Episode 4: Exploring Creativity in Unexpected Places

Episode Title: Exploring Creativity in Unexpected Places

In this episode of the CWH NaPodPoMo Podcast, the crew explore creativity beyond traditional art, discussing its role in entrepreneurship and daily life. They compare online platforms Go Brunch and Mighty Networks.

During the month of November for the napod pomo. We’re just having a kind of a casual discussion amongst ourselves. So this is day four. Start out with an icebreaker question, really, what does it mean to be creative, and how do you embrace that identity? Any thoughts on that?
Don’t everybody answer once, right?
I’ll go, I’ll go, I have a I have a business, so I’m not. I think most people are 99% of the people in this group are artists and writers and and I’m not. So I embrace my creativity and different thinking, as far as you know, business ideas and how to something new and engaging. That’s kind of what I do. So it’s probably a little different than the group.
Is that something that’s developed over time? For you, yeah, it’s,
you know, the more you’re in this world, and you see what’s going on, and you for me, it’s like, Oh, what about what? You know, it’s like, it’s all about what niche needs to be filled and so that’s kind of how I get my business creativity and how to reach people no
one else. Have a thought on that. What does it mean to be creative, and how do you embrace it? The identity of a creative will
you? Rachel, get some thoughts on that?
No thoughts. Sorry,
I think a lot of the time it’s about expressing yourself in unique ways that are not as common, and that doesn’t necessarily mean using a medium that’s not as common, but even in business, writing, how you choose to string your words together is a little bit of creativity is involved in writing and drawing and even decorating your house and how you arrange things, right?
Making a space for creativity. What are some ways to boost creativity?
I think maybe Bobby has underestimated her own creativity. She’s created a business. She’s taken that business and she’s put it on a platform that not everybody is using that’s some creativity in itself.
Well, thank you for that. I appreciate that. I always, I always think of creativity more as a very traditionally narrow, narrowly defined Act of, you know, like playing instruments or theater or that kind of thing. So So I appreciate that I have to broaden my horizons. Well, if
you think about it like, oh, while music, I played music for a long time. And yes, there’s some creativity and expression, but a lot of it is like memorization and practice and repetition as well. So there’s a lot of things I think we see is creativity that are not necessarily as out of the box as we think they are. Like writing music involves, obviously a lot more creativity and inspiration and stuff, but just playing music in and of itself, while, yes, there is expressiveness and emoting within it, it’s also memorizing and reciting over and over again, right?
And that’s true. And Bobby, you tried different mediums being not, you know, it’s not just paint as a medium and color markers, pencils, but, you know, go brunch, different platforms,
Canvas,
yeah, I actually try like Canva, yeah, yeah, yeah. Now you your platform. Now is on? I forget the name of it. It’s not go brunch, no,
it because at this point in time, the Go branch just didn’t have what I needed for my for my platform. So it’s on mighty networks. But I
You members that I’m assuming you needed, that membership set up, that they’ve got coming.
Yeah, of all the technology, it was one or two clicks where go brunch. You had to at this point in time, because I’m hoping I can get back to it. Quite frankly, there were a lot of plugins. And when I actually, I had created something on go brunch, and then when I demonstrated it, it was so slow, and I was like, oh, gosh, this just isn’t going to work at this point. So that’s when I switched over to mighty networks. So everything is fast, and yeah, and, and I, I’m doing their path to pro, so I get a lot of support. Quite frankly, Richard was fantastic at and his team was fantastic. Yeah, yeah, you know, I can’t really beat that, but, yeah, so with mighty networks, it’s different than go brunch. But I’m, I’m happy. I’m happy with it at this point.
What was slow by me?
I just needed
you know, there were what I wanted to do. I wanted to do events. Some of them would be, if you were not a member, they’d be paid. If you were a member, it’d be free. Like, there was just stuff, like a lot of complications, like, you could join for free, but you can always upgrade at any time, and all that is built into mighty networks, right,
right? Yeah, that’ll be coming in the in the membership thing, from what I understand, they were hoping to have by the end of the year, but it sounds like it’s going to be in the new year, right? Right? Yeah. I
mean, I’m definitely, I’m on the list, and I would love to be able to integrate it, that’s for sure. I because it’s some it’s new and keeps you engaged.
And we’re talking about gold branch. I don’t want to say it’s a zoom alternative, because it’s kind of not, but it’s like zoom, as in that it’s a platform for having conference calls, where you can put a customized background on there, you can put your living room folder on there, and sit in the arm chairs in your living room, and a lot more besides. And there’s a lot of upgrades coming out with that. The one of the developers, Richard, super nice guy, and listens and takes part in open calls about it, is always developing the platform. I know that shadows, you and Keith were talking about that. I think when I first heard of it on I go
as far as to say that it’s a zoom alternative where you can build your own world to create the environment. And Richard’s the founder of it. Oh,
Richard is the founder. I didn’t know if he was like, CTO or CEO? No,
he’s the founder. Yeah,
really accessible, really, yeah, really nice guy.
Yeah, I
smart as all get out,
