Hi, this is my first reddit post ever. I don't totally understand how to use reddit. I've used the reddit app for a few years now, just scrolling through the main reddit page thing when I'm bored. I finally created an account a few weeks ago because I felt like somehow reddit is my best chance of feeling less lost and alone. I imagine that if I explain my dream and post it where it has the potential for thousands of people to read it, I’ll be able to connect with at least a few people with similar interests and dreams. I want to create big things that I can’t do alone.
I suck at organizing my thoughts. My brain constantly jumps back and forth between a whole bunch of ideas. I’ve been trying to collect my thoughts on the notepad app on my cell phone for like six months now. I had over one hundred full notepad things on my phone. It’s over a hundred pages that I copied into google documents to try and organize it all. There’s a lot of redundant thoughts, just worded slightly differently between notepads. A lot of the notepads reference things I wrote in previous notepads. I added onto a lot of the thoughts as I read them and copy-pasted them into the google doc. There has been a lot to unpack. I have a lot of dreams and projects.
It’s a big ol’ mess, but hopefully I organized this well enough that some people are interested and read the whole thing.
When I was in college, I wanted to build a racecar for the 24 Hours of Lemons race series. A car showed up on craigslist that was the perfect candidate to turn into a racecar, but I didn’t have the space to store it and work on it. It was a once in a lifetime opportunity. I bought the car and told the seller that I would tow it away sometime in the next few weeks. Then I made a craigslist post looking for teammates for 24 Hours of Lemons and I said I had bought the car, but was looking for a teammate that had the space to store the car and work on it. I found someone within 24 hours. The internet is an amazing place to find people with similar interests. Once again, I find myself desperate to find some very unique friends and I’ve turned to the internet to find them.
–INTRODUCTION–
I moved back to my hometown after college. I moved back right before the pandemic, and have struggled to make close friends like the ones I had when I was in college. I'm still friends with my friends from college, but it's just not the same now that they’re remote friendships, or long distance friendships, or whatever you would call it. I’m trying to do ‘real life’ now that I’m done with college and I have a radically different dream than my friends from when I was in college.
I'm reaching out to hopefully find some people with similar interests that could become close friends. I’m hoping to re-ignite my motivation to work on my dreams. I want to find/make a community of makers that want to collaborate to create an amazing community for creative people. I’ve tried to explain my dream to people that I meet in person, but it’s hard to describe what I’m looking for. I’m looking for a specific kind of person, so it has ended up just being a waste of time trying to explain my dream when I introduce myself to new people.
I don’t even know what to do if this post manages to reach people with similar interests and dreams. I don’t even know which subreddits to post this in. I think I would want a collaborative document that better describes the dream, and then share that document with the whole internet. I would want to start by communicating over direct messaging with the interested people that read this post, then start a forum or a discord server or something. For people local to me, it would be cool to plan a hike or a bike ride and hang out and get to know each other. I don’t want to share all my crazy ideas with the whole internet (not yet, at least).
–THE DREAM–
I always joked that when I grew up I wanted a house-sized garage and a garage-sized house. I like projects. I have a lot of projects. I have a lot of tools and ‘maker’ skills. I have dirty projects that need to take place outside, like making a concrete bathroom sink countertop. I have clean projects like sewing and 3D printing that need a clean workspace. I have dusty, grungy projects that use expensive tools that need to be sheltered from the outdoors, like welding and plasma cutting. My dream house would have all three types of workspaces.
My house wouldn’t need to be very large if all my projects had a separate workspace.
After graduating college, I bikepacked GDMBR and realized I can accomplish anything that I’m truly passionate about. I told my parents how adamant I was about being an artist, and I explained some of the things I wanted to make. I convinced my parents to buy a fixer-upper house for me to live in and I would pay rent. I convinced them to pay for the materials for me to build a workshop in the backyard. Now I have an 1,800 square foot workshop and a 1,200 square foot house.
I thought by building a workshop first, the ‘maker’ dream would be a lot easier. The risk of failed projects would be lower if I owned the workspace rather than rent it. I still think the workshop will make anything I try to do easier. I’m just ready to make stuff now. I’m sick of figuring out everything alone. I want some friends for the journey. The goal was never to try to do this all alone.
I had this dream of owning a house with extra rooms that I could rent to friends. Everyone says that having friends as roommates is a bad idea. So I decided I wanted a guest house in the backyard to be able to rent to a friend or two. Before building a guest house, I would need to finish the workshop and the house projects, though.
