What a start to the year it’s been here at CTO Craft! We started 2018 with 430 members of the new community we launched in October, having originally started with paid-only coaching, and a handful of free events which we ran at CodeNode in London and the Skiff in Brighton, UK. There was a clear need being met, and the momentum and word of mouth was incredible.
The plan was for this to be a community linking CTOs and other tech leaders early in their leadership careers with those of more experience, and the willingness to learn from each other, alongside formal mentoring and coaching, and to augment all this with free and paid events and workshops. We turned on the paid memberships (Basic Membership and Circles Membership) at the beginning of January, with the view that all community members would need to contribute by becoming paid subscribers. In return, they’d get 30 mins of mentoring, access to private events, discounts on workshops and various other perks.
There’s been a great response to that and we have over 30 paying members, but it had another effect — the more experienced CTOs that had joined to get involved with mentoring and asking questions, and just networking in general weren’t serviced by the paid memberships; they were too experienced to make use of the mentoring, but still wanted to be involved. Alongside this, we knew that there was great appetite for more open discussion, and we recognised that the only way to build the conversation volume again was by having more Slack members.
So, as of last week, there’s now a Free Membership, which gives access to various Slack channels (some key ones will be available to paid members only, such as #ask-for-help, #cto-roles, #management and #mentoring), but not to the CTO Craft Topics discussion forum, and doesn’t include the monthly mentoring sessions. That’s having the desired effect, and the number of great conversations and questions and answers is still rising.
If you’re leading technology teams and people, and would like to be part of the Community, just fill in your details here:
Look forward to seeing you there!