The Platforms that Almost Worked

One of my favorite metaphors that Andy J. Pizza returns to on his Creative Pep Podcast is “the coffee mug.” It goes something like this:

As artists, we often have delicious coffee (aka art) to share, the trouble is, sometimes we struggle to find the right mug to present it in. And without a mug, it doesn’t matter how perfectly brewed our coffee is. No one wants you to pour steaming hot liquid into their hands.

I like Andy’s metaphor because it’s ridiculous enough to help me laugh at the very real problem I’ve returned to again and again throughout my creative career.

The problem was this: I knew exactly the experience I wanted to create, but every package I wrapped it in didn’t quite fit.

I kept failing to find the just-right coffee mug.

I tried every kind of platform: communities, memberships, course libraries, websites, books … on and on it went.

To be fair, some of these projects did work by the measures I’d set for them. People signed up, participated, and learned. Sometimes they even told me about transformational moments they’d experienced.

And yet, after each launch, I kept encountering the same uneasy feeling:
This wasn’t quite it.

For a long time, I assumed I was the problem.

Maybe I hadn’t built the thing well enough. Maybe I needed better technology, a bigger audience, clearer marketing, more content.

So I kept pushing myself to work harder, to produce more. Eventually, surely I’d stumble across the perfect solution. Right?

With each program and pathway I built, I’d be sure that this time was the time. Finally, I’d figured the puzzle out.

Each experiment did teach me something important. But unfortunately, none of them fully solved the problem.

I would watch people arrive with genuine excitement and leave with valuable experiences. I knew that what I’d made was making a difference.

But even though I genuinely tried to settle into what I’d made and build forward, all I could see was how the current platform was getting in my way. No workarounds could fully disguise that the platform’s structure itself actively worked against the experience I most wanted to create.

• Discussion spaces rewarded constant participation.

• Courses rewarded completion.

• Memberships rewarded ongoing consumption.

It wasn’t that participation or completion were inherently a problem. It was just that the platforms were designed to subtly shape behavior in the opposite direction of where I wanted to go.

What I wanted was to build a space that invited people to step into creative freedom and agency.

But instead, people kept feeling pressure. Pressure to keep up, to finish, to do everything right, to consume enough value to justify being there.

And honestly? I felt pressure too. I felt compelled to constantly produce, to keep conversations alive, to create enough new material, to prove the space was active and valuable.

As though more was always the goal.

Meanwhile, I wasn’t actually interested in pushing people to consume more, to comment more, to produce more, or achieve more.

I wanted to help people slow down enough to show up for their own wonder-filled lives.

I was curious about the way meaningful ideas return to us over months and years.

I longed for conversations that deepened instead of accelerated.

And under it all, I deeply held to the fact that imagination is more than entertainment or escape. I knew that under the right circumstances, it could become a way of relating to ourselves, to one another, and to the world around us.

It took me a long time to let go of the hope that if I just worked harder, created more perfectly, I’d find a magic wand solution.

I had to try a lot of options before finally admitting to myself that I needed to stop. I needed to study the situation, take time to understand it, rather than leaping into the next promising solution. And when I did, I realized something surprising.

I didn’t actually want to build a better platform.

What I wanted to build was an environment.

Something more like a community garden than a course library. More like a museum than a feed.

I wanted to create a place where travelers could wander. A place where they could build their own memories and later, return to notice something different the second time.

I wondered what might happen if people could follow their own curiosity instead of someone else’s sequence.

And as I allowed myself to follow those questions, something new started to sprout in my imagination.

I say “new,” but this landscape feels anything but new. It feels more like I’ve finally opened my eyes and started to see the trail system I’d been exploring all along. These trails are shared ones, too, trails I’ve watched others travel. Rather than feeling like an inventor, I feel more like an explorer mapping long-loved territory.

And this landscape is a special, magical place, filled with old-growth trees and wild, vibrant things that bloom and fade from one season to the next.

It’s alive. It carries a rich and layered history. Stepping in feels like entering the stillness of a forest trail, and that? That feels just right.

I can’t forsee what this space will mean to anyone else yet, but I do know that it’s a landscape I personally want to spend time in, a place I’ll be delighted to share when the time is right.

And the doorway is starting to take shape.