happy was something I did a lot in the heydey of the site. My partners and I created some cool stuff too. I learned a lot about organizing, entrepreneurship, and all sorts of other things. And I’m going to leave the blog and the socials up, maybe I’ll even update them going forward. I tend to put a lot of pressure on myself when who knows if anyone will even read this.
Long story short, all you are loved and appreciated! Thanks for reading 🙂
