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The Beacon

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The Beacon

I daydream about bringing people together

Back in 2021 I was living in Fayetteville NC and I came across this giant commercial building that was dirt cheap and run down. I had this idea to turn it into some sort of co-working space or community center for ambitious people, maybe like a business incubator. I wanted to call it The Beacon.

I wasn’t exactly sure what it was going to be but I knew two things: 

  1. American culture is increasingly desperate for meaningful social interaction 
  2. I have a gift for and immense desire to bring people together in person

We didn’t buy the property in question but I wrote reasonably thorough business plan and have been dwelling about it ever since.

This idea got put on hold while I bounced around the last few years, I moved to Charlotte and then to Maui, but I never stopped thinking about this and now that I’m in Austin – where I plan to live for the rest of my life – I feel compelled to put it together….whatever it is….

If you build it...

Last week 2 things happened:

  1. I found a gorgeous 2.7MM commercial space here in Austin in a fabulous location that I would love to own. I could build a studio there, run Kates quilt store out of it, and do this coworking idea
  2. A good friend of mine, who is normally a very determined “lone wolf”, called me and said he’s freaking out because he’s been too isolated for too long and needs people around  to talk business and grow with.

I can’t do anything with a building right now, but the idea of gathering people in a central location over time to invest in them and curating a community to facilitate their growth is the right idea but instead of buying a building maybe I just start with hosting small events, regularly? 

I told him to fly to Austin and I’ll put together a small group of similar minded ambitious folks and we will do a mini mastermind.

I’ll name it the same name I’ve had in mind for years, The Beacon

Now that I think about it, I've done this before

In 2022 I rallied 13 investor friends to go to Guatemala for a similar reason – community building with ambitious friends – and once again I called this trip The Beacon. However, getting people to go out of country to hike a volcano is a higher barrier to entry and it’s hard to do it regularly enough to build something foundational, but could we get people to travel to Austin regularly and build something? Probably.

I put this on Facebook and texted a few people and we locked up ~11 attendees pretty quickly. This reaffirms my belief that people are desperate for in-person community even though our culture as a whole is very bad at articulating and facilitating this. The price for this event is negligible, around $300 which is simply the cost of the Airbnb and to stock the house with food. I’m not making a profit on this, which poses some problems, but it gets in some reps and gets people connected. I also hopefully get some good media from it.

This first Austin event will be Nov 1-3, but maybe the next one could be in January??? 

What's next and how you can help

Interesting to note – I built the entire itinerary in Notion and made the page public for people to use and sign up through. I think I’m going to share some of my Notion boards soon!

There are definitely some problems in these ideas: mostly that it’s not clear exactly what the value proposition is and who the right participants are? I want to do some combination of destination masterminds, I want to own a building locally, I want to gather people to solve common problems, but I don’t know exactly what people are right and how to communicate exactly what we are trying to accomplish. 

Most of this will be solved with reps. I just need to do more of these events and meetups so I can figure it out with experience, real world problems never get solved on paper.

Some of this will be solved with feedback, so if you read this I’m very curious what you think.

Also, would you be interested in coming to Austin for a 1 or 2 day mini mastermind with ~12-15 people? If you live in Austin or nearby, would you be interested in meeting more regularly to start building this community organically until it’s big enough we can swing some real resources around? If any of this sounds appealing to you but you don’t live in Austin and aren’t willing to come here, could you help me articulate this problem better so I can narrow down what exactly this is going to be?

Why I'm sharing half of an idea

How long do you have to daydream about something before it becomes a calling?

It’s scary to put your ideas into the world, and I don’t know if this is the biggest most profitable idea I’ve ever had but it has been one of the longest ideas I’ve ever been attracted to – and it’s unlikely that I’ll stop extroverting anytime soon, so this is going to happen in some way.

So I figured sharing my story would be useful for anyone else who is sitting on idea an idea for 5 years and isn’t sharing it because it’s not fleshed out or it’s scary, because maybe sharing in public is how things come into existence.