I couldn’t believe that you could, you know, do your own kind of background on there, build a world. I like what Richard talked about, telling a story. And I could see that Bobby with you as well, with the, you know, the real estate type stuff. One of Richard’s conferences, he talked, you know, you could meet in the front yard and say, This is your yard. Look at the landscaping. Let’s go in and look at the hallway. All right, let’s go visit the kitchen. And you can kind of take people from room to room and tell a story on your way. It’s pretty awesome.
Yeah, yeah. Yeah. It’s an amazing platform, but it doesn’t fit yet for a full blown membership setup,
yeah, being the key word, right? Yeah, yes,
I agree with that. That is the keyword, because when, again, when it when it gets there, I’ll be there.
But you know, you you could do some events over there where it introduces the community you’re building to go branch for when you do go to integrate,
that’s true. I can do that,
yeah? Maybe some of the less formal things use it as a kind of a showroom, yeah, like that. I think one of the
things I love about go brunch and, you know, just, we’ll circle back, the creativity is, in fact, the creativity, yeah, you know, basically, if you can put it in an iframe, you can embed it in in one of those rooms. So it’s not just the picture in your background, it’s, it’s bringing the room to life. And in so many ways, Artemis has done some amazing stuff over there. As far as I’m concerned, beautiful, well, she something else that she’s done, Bobby, is she’s developed a private room, and what she is embedded in there is everything she needs that if she’s away from home, she can pick up her tablet, log into her go brunch room, and there’s things like her calendar, embedded, reference material, embedded, you know, notion pages, embedded. It’s really was amazing to go in and have a look at it. Nice.
That would be fantastic. What a use case. Yeah, and, and it goes the other way as well, right? You can embed gold branch in an iframe on a website if you, if you you know, so decided,
but you can, and Artemis tried that, but it’s a little quirky. And Richard will tell you it’s a little quirky.
Okay, okay,
is to use the domain and have the domain point to your space.
That’s what I did with support journey that I’m going to be rolling out. Yeah, yeah, pretty cool. Is it platform specific, as far as the quirks concerned? Or just like at the moment, it’s just the way that, because it might, not always be iframe, right? It might go to a different embed as it goes along.
Think, right now they’re using iframe, so I’d be surprised to see them switch to anything else, right, right? Okay, and you really don’t like in a room, the elements in a room to be any more than than three megabytes. The iframe doesn’t actually count as as adding to the size of the room, so that that lets you do a whole whole lot more things without overloading your room, right?
It does. It really does. I noticed that as well. When I first made my room, I didn’t realize about the size of the background image will affect the loading. And I think it was you that told me that, because I was like, this is slow. Everyone else is not. And I think it was you that told me, yeah, try and keep it to about 180 kilobytes, right. There
are some rooms I go into I find her slow loading, and I suspect it’s the busyness of the room. Come right in as one. It tends to be on the slow side loading. But when you get in there and you start poking around, she’s got a lot in there?
Yeah, yeah. And it never ceases to amaze me what you can actually do, the boundaries, the envelopes always being pushed, and someone’s always finding a new way. And that there’s a great Chrome plugin that I forget that gentleman’s name that did that, the gold branch plug in, Claudio, Claudia. You. Yeah, that’s, that’s just amazing for replicating, duplicating rooms. Yeah?
So he’s put together a group called the brunch hackers. And what he is doing is he’s teaching them some of the hacks he’s figured out on on gold brunch. And one of the things, when you were talking about Bobby being able to do, like, a demo where it’s like a walk through it of a house, yeah, instead of, instead of putting the rooms in separate rooms, he’s got a setup where you could actually have those images right within a single room and have triggers embedded that will change the the background image to what you want to talk about. Wow,
yeah.
How much is he charging for that, that cohort,
I’m not sure
how much he’s charging the the first one obviously was cheaper because it’s, it’s, you know, kind of an experimental beta thing. He’s not accepting any more people into it until January.
Okay, okay, cool. Yeah,
give it a try if he’s if I can swing it, but I may have to wait.
Yeah, and that whole being able to go into the code when you’re in the edit changes are persistent, that just blew me away. Yeah,
yeah. I think over time, Richard and his team will incorporate some of those hacks. One of them that is coming in is, you know, the doorbell that’s been set up in some of the rooms. That is a hack that Claudio set up. They’re actually setting that up that it’ll be embedded as a browser notification.
I saw that. Yeah, that’s that’s pretty cool. And being able to, you know, move a broadcast to the different rooms was good as well. And if you’re a co host, you can broadcast as well. You can have a conversation back and forth. So, I mean, if you have more than 600 people in a room, if that’s not enough for you, you can have a second room and broadcast simulcast too. Yeah, yeah,
into the platform. Oh,
yeah, for sure. And he is so open. This is such a two way street with with Richard with ideas, he’ll take them on board and, you know, we, if he can do them, he’ll do them. If he can’t, he can’t. Yeah, well, that’s taken us to the bottom of the hour. That’s pretty cool. I think, how, how do we, guys think we did, guys and girls,
excellent. This has been, this has been excellent. Sorry, I’m not camera ready
today, but that’s life. No, we’re just using the audio anyway, not come Oh,
okay, great, you’re
safe. Yeah, thank
you.
Yeah, I don’t want me on camera. I’d break it.