I was convinced that once I had a finished workshop it would make it easy to make friends and find people with similar hobbies and interests. I’m sure it would be easier to convince people to make cool stuff with me if I could provide them a place to live. Especially if we were co-owners of a business, and I could give them a super cheap rent.
I have a friend that started a business a few years ago. The business wasn’t making enough money to be able to pay himself and pay rent for the space he ran the business out of. He blew through his savings trying to keep the business afloat during the starting phase. He had to get a regular job to pay his living expenses and to pay his business expenses. He didn’t have enough free time after working his regular job to work on growing his business. He either needed to grow his product line for his current customer base, or grow his customer base. I wanted him to move into my workshop and run his business out of my workshop. I wanted to give him free rent until his business could afford to pay rent. I wanted to help him grow his business. I wanted to own stock in his company in exchange for providing my time and space that his business needed. Maybe if my workshop was complete, I could have convinced him to move into my workshop.
–THE PROBLEM–
I have spent two and a half years building the workshop in my backyard. I overcomplicated the project. I always over complicate projects. I wanted a mezzanine in the workshop. The workshop wasn’t planned to be insulated, so it gets hot in the summer. The mezzanine would be comfortable in the summer because it will be enclosed, insulated, and climate controlled. The property lot is fairly small, so the mezzanine was the easiest way to make a bigger workshop. There would be a little apartment area in the mezzanine that would have a kitchen so I would be able to cook and eat lunch in the workshop. It has a bathroom with a shower and I want to build a custom Murphy bed so that a friend could comfortably live in the workshop.
It would have been easier and cheaper to build three separate workshops and a guest house than trying to make one workshop that could do it all. I don’t have space for three workshops and a guest house, though.
When I moved into the house there was a 'spare' bedroom that needed to be remodeled. I filled that room with all my tools and materials and projects that I wouldn't need until the workshop was done. Some ‘life stuff’ happened and I had to empty and remodel the 'spare' room, because I needed to use the room. That was a double-whammy. All of a sudden, I had to store a bunch of things in the unfinished workshop, and I also had to shift my focus to remodeling the bedroom. It's been a game of tetris the whole time since then. Every day consists of tracking down the tool I need and moving stuff out of the way.
The house only has one bathroom, but the spare bedroom was perfect for adding a bathroom to and creating a master bedroom. The spare bedroom was an addition to the house that started its life as a carport. There have been 70 years of modifications and improvements done to this house. A lot of the improvements had flaws and shortcuts that made my current improvements extra complicated.
The concrete slab for this room was poured separately for the footers and floor and had non reinforced seams from when they reused the carport slab and expanded the slab to make the room. There's weird cinder block footers separating the original carport slab from the extended floor slab. Half the area had been tiled with the same modern tiles that were used in the rest of the house, and half the area had old (probably original) vinyl tiles that would break loose and crack if you dropped something on them. The side that had newer tiles were tiled right on top of the old original delaminated tiles. The floor is below grade. There is a sidewalk around the perimeter of the house that is higher than the room floor slab, creating a moat between the house and the sidewalk when it rains. The floor is 1 inch lower on one side, and someone 'fixed' it with leveling concrete that sits an inch higher than the rest of the floor in some spots. A simple tiling project became a nightmare.
That's when I realized this would never be my dream house and I would have to make my dream home from the floor up. That was hard to accept. I had spent two years trying to make my dream come true. When I showed people my house I told them, “This is my dream house. Because it has the potential to become my dream house. I'll be able to build my dream workshop and my dream backyard. I will improve the house to be my dream house”. Then I had this realization that it would be easier to build my dream house from scratch. There's things I want that this house can't ever be:
I want sustainable living.
I want passive heating and cooling.
I want extra insulation from the hot and cold weather.
I want gray water to be recycled for a backyard garden.
I want a shower with no door and no curtain.
I want a basement, or just somewhere to store camp gear and bicycles.
I want a guest house.
I want to build a shed to store garden tools and ladders and such.
I want a home gym.
I want a bigger workshop.
I want a garden.
There's not enough room on the property to legally build a guest house or sheds, because the workshop takes up all my allowed accessory structure square footage. I want to build a shed to store garden tools and ladders and such. I want a home gym. I want a bigger workshop. I want a garden.
I dreamed of building a tiny house in my backyard for a friend to live in. I added sewer, electrical and water hookups to connect a tiny house to park beside the workshop. I wanted to convert my garage into a guest house for artists to live in. I wanted a cool backyard with fountains and a koi pond and art everywhere. It would be an artist's haven. I wanted to build a sensory deprivation chamber. I wanted a hot tub and a pool. I wanted a garden and an outdoor shower.
