My dad and I started Woodworking Masterclasses back in 2012. We had no idea if it would work. I think it is inevitable when you begin working on something that may not work that you structure it to fail gracefully. In my mind, I set a goal that if 100 or more people would sign up in the first month we would be able to make the venture work. 120 signed up on the first day and I felt confident that we could make a success of this venture. 

Since then we have had a loyal, interested audience. Some of those who signed up in those early days and have been signed up ever since. Some signed up periodically and check out what we were doing. Others have been encouraging and interested but not actually signed up for anything. We don’t publically share our financial growth or the number of paid customers we have. But, just to give you an idea of the growth we have had, when I added up all the page views and video views we had in one month it came to around 1.5 million. 

We have a problem though. When we started out we didn’t feel we could plan for long-term loyalty from customers we had never met. We didn’t know how long people would stay interested. So, we just came up with one good project and posted it out there. People liked it and we came up with another. Quite some time has passed and as it has we have had a few people saying they didn’t like one piece or other we did. But overall everyone following along liked each individual piece. The good thing is, so did we! However, if you assemble everything we have done into one big ensemble, it doesn’t go. The pieces were each designed as a one-off. This isn’t some awful thing, but it also isn’t how we want it to continue. 

We are going to reset, and start working through pieces of furniture with the intent to make the whole ensemble work together. How cool will that be?