This week represents a “split” in the Flow to Your Dream universe. These weekly posts were originally going to be saved for sharing ideas from the Flow to Your Dream philosophy. I suppose, in a way, this post embodies elements of the philosophy as I’m going with the flow of last week. The “split” is that my Flow to Your Dream energy will be spent both on writing AND community building. The community building was already there but it was taking an extremely back seat role. Now community building is riding shotgun so writing and community building will be taking turns behind the wheel. 🙂

For the previous two weeks I wrote thousands of words pouring out numerous ideas related to Flow to Your Dream. Then on Thursday I chose one of the ideas to spend more time with, worked on it for a couple days, and hit “submit” on Monday.

This week I’m typing everything on Monday and will have to hit “submit” before the clock strikes 12! Why didn’t I have any time to write last week? Last week I was a part of a 5-day digital boot camp focused on community building called YEN.CAMP.

Entering he #yeniverse!

Wait a minute… no… let’s not enter the #yeniverse just yet. Let me tell you how I discovered it.

It all happened so fast!

Three weeks ago I was doing research into how I might use Patreon (a membership platform that makes it easy for creators to get paid.). While clicking through a bunch of their blog posts I ran into one about a Bitcoin community which had 750+ members back in 2018.

I really liked the approach of the guys who built up that community. “Treat Patreon like a product” resonated with me. After reading the article I clicked through to their Patreon page to see what it looked like now. If they had 750+ supporters in 2018 they must have OVER 9,000!!! now… right?

Wrong.

Instead I was greeted with a Patreon page featuring Saitama from One-Punch Man with 50+ supporters…

What the heck?!

This made me really curious to figure out what was going on. This curiosity led me to a blog post titled “YEN 3.0 — Goodbye and Hello, Again!” detailing the entire adventure from starting a YouTube channel and wanting to build something “cool” in 2017, through the Patreon experiment in 2018, up to the end of 2019 when they decided to hit the reset button. They experienced several highs and lows along the way. I loved the transparency!

Entering the #yeniverse

I didn’t go straight into the #yeniverse (a digital community of community builders). First I stopped by the YouTube channel of the founder, and fan of One-Punch Man, John Saddington. I clicked through a few videos, but this one spoke to me. It…

• …was unabashedly rambly! (My kind of video!)
• …talked about his thoughts on friendship
• …talked about upgrading his video hardware and needing to get over being uncomfortable walking around with a HUGE camera pointing at his face
• …talked about daily vlogging on the Yen channel
• …had a call to action (Where are you going in 2020?)

To me, it felt like “old YouTube”. Authentic.

It inspired me to make a video response (old YouTube style).

Then when I headed over to the company YouTube channel and watched the intro video… I was sold on following John’s journey in the form of his daily vlog!

I entered the #yeniverse.

YEN.CAMP

This is the reason I didn’t have any time to do any writing last week. John put together a 5-day digital bootcamp designed to pass on everything he knows about building community around early stage projects. Between the homework from the boot camp, work, and “life”, I wasn’t left with the time or energy to write.

There are going to be a few more posts that spill out of me this week detailing my experience with YEN.CAMP. For now, take a look at John’s intro video explaining what it’s all about, or check out the website (yen.camp) if you have some curiosity. 🙂

I had to throw in the One-Punch Man image I made after winning Taiwan’s first meme competition. 🙂

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#ONEMEMEMAN

A post shared by Casey Abbott Payne (@caseyapayne) on Dec 27, 2019 at 8:03am PST