I can't make that all happen, though. I can't build it all alone. You can't just build all that stuff on your property.
I have spent six months trying to figure out how to make the dream of a maker community a reality. I spent that time figuring out what I was really trying to do and why I wanted living space for friends. I spent a while trying to figure out if my house could do anything for this dream, or if I had outgrown it before ever making anything.
I want a property that can grow and evolve. I want a community. I want a ‘makertown’. This property can’t grow.
Until a community has formed and collaborated to design a ‘makertown’, I need to work on my smaller scale ‘makerhouse’ dream.
I’m sick of making all the decisions and doing this alone. I thought I could pitch the idea once my workshop was done, once I had a tiny house, once I had a home gym and a guesthouse. But I don’t even know if anyone exists with the same interest in a community like this. I don’t know if anyone would want to live in my backyard and make cool stuff with me.
I have chronic decision fatigue.
–A MAKER COMMUNITY–
The first time I visited MeowWolf, it blew my mind. The documentary blew my mind. I want a community like the one that the MeowWolf artists created. My BIG unrealistic DREAM is a community that can create their own MeowWolf-type commercial business.
I want something sort of like Arcosanti, sort of like MeowWolf, sort of like the Ithaca ecovillage. There’s a whole list of places I have researched and recently found out about that have inspired the description of my dream. None of the existing communities are quite what I dream of.
I’ve learned terms that I had no idea existed:
-Intentional community
-co-op
-ecovillage
I’ve learned of other people's ideas and communities that I had no idea existed:
-onecommunityglobal open source eco community.
-bauhaus.
-Ithaca ecovillage co-op.
-I finally understand the importance and power of open source things.
-I read the bitcoin manifesto.
-I read about ethereum’s decentralized autonomous organizations. (DEO)
I want an open source eco village co-op thing. After reading about cryptocurrency, it makes sense for an ownerless community to run on a cryptocurrency-based decentralized autonomous organization rulebook. I want to be a part of a giant employee-owned company where everyone can have their dream job. Housing and food would be provided to members by the community organization.
I want to live in a passively cooled and heated house designed to be a comfortable temperature year-round. I want a smart house. I want an intentional community, a neighborhood of people with similar interests. I want to have housing that is ‘free’ in exchange for working on stuff that improves the community.
I want a community that can provide everything that a group of artists need to live so they can create a MeowWolf type interactive place. I want an ecovillage/co-op/intentional-community thing that provides members the workspace and tools to work on their dream business idea. I want the members to partially own their business and the community will partially own the business. I want everyone to benefit from good ideas that community members have. I want dreaming to be encouraged. I want helping people to be encouraged.
I have a whole separate 50 page document where I’m trying to organize my ideas describing the community that I want to be a part of. These are some of the things I’m trying to figure out and explain:
-How to start the community
-Initial funding
-Make it fair for all members. (certain skills are more valuable)
-Find similar examples of communities like this.
-How to make it sustainable, allow it to evolve.
-How to make it community-run, community created.
-How to create a platform that can be used to create a community.
-How to make it low risk and fail proof.
-How to create a template so anyone can pitch their business plan.
I have some ideas and examples that I have described in great detail, but to make it easier to explain, I still need to make some graphics. I just want to get an idea started right now, so I know if it’s worth spending any more time on all this. I want other people to be able to add their input. I want other people to find flaws with the plan. I want people to think of other solutions. I want people to be able to focus on improving the parts that make sense to them. I want this reddit post to get the ball rolling on uniting people to start a community that works to create the blueprint for a ‘makertown’. I want to unite people that want a change from how society currently works.
I want a community with decentralized everything.
I think creating or finding a maker community is the most important thing I’m looking for right now. It’s basically what I was dreaming about when I made the workshop in my backyard. I didn’t totally understand what I was trying to do three years ago when I started looking at houses. It wasn’t until recently that my dream had outgrown my house.
I recently described my dream to my friends, and they have all told me to go get a regular job. I could be making an $80k salary with my computer science degree at a regular job. I’m wasting my time. I spent three years messing around, and now it's time to accept failure and get a real job. I could get a real job now and save up to 'start the crazy commune thing later'.
I would have to work for my whole life to save enough money just to afford to start building my dream community. The whole dream is for the ‘makertown’ to be a community created place. The whole idea is that designing a ‘makertown’ would take more time and knowledge than any one person has. Building this community would take more man-hours to create than anyone could ever justify paying for.
Building a ‘makertown’ would be the ultimate project. It would be the ultimate collaboration.
