Announcing Hello Blink Show

I’m starting a new podcast: It’s with my friend Shawn Hymel and it’s called Hello Blink Show. It’s a business growth podcast for technical people who want to start their own company. The top-line update is we are going to be releasing the first episodes later this month and if you are interested, click the button below:

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A Brief History

This past fall the Open Source Hardware Association (OSHWA) held the first-ever Open Hardware Month. There were events held all over the world. I had the privilege of participating in a panel discussion at SparkFun Electronics with fellow current and former OSHWA board members.

You can watch highlights of the panel discussion below:

When Shawn and I looked at the overall agenda of events for Open Hardware Month, we noticed an opportunity to talk about actually bringing products to market. We decided to host an online discussion to see if anyone might be interested.

Sure enough, people were! It got picked up on Adafruit’s blog, we talked about sales and marketing with attendees, but ultimately heard that the format wasn’t accessible. Having a fixed day/time/location was difficult, even though it was online.

Creating a New Space

Shawn and had a few lengthy discussions before our online event and afterwards realized that we enjoyed talking to each other about this stuff. Our chats were downright long-winded. And fun!

In our work, we are regularly having conversations with technical people who either want to start something new or have already started something new and are ready to grow it. It comes up enough that we believe there’s an audience out there who will value these conversations. This is a space for folks who want to learn about sales, marketing, and general go to market work when they already have the technical skills to deliver a product.

Now, this isn’t reserved to hardware companies either. We have conversations with people interested in starting software and service businesses across a huge range of industries. It just so happens that we both met when we were working in open source hardware years ago and that is something we both care about a lot.

The Goods

We want to have discussions, host interviews, and generally offer conversations that serve technical founders and business owners. This probably isn’t going to be for everyone, though of course we encourage anyone to listen! It is for the people that we not only work with as our clients, but also consider our friends. Starting our own businesses changed our lives and we want to help other people do this too.

In the first few episodes alone we have conversations about starting something new, launching a brand, engaging with developers, and creating content marketing. We are excited to feature voices that reflect the diversity of people, projects, and problems that are being solved in the world today.

Our goal is that people take actionable steps with each episode. We will follow up episodes with an email newsletter that shares show notes and additional resources. We hope to build a community around this, share what people are building, and maybe even have in-person events where we can get people together to learn from each other.

If this catches your eye or you know someone who might be interested, please sign up below and share:

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