Why I Will Aways Be a Beginner

Working in Rachel Ray’s blue green room while Maggie Mason is telling you all about Go Mighty.

WHEN it’s the beginning, there is no looking back. Nowhere to look back to.

Go Mighty is my new beginning, but beginnings are old for me. I’ve been building media offerings from beginning all my career. My first real job was as associate editor on an as yet created/designed/launched section for The Australian newspaper, back in 1999. Titled, Media, it was the first time a national newspaper would cover its own industry. It was awesome. And that’s 1999 awesome, long before anyone took the meaning of that word to be nothing more than a swish of a ponytail.

Next was donna hay, a love affair between style and food and design and heavy stock. There wasn’t anything to build there, it only needed a decorator’s eye.

Family Circle called next and it asked to be demolished and rebuilt for the ‘young woman’. That was fun. And hard. And pointless. Not everything asking to be built, or rebuilt, should be.

And then I wrote a book and during my procrastinating sessions I discovered online. Oh, this needs builders out front, I thought, to make all that code be about you. It was, as Jordan Ferney says, like the old wild west, and I wanted in.

I bought a subscription to New York magazine, which arrived at my Sydney home every week, and vicariously lived its life while at the same time joining an Austin-based CEO to help build kidspot.com.au, an Australian parenting platform, which sold to News Corp last year. I lived and worked in Sydney but heavily under the influence of the USA and its wild-west style of possibility.

Recruited by babble.com I came to NYC in 2009 to help lead it to a sale. It went from 1.5m pageviews to 5m+, and sold to Disney, also last year.

So I went with my family to France for the summer.

Returning to NYC, I began building small things: Blogstar, a database of bloggers; projects for others, but I wanted to build with purpose. I wanted to prove, particularly, that you can take a blogger, with an influential voice, and turn that into a business that not only makes a difference but a living. And do this again and again, via connections and collaborations, until that web is powering itself.

This is what I wrote as one of my goals when I was invited to attend Mighty Summit last year. My hosts, Maggie Mason and Laura Mayes, called me on it. Do it for the Mighty brand, they said. And so we are. Along with Amber Doty who joined us as our managing editor.

After 6 months of building we’re close to launching gomighty.com. It’s where online voices can connect and collaborate around their life list goals, share stories and journeys around their experiences via a personal blog that is either a stand-alone or connects to an existing blog, and partner with brands that will provide both in-kind and financial support so they can do something good for themselves and others.

Each season we will invite select members to become Cast Members and gomighty.com will work to help our Cast Members achieve at least one of their goals using our resources plus grants from our brand partners. Success for the Cast Member also means success for social good as each Cast Member will be working on behalf of a chosen charity with a donation made by the supporting brand once the Cast Member’s goal is achieved. Cast Members will their share their stories via their personal blog at gomighty.com, chronicling the good, the bad and the not so pretty. And the awesome.

We’re launching with a dedicated section celebrating Olay’s 60th anniversary where all women are invited to Challenge What’s Possible and Olay will be gifting goals for the next few months. Sign up.

We’re proud to be launching with Olay and Bing as our online partners and thanks to an appearance by Maggie on The Rachel Ray show this Friday, we’re expecting lots of new members and hope you will find your people, those who, like you, inspire and support and share stories of journeys towards doing something good.

See you there.

P.S. We’re doing the IRL version this November in Palm Springs at The Ace with Ben Silbermann, the co-founder of Pinterest, as our keynote speaker. Camp Mighty. Come.