When I try to comprehend how large this dream ‘project’ is, I start feeling like I’m part of the computer known at EARTH in ‘The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy’ that creates the NEXT computer that gets one step closer to learning ‘The answer to the ultimate question of Life, the Universe, and Everything’. This community platform I want to make IS the computer that figures out the Ultimate question of Life, the Universe, and Everything. By allowing the community to evolve. The dream community I’m imagining will outlive me. The dream community I’m imagining doesn’t even actually need me.
My mom keeps saying that money won’t bring me happiness. Even if I had $50 million to spend I wouldn't be happy. I asked her what she'd do with $50 million, and she said every day she’d just fly in a private jet wherever she felt like going for the day.
If I had $50 million, I'd make a theme park. I'd make affordable housing for the artists that make the theme park. I'd want people truly passionate to work there and design stuff. I would want it to be more than just a job. I would give those artists stock in the company.
If I won the lottery, I would spend it all to create a community. I would fund as many peoples’ dream businesses in exchange for partial ownership of their businesses. I would create a place that provided everything people would need to live while they worked on their dream business. I would require their business plans to be well thought out. It would be more like the Shark Tank T.V. show than just randomly buying stock in random small companies.
I would have a list of businesses that I wanted people to start. The community would have all the business and jobs needed to be self-sufficient. I would pay people to start creating the ultimate open source community if I could.
My mom says that would be a waste of money. Why take the risk if I had enough money to not have to do anything the rest of my life?
I have a little money from my grandma. My parents are willing to keep helping me a little bit. I can’t make any high-risk investments to start a community like I’m dreaming of. If we could create a business plan that proved feasibility and low riskiness, I’m SURE funding the start of a community property would be easy. The community needs to be designed for all types of hard-working passionate people.
I don't want to make tons of money. I want to be happy. Tons of money doesn't magically allow you to ‘buy’ happiness. Tons of money allows you to work on your dreams. It allows you to start your dream business, to make art, to do cool things, to go to cool places.
You don’t even need tons of money to make your dreams a reality. Money just makes your dreams easier to accomplish without having to compromise other necessary parts of life (like saving for retirement). Having lots of money allows you to make risky financial decisions without risking everything.
Humans are capable of a lot, but the current society we live in holds you back from greatness. Society makes it hard for people to accomplish their dreams. Society makes it hard for people to figure out their dreams. School doesn’t actually teach you to think outside the box. Society makes it easy to give up on dreams. I want to change the way society works. I want to change the way jobs work.
A lot of things need to be figured out and implemented before a ‘makertown’ community could be a tangible place. I think with an organized business plan for the community, crowdsourcing money for starting the physical community would happen easily.
–SOLUTION–
There are two things I’m hoping to get out of this reddit post:
(1)
I want to find some friends with similar interests that have time to start a business making art or RVs or bikepacking equipment or a VR game with me.
The problem is that my workshop is full of tools and is not ready to make things yet. I’m burned out on having to make every decision myself. Finding friends with a similar interest would give me new motivation.
(2)
I want to work towards my dream of a co-op, employee owned, crowdsourced, open source, environmentally friendly community. A community for artists, dreamers, and makers.
I have thought about this dream long enough that I’ve realized it has to be created by the community members of the community that share a similar dream. There are a lot of parts to this dream that I don’t have the time to research deeply. No person could single handedly create the community I'm imagining. I want to plant the idea that can grow into a community.
–––MY INTERESTS:—
These are only some of my interests. These are the things I was hoping to do in my workshop once I finish it. I want to find friends with these interests and make cool stuff with them.
I’m also interested in helping someone with their similar business idea.
–BIKEPACKING–
I'm really into bikepacking. I like hiking too, but bicycles are cool because the camp gear weight and water isn’t on your back, it's on your bike. My knees always end up hurting on the downhill part of hikes, but on a bicycle you can coast downhill.
I want to make bikepacking equipment. I want to make custom bikepacking handlebars and some custom bags and clothing. Bikepacking is still fairly new and evolving and I feel like there are still a lot of game-changing ideas that can drastically improve it. I did GDMBR a few years ago and spent a lot of time thinking of upgrades that I wanted and could describe in depth, but nothing even remotely similar exists.
–MAKING ART–
I'm a 'maker'. I’m still trying to figure out what I can make that people will pay for. I watch a lot of the makers on youtube, and it seems that making youtube videos are a good way to justify making a lot of different things and learning a lot of different skills. I want to make youtube videos of adventures and projects that I do, but I don't know where to begin. Youtube also seems like a good way to self-advertise for products and art and merchandise. I want to make a subscription based monthly limited edition t-shirt design that I would hand screen print and ship to paid subscribers. Giving paid subscribers handmade items with low cost to make, but high 'retail value' seems like the best way to grow a youtube channel.
