Possible Place

Before I added the blog I was wondering how I would market Possible Place. If I just posted on channels with the idea, I wouldn't really be providing value or targeting a specific audience. By writing blogs about specific aspects of Possible Place I can share those on appropriate channels to provide value to specific audiences and grow interest in Possible Place while I continue building features.

I built the blog using MDX, specifically next-mdx-remote. I followed this guide, with a few tweaks, to get my blog up and running.

I realized that my basic email form was giving me a couple email submissions, but I wasn't really learning anything about the people interested in Possible Place. I swapped the email form with a one Google Form survey that has the option to submit your email at the end. From this survey, I've learned what particular issues people are more interested in that other issues, which broke some of my original assumptions. Responses also show some people are working on sustainability full-time while others only want to participate ~once a month.

I surprised myself by launching the site one week after starting the codebase. I used Vercel for deployment and it's so easy to update the production site just by adding a commit to the main branch. The hard part for me starts now which is marketing Possible Place to grow interest even while the product isn't providing value to users.

I started working on the Possible Place website using Next.js which I had been using in a few other projects I was working on. The goal for the launch was to simply build a landing page with an email signup and a simple prototype page for NYC. To capture form submissions I used PostgreSQL and Prisma to connect to it from the Next.js site.

I left my job at Instagram at the beginning of 2021 to work full-time in climate tech. At the time I wrote the following points to investigate:

• I want to take actions on policies that I align with with the hope that the public policy will get passed and change my city and my experience in it
• I also see successes in other cities (including international) and want those benefits in mine
• I see inefficiencies in my city that frustrates me, but have no outlet to discuss and see through solutions to make their city a better place.
• I would like to publicly see actions people are taking towards climate change in order to encourage myself and others to do the same. This would sometimes give me an extra push to do another action.

This sparked a series of discussions with organizers, climate tech workers, and people involved in city government and civic tech that have shaped what Possible Place will become.