Hey, friends, @ideaclub @members -
What do we want to do about the Idea Club for 2025?
Keep it going? Keep it going with a different cloak (like when we changed it from Book Club to Idea Club)? Kill our darling? Or simply take a break and see if anyone misses it?
Thanks for your input!
Christi
Dear @ChristiCassidy - thank you SO MUCH for asking about the Idea Club and posing the possible decisions. I’m one small rather “out of touch” voice so this is offered purely as personal choice - not as wisdom on what’s best for the Podcaster Community. Let’s let it go - so a watchful combo of “kill our darling” and “take a break” (which gosh, I think I’ve been doing anyway.
Is Spot Light still active?
Christi, good question. Ideally, it would be great to add a few more consistent attendees. But I am up for whatever direction you end up choosing.
Hi Mary! Happy New Year. You know, I’m not sure about Spot Light, if it’s still active. @craigconstantine might know?
Thanks, Mark. Happy New Year! Good point about more regular attendees. I think that’s what happened with the Campfires, too, and I was certainly guilty of not showing up consistently for those.
2024 has been obviously busy for me. But I’ll be resuming podcasting soon—I’ve started doing guest outreach and it takes a few weeks for that to bear fruit. I’d be interested in continuing to attend something in the spirit of the Idea Club going forward.
Spotlights went away because no one was taking advantage of it and they were too complicated.
The Campfires were put on hold for lack of attendance. I think we could resume those when there’s more engagement generally around here.
I’m currently thinking through changes here for 2025, and any input would be useful…
Early in 2024 I shifted to limiting posting/replying to only paying members and that took all the wind out of the sails. Aside from the core group that remains engaged, it left 100+ people “in the moat” outside the paywall; They can read, but they can’t do anything else. (And there is a LOT of reading going on.)
I’m considering moving back to allowing everyone to post/reply. While still keeping things tight in terms of fending off spammers and those who want to rush into our living room, jump on the coffee table and scream for our attention.
Doing that brings me back to the conundrum I had at the start of 2024: What’s the reason for people to pay? There’s a core group (hey, thanks to all of you!) but we need a steady (not necessarily large, but steady) influx of new people to keep things healthy.
That derails Christi’s original post, but that’s my answer 
@craigconstantine not a derailment at all. In fact completely relevant to the question yea or nay.
We need some fresh blood to keep it all humming along on the through track.
(Hope that’s not mixing the metaphors too badly.)
So glad you’re doing guest outreach and will be doing more episodes soon!
Here’s what I’m planning to add…
I’ll create a Producers space, only visible to the paying members. Every couple weeks, I’ll kick off a deep-dive about some challenge or interesting topic.
A while back I did a Workbench topic, Selecting quotations using Chat-GPT, about finding good quotes from our guests — that’s a perfect example of what will be happening in the Producers space.
The possibilities for what we can go over in the Producers space are endless…
We’ll then have…
My question is…
I’m not certain about the name “Producers” for the new space…
I’d love to hear your reactions to that name, and if you have any better names that sprang to mind as you read.
É•
Great idea, @craigconstantine
As for Producers, aside from the smile it brings remembering Larry David’s whole Producers series (the farce and drama of producing Producers), I have no opinion. I suck at names and titles. But i like the idea a lot.
At this point, I’ve rearranged all the furniture for the new year
The Ideas category (that half-baked “producers space” idea I mentioned above) is the name I went with. Described as…
As indie podcasters we face a lot of challenges. The Ideas category is a space where @craigconstantine digs deeper into specific things… so you don’t have to figure everything out alone.
Craig kicks things off, and everyone can ask questions and take each idea further. Or, you can simply read along to keep those pesky unknown-unknowns at bay.
I’ve also posted a reply in the timeline topic describing what I changed, if you’re a completist who wants to read everything, see: Timeline of features and changes - #7 by craigconstantine and What’s inside for our Supporting members
@here