I have a lot of tools: cnc plasma cutter, mig welder, tig welder, oxy-acetylene torch setup, cnc engraver, laser cutter, 3d printer, sand blast cabinet…
There are a whole lot of tools I would have if I had more space: cnc router, lathe, milling machine, planer, vacuum former…
I have a lot of ‘maker’ skills: I have a computer science degree. I do my own car maintenance. I've been welding for over ten years. I've been riding bicycles and doing bicycle maintenance for over ten years. I’ve done a lot of home improvements and maintenance to my house. I’ve been sewing and making my own patterns since I was in fifth grade. There are a lot of skills I want to learn. There are a lot of skills and techniques I’ve spent a lot of time researching and learning, but haven't actually used yet.
I have a lot of ideas for sculptures that I want to make. I’ve thought of techniques that I don’t think many other artists have combined to make metal sculptures like I want to make. I just have to learn a few more intricate techniques to be able to implement the process and create high-quality metal sculptures. I like making art out of bicycle chains, because you can easily collect a lot of old bicycle chains from bike shops. I want to make some tools to make it easier to clean and ‘break’ chains. I want to set up a paint booth so I can add high quality paint jobs to the sculptures.
–MAKING AN RV–
I want to make an RV camper box that bolts to the chassis of a common truck and replaces the truck bed. My first car was a 1970’s Toyota chinook. After struggling to make it reliable, I bought a toyota tundra and spent every summer and winter break of college trying to fit the chinook rv shell to the tundra. I cut the warped wood/cardboard floor out and made a tube metal floor frame. I added a metal frame to the warped roof. It was way too much work. It doesn’t look professional, and I never finished it. After college I got a job making the camper shells and I realized it would be easier to build a camper from scratch, rather than trying to make the chinook into a high quality modern rv.
THIS IS THE MOST FEASIBLE BUSINESS IDEA I HAVE.
I want to make my own high-quality RV, and then show it off to see if I succeeded in making something that people will buy for enough money for it to be worth my time to make them. I would want to make one model that will have only a few layout possibilities, and will only bolt to a few models of popular vehicles. I don’t want to make custom one-off RV’s, and I don’t want to have to buy the vehicles. I want to build something so that people can drive up to my workshop, we can remove their truck bed, and bolt a finished RV ‘box’ to their truck in under half an hour. I have the space and tools to make an RV. I have the skills to make an RV. I worked at a place for a few months making aluminum truck camper shell things that had pop-top roofs and cabover beds.
–VIRTUAL REALITY VIDEO GAMES–
I have wanted to make video games ever since I played Diablo 2 when I was a kid. I messed around with Gamemaker studios when I was like 14 years old; I had lots of grand ideas, but never made much of a game. I gave up and just played video games in all my free time.
I preordered the oculus dev kit 2 when it was announced, because virtual reality looked like the future of video games. I wanted to make a virtual reality video game. I played the one and only virtual reality demo that was available at the time, then sold my oculus dev kit 2. I realized how hard it would be to make virtual reality games, and it didn't seem like that cool of a technology. No company had made cool hand controllers for virtual reality yet, so you would just hold an xbox controller. It didn't feel amazing to play. It felt like just watching a video game in 3D, and not truly immersive gameplay. Making your own video game was still an impossible task back then. It motivated me to go to college to get a computer science degree, though.
Earlier this year I found the Unity engine and was amazed that software that could make high quality video games was available to use for basically free. I followed some of unity's basic tutorials. I recently bought an oculus quest 2. I bought some Unity assets to make the VR implementation easier. I've always wanted to make video games and it finally feels possible.
I want to make a virtual reality video game for the oculus quest 2 headset. It’s amazing that you can make Virtual reality games that run on a $300 VR headset without needing to be connected to a powerful gaming computer.
–CONCLUSION–
Co-op businesses and employee owned businesses just make so much sense, it makes me wonder why more of them don’t exist.why aren’t there any co-op ‘big tech’ companies? I guess there’s a few co-op companies that are alternatives to Uber. There are co-ops that own a fleet of vehicles that members can rent for super cheap. There are co-op neighborhoods.
I bet it takes a lot of unpaid man-hours and money to start a co-op. Someone has to create something amazing, AND have a ‘share the wealth’ mentality to start a successful co-op
Wow. I hope it works. I hope it was worth the fourteen hours I spent trying to organize these ideas.