THAT

Here's the thing we often forget to share. We also have to walk away. This year has been a punch in the gut and we've been working a lot of hours for many many months. This year, we decided to close the doors and take the week off. The three of us are not allowed to work, period. We're all starting to see the wear this year has brought us. Right now we're seeing productivity slip and it's just because we need a break.

So we're taking one. Period. Hopefully it's the recharge we need.

Communities for us is what THAT is about. Groups of folks who have similar interests and us being able to help people connect with one another. Getting to this point requires things like a profile, landing pages, how do you associate these items to one another, etc. Mind you, we're far from done, but we're at a place where we're onboarding folks to help us now design from here. We're able to connect people and things together, and it's a base we can build upon.

We're super excited.

https://that.us/communities

We've been hard at work building out the platform and while there have been milestones every couple of weeks it can be summed up with laying groundwork for value.

We recently launched Communities, Partners and Members. I see these as just a few of the major pillars of the overall community. Building transparency and ways for people to expand their networks and their businesses.

The goal of THAT wasn't to just build an event system. No it was to create a platform that we could use every day. THAT Online was just an event, a milestone if you will. Would the system work at scale while giving the THAT Conference community some closure on the fact we couldn't have a physical event.

Once the event was over, I set out reworking things such that you could schedule an Activity anytime on anything and we would curate an activity board of what's upcoming.

At this point, THAT Board was open to be used, whenever wherever.

By this point the system was running for ~ 2 weeks. People were entering their sessions, and we had sold a few tickets.

It wasn't perfect, it wasn't even close to complete, but it was working. We had ~900 people registered and during the day we were running around 400 - 500 concurrent folks.

Needless to say, we did it. 2 geeks, 2 months, from scratch to a working system.

We're building an open source project. At the very heart of what I stand for is helping others and what is a better way than building your entire product out in the open.

So almost every weekday on twitch (https://unspecified.live ) I open up the editor and work on that.us.

Oh yea, Svelte is also completely new to me, and historically I've been more of an API/backend dev.

It seems crazy to build your own system, but over the past decade our own systems have been our advantage. It's let us connect people, and operate differently.

Today we pushed the initial commit of what's going to become that.us. Built in Svelte with a graphql backend, our next biggest milestone is July where we can open things up for people to submit a session for an August event.

When the pandemic hit, we were left trying to figure out what exact we were going to do for THAT Conference. The government shut things down ( and it' still not allowed ) and our revenue stopped in a hot minute.

For the past few years I'd been noodling on another plan already. How could we expand across the globe. How could we connect with one another to seek help but not have to wait for some event.

I call it, THAT.