I'm a week or so late talking about this...kinda! On February 14th, I sent out the monthly newsletter and mentioned as much. And I also gave away $14 in patterns (which was completely by accident lol). If you're reading this particular post, there's a 99.9% chance you've come from an email notification.
Don't forget to use your free pattern codes! These expire on February 29th and after that, I don't know when I'll be doing another pattern giveaway. Even if you don't get to making these projects right away, at least you'll have them for later 💖.
I gave away copies of The Sweetheart Scarf (knitting pattern) and Dexter the Ducky Pouf (crochet pattern).
There are a lot of new faces in my little community here who haven't been around long enough to experience my pdf patterns. Since I started changing how I release my designs a year or so ago, even some of the OG subscribers may not have seen the changes. So this is my way of letting y'all sample how my patterns are written out, as well as a thanks for being here.
I have no idea how this year is going to go for Infiniti Crafting Co. if I might be so open.
What's going right?
My crafting community is growing every day and I am very blessed to be able to serve so many people with my content! I never would have thought that I'd encounter and speak to so many strangers on the internet at one point. Be that because of social anxiety or the fact that I didn't think I was all that interesting 😅.
Boy, y'all sure proved me wrong.
Especially here on my website. In the beginning it was harder than pulling teeth to get people over here to check it out. This is my baby, right here. It took me 4 years to save up and develop this place and I have to say I am very proud of the work of my hands. I'm delighted that so many people have started finding their way to the free resources I provide here. I'm tickled by how the newsletter list has grown too!
So thank you for being here! 😁
If worse comes to worst, this will be the only place I'll be creating content on for the long term. I refuse to give up on it until I've been publishing on it for at least 4 years. Gotta get my labor's worth, ya know?
What's going wrong?
Social media is doing this fun little thing where it only shows my posts to 1- 10 of my many
thousands of followers so I've been laying off posting. Obviously this is a pain in the butt if I'm trying to get important messages out there, as I have.
It's also created a lot of grief and misconception on my end because I thought for a while there that Crafties were seeing
my posts and just... ghosting me by. While that
is partly the case in some instances, it isn't the whole picture and I'm grateful for that.
However, I primarily deal in video and I've resorted to jumping through many hoops to get people to hear me out. About what?
I've been serving my online community joyfully for almost 7 years now and I am desperately trying to save the channel while building something more. I fully believe that businesses should survive because of their merit and value they bring to their consumer. Me being a small, indie designer and tutorial maker makes that even more true. After years of
focusing on what I could offer the public, I started implementing more reliable ways for my community to support my content if they saw value in it.
The main thing being memberships for my my pattern club,'Hey Craftepreneur!'. For months, I've been talking about this program and trying to show it off in a favorable light.
To your right are the Channel Chats in which I have been talking about this program and other advancements I've been implementing here. Essentially, I've been pivoting my ass off to get this thing to work. Now I'm at a point where I'm wondering if I should bother continuing with public resources. I keep going back and forth with it because it seems like it isn't fair but, looking back even further, I feel like I've been begging people that follow me to support the content they benefit from.
Mostly in the sense that when I post freebies, I get a lot of fanfare but, when I start to be transparent about the help I need to keep things running smoothly, I get crickets and random rude commentary.
I never expected this thing to grow the way that it did and I am very happy to have helped hundreds of thousands of people in their craft journeys. Being that I started off with a hope that making tutorials would also help me in my teaching career, thanks to the love from the internet, I can say I've had hundreds of thousands of people under my tutelage before I graduated college! 😂 It's crazy to think about sometimes and my introverted heart does a little leap every time.
Last year, when I launched Hey Craftepreneur!, I knew that this was going to be the backbone of what kept Infiniti Crafting Co. going. Amid all the personal crisis', rising software, and material costs I knew that the support from my community would solve all of it.
I also knew it wouldn't be easy to build given past experiences with product launches but this one thing, I still have hope for.
Referring back to Channel Chat 137, it's entirely possible that this fails. And should that come to be, I'll no longer upload to YouTube and Rumble.
Bold move? Yeah, but I've done bold things here before.
My rationale for all this is simple. I've put in thousands of hours, spent many late nights and early mornings over the last 7 years, providing stitch tutorials, patterns, and advice to all my fellow Crafties. This has taken place during times where I couldn't work full-time for this reason or that and I'm grateful for the experience.
But for Infiniti Crafting Co. to continue as a brand and a help, I need strong support from my true fans. From the people that love me and/or my teaching style.
When I did the math on what I would need to make it worth with my program's accessible price point, I determined that I would need less than 1% of my audience to subscribe to Hey Craftepreneur! in some fashion.
I won't bore you with all my nerdy calculations but if I could earn the support of 500 people from
my collective audience of 67,000 by the end of May; it would change things drastically for the better. That's ~0.07% of my total audience.
Now. You may have noticed a series of posts and polls that have been gauging people's awareness of what I offer outside of my channels. Every time I run these things, I get 90%
of respondents saying they hadn't heard of this thing or that.
I'm going to be really real right now and say that's hard to believe. It's likely that the people responding to the polls are brand new to my channel, true. My community is growing every day.
BUT, you may have noticed that I've been implementing my own ad-reads at different points in my videos,where I'd formerly left them for the end of videos. Thousands of people have seen or heard these reads so imagine how perplexed I am when people say they ✨didn't know✨. This is the internet though, so I digress.
The essence of all this is that I NEED your help if this place is going to make it. I'm asking you to reflect on the value you have gotten from me and my content. Even further, I'm asking that you consider whether it is worth $6.
If that answer is positive for you, I ask that you subscribe to my pattern club when you read this. I have a monthly and quarterly payment option for your convenience and you get a host of perks for being here and being a support.
Right now, Hey Craftepreneur! sits at 11 of 500 for its membership goal. I'd love to see it reach about 400 by the end of May.
What happens if the goal fails?
If the membership goal fails, then I guess that's my answer... right? If I can't get anywhere near my goal, I will have to stop making public tutorials. It would just take too much time, effort, and resources to keep doing something that no one really supports.
If you have time, I really do recommend going through and giving these Channel Chats a listen. I've been saying the same message for months (and years before then).
And it's not that I don't have the fire to keep going but I can't keep footing this things on my own once I graduate in May.
In addition to that, I'll just pack more time and energy into the website and into the existing memberships of 'Hey Craftepreneur!'. It took too long to build this place up to let it all go. To be able to share my love of the arts is still the mission here and I'll do so for as long as y'all want me here.
I love writing patterns and I hope eventually, more people will come to love them as I continue on this path.
Now...that isn't to say that I'd leave the video scene forever, I could eventually be convinced to come back if two (2) conditions are met. Sounds a little pretentious, I know. But if I end up walking away from uploading in the first place, I'd need 1.) the 500 Super Crafties in Hey Craftepreneur! and 2.) 100,000 subscribers on the YouTube channel.
It likely won't sit dormant until that point but no new crochet, knitting, or sentro knitting machine tutorials would be posted there until those thresholds are met.
I think that's reasonable...what say you?
