Jackson's Scratchpad #1
Small ideas and points of note from the road to founding New Athens
New here? Get up to speed on New Athens, a proposed new U.S. city where a family of four can live comfortably on a single income.
A meta introduction
This is the first post in a series. I take notes constantly, physical and digital, that I collectively refer to as my scratchpad. Here, I’m going to grab some highlights from the past week-ish, expound for an hour or two, and post whatever I end up with.
For the uninitiated, this is in contrast to the “Founder Update,” a writing format I picked up in the tech industry. Those were basically a vehicle for founders to share private information with investors. Bluntly, I always found them soulless and performative—precisely what good writing isn’t—which offended me in a way that investors were unlikely to grok.
Another lens: you are investing in New Athens by reading this. So this is for you. And while I’m at it I’m going to have some fun.
Time to hit the phones (does anyone say that any more?)
Now that the New Athens website is live, I’m due to radically shift gears. Apart from calls with team members and a user feedback sessions, I’ve spent much of the past month heads-down. By contrast, in a past life I lived by my calendar and would regularly grind through 8–10 meaningful calls in a day. For better or worse, the pendulum is about to—and must—swing.
More complexity than I bargained for
The New Athens website is as much a writing project, as an information architecture project, as a staffing model, as a bet on particular global outcomes over the next few years. A city is many things to many people, but candidly I did not see this level of complexity coming. It took me longer than I anticipated to tease apart audiences and clarify the use cases of pages on the site. But what’s there is decent, I have a roadmap for further improvements, and, most importantly, in user research sessions nobody is getting lost any longer.
All at once, the process was exhilerating and I’m proud of the work…and I’m not sure I’d have taken it on if I knew what I was getting into. Checkpoint passed! Whew!
Who doesn’t love configuring SaaS products?
Over a three day stretch last week I poured myself into tooling. In some ways this was a good sign—I’d successfully put it off until I had enough information to do it right—but still, what a slog!
A partial list (skip ahead if you care for your sanity): I opened and/or configured accounts for Google Workspace, Fillout (forms), Notion (website CMS), Super (website host), Airtable (waitlist database and automations), 1Password (password management), and Missive (shared email imbox for the team). Add in a half-dozen domain name configuration tasks. And then securing social handles/pages, setting up profiles, and configuring notification settings on Substack, TikTok Instagram, X, and LinkedIn. (Are your eyes bleeding yet?) And then configuring notifications across tools and social platforms to flow into Missive (email tool), so everyone on the team can see and respond to activity in realtime.
Looking back, I think this was my fifth rodeo getting a basic ops stack off the ground. Every time I’ve done it, including this go-round, I have the thought, “Dang I’m pretty good—I should write a book on this!” but the closer I get to finishing, the more desperate I get to stop thinking about this crap and do something meaningful again.
I must not Slack. Slack is the mind killer. Slack is the little death…
I’m intentionally avoiding team chat apps (for now). We’re covering the base with text messages. I’ve got a lot more to say here, but for now I’ll note that Slack, Discord, and other chat apps put teams on a particular cultural path that I increasingly recognize as, at best, fraught.
Copywriting Center for Kids Who Can’t Read Good
In the run-up to publicly launching the site, I must have proofread the thing at least five times. I find this rather enojable, which is good because the site clocks in at 5500 words. That’s maybe not so much for an article, but it’s a lot of web copy. It all brought me back to my copywriting days. Oh, the memories!
…And the knowledge must not be lost! I can see it now, future me sitting the boys down, maybe they’re in middle school, dad passing on the essential distinctions between ad copy, brand marketing, conversion landing pages, audience segmentation... Eh, I can feel their eyes rolling already. Nevermind.
Until the next round, y’all. —JCS