Janurary 2023
Heyo!
January, the month of resolutions, and changes and learnings. And hopefully also of stick-to-it-iveness. One of the major problems I had identified last year was that I am really quite bad at outbound marketing. Another thing I realised is that a lot of the work I create does not see the audience it potentially could see, not because the quality is lacking, but because I am not talking about the work to enough people.
There is this idea that if your work is good enough then it would be noticed automatically and you will be rewarded. You dont have to do the super ugly, dirty thing of “talking about yourself”. I dont know when I learnt it, but I know that I have internalized this message at some point. And I know that it definitely has stopped a lot of my work from reaching more people. So in 2023 I have decided to rectify this problem. How? Well, by making sure that I do a lot of outbound. Whether it is talking to spaces where I can give a speech, or messaging about taking workshops or a wide variety of other things. I wanted to send one cold email everyday. I have been more regular than not, and only missed a few days in January, though as the end of the month rolled around, I also recognized that I do need to figure out what is my long term strategy here. It was really interesting to see myself feel less and less resistant to cold emailing people, the more I did it. This is a work in progress so I will keep sharing updates about it.
Another cool thing that happened is I started using AI generation as a part of my creative process. Charu and I had been feeling honestly fairly stuck over the last few months when we were working on art direction for our game. But starting to use MidJourney as a part of the process was a complete game changer. We have been producing more, and faster, narrowing down much more quickly. If you haven't had a chance to use AI art as an assistant for your own art direction work, I would definitely say give it a shot. (We are also planning to give a workshop on MidJ soon, will keep you posted)
And the last update is that now that the wedding craziness is over, finally Kahran and I are able to focus on Joyus. I am super excited about what is going to come out of this. We have been talking to some very interesting people that I’d love to work with, and our podcast content has also been improving, because we are able to be a lot more focused and centered.
This has been a good start to the year!