HRS has been busy with The Women’s Legacy Project for the past year. Women’s history, women’s culture, and women’s communication systems combine to form a core research and interest area for us.
Authenticity and collaborative ventures are our hallmark traits and values. In keeping with these elements of HRS, I thought I would share a few of the highlights and challenges a solopreneur such as myself faces in starting a new project.
Developing Emergent Intellectual Property
An idea needs to coalesce before conscious action can commence. Much creation takes place before the product of the creative process even enters into awareness. Longstanding interest, starting Tucson Women Bloggers via Meetup.com, and giving myself some time off from company formation by accepting a low stress temporary position at a university library during a time of personal loss, all contributed to an aha moment in January 2015 when the phrase “women’s legacy project” came to me and I knew what I needed to do. I purchased the domain.
Then I began to hunt for a web platform designed to offer the services I would need to offer in order to grow an information based project with product and service purchase, download, course-offerings, and marketing platform. Found a company that offered something interesting and from whom I had purchased other products, and signed up for a trial. At the end of the month-long trial which they gave me when I asked, always ask for what you want, I decided to purchase. Then I had to begin building a site structure, content, and learn a new system even thought it was based on WordPress, with which I am very familiar.
Life Happens
Another loss in my family, the second death of a brother within a year, scrambled my focus for a while. I mention this because such events will happen and we have to continue to push through as best we can while reprioritizing items and being kind to ourselves.
So I decided I could only work on one thing, and that was the new new site / project and keep my Meetup functioning as best I could emphasizing the elements that connected to women and legacy. I discovered that some blogs had become vulnerable when I was grieving and by the time I got that cleared up I realized I was not going to be able to update nor encourage new HRS clients until I switched server type, did clean installs, and made sure everything was updated. As these were not the top priorities, I followed my own guidelines, and only recently was able to complete that process. HRS, this site, and Reasoncreek, my blog, are now on a new server and are set to become active again.
Along the way, this past year, I learned much more about social media best practices, even though I was good before accelerating my learning and practice curve with WLP. I will begin sharing what I have learned in the very near future.
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