The Saving the World Strategy Guide: The Awakening (June to August 2022)
What I went through to make sure the world knows about community wealth
After a lifetime of mental health battles and never being able to live independently (I'm autistic), I had been exploring mental health therapies for years. The next stage in my journey was psilocybin, which I believe is going mainstream in the west for a therapeutic aide in healing deep seated traumas.
I went into this therapy hoping to heal my trauma, but instead came out with an idea: community wealth.
You see, I had also been a serial entrepreneur most of my life. A serial failed one, that is. Most of my business ideas never took off.
One actually did, but I was too autistic to manage customer service by myself and didn't know how to ask for help -- so I shut down a successful business!
What I had done was help my former partner establish a brick and mortar niche business over the course of our 17 years together, the source of my livelihood, though the relationship wasn't good for either of us, and I was looking to start my own business as a way to exit that one and finally live independently.
Enter: Villej
My approach to community wealth was to build a platform cooperative that 1) exemplified the idea for other people to copy and 2) gave accommodating jobs and income to neurodivergent and disabled people like me.
I thought, I build this and it will scale to unicorn status in 18 months and prove community wealth works.
Easy peasy.
My background and the one successful business I had was in on-demand manufacturing. Villej was to be a marketplace on the front end and affiliate system, with on-demand orders routed toward makers all over the world.
You see we have all the tools at our disposal to miniaturize manufacturing. And at the time, there was only one on-demand jewelry manufacturing company, and they had orders backed up for months.
I looked at the margins. Wow.
No wonder Printful grew to be a unicorn so quickly. But no one had solved the jewelry problem. I could do that, but create a new unicorn in the community wealth space -- where profits went back to the community it served, where the people and not shareholders were the ones who benefitted from the company we had created.
Seemed like a no brainer from all angles.
So I went all in.
Like, all in all in.
I mean all the cash and savings I had access to. Maxed out all my credit. Took out leases for equipment, hired a company to develop the platform.
The issue was, I only had a few months runway where that would be a SIZABLE payment. But even if it took a little longer, I could stay and keep working in my former partner's business.
In retrospect, I was naive in thinking I could get a startup this size off the ground in little time with little help. And despite what was to come, I remain an optimist to this day.
But naivety is how you learn the hard lessons when you didn't grow up learning business skills.
**And I was about to learn the hardest lessons of my life.**