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Today's a big day. After 5 years, Unicorn Utterances is going through a major rebrand: say hello to Playful Programming!
After such a long time, it's warranted to ask what this means going forward, and the thought process behind our decision, and today we're going to go over that.
Taking feedback into account
While we're beyond excited with our growth from this year in particular, we've gotten some feedback that we think is valuable to take to heart. Chief among them were questions about our fundamentals, such as:
- What is an "Utterance"?
- What is it that you do?
- How do you fund yourselves?
While these three questions may seem disjointed, there's a throughline in it; brand confusion.
First of all, the word "Unicorn" often refers to a company evaluated for more than billion dollars and "Utterances" is often misheard as "Udder-ances", which leads some to sheepishly ask if we pertain to dairy work in any way.
But instead of a highly profit-driven dairy company, we're a volunteer-based developer education platform aimed at migrating people into the industry and improving their skillsets in a fun way.
Moreover, since our redesign launched this year, I've been asked repeatedly what's our "company's" funding source and what our main product is.
Given this confusion, what can we do to improve our problem of ambiguous motivation and goals?
Our solution
First and foremost, we took a look at our naming and realized that, while it has a certain charm once you're used to it, it was time for a change.
After hours and hours of searching — no joke! — we landed on something that we thought captured our brand well: Playful Programming (PFP for short).
Not only is it more directly linked to programming and software engineering, but it keeps our long-standing obsession with alliteration; all while keeping things fun and delightful for newcomers to discover us and feel welcomed.
Secondly, we're often mistaken for a for-profit group. We're not. While we haven't yet decided to be an official non-profit, we're a volunteer based collective. As of today, all of the funds from Playful Programming have been sponsored either by myself (Corbin) or by my own consulting agency, OceanBit.
The problem is that, when people assume we're a company, they miss out on the fact that we're actively and consistently looking for contributors.
Contributors & sponsors
To help make this more evident, we've designed and developed a new page on the site to highlight both the perks of contributing as well as the types of contributions we're looking for.
But that's not all; I mentioned that all funding has come from me or my company, and that's not sustainable. Today, our spend can be broken down by:
- ConvertKit newsletter hosting ($490/yr)
- Vercel hosting ($240/yr)
- Plausible analytics ($190/yr)
- Domain costs ($80/yr)
While there are some things we could do to bring this cost down, we're happy with our setup and would like to keep it. Moreover, we'd like to expand it in many ways that are not financially viable today.
We need sponsors to continue supporting us as we grow. We currently offer in-banner content ads like this one:
We can also provide the following:
- Sidebar ads
- Inclusion in our newsletter, Discord, and other social media announcements.
- Partnered content — if we found the conditions acceptable.
To support us, we also accept donations through our Open Collective. Any money donated will go directly to growing our project. We'd love to get to a point where we can even compensate our contributors.
Our mission continues
Finally, we're determined to continue making great content for everyone to enjoy. Our upcoming books in "The Framework Field Guide" have many folks excited to learn more about each framework's internals, and we're always writing smaller content along the way.
We never want to turn into a sloppy content farm or reduce the quality of our work to garner more attention. We'll continue our high bar for quality as we always have.
We look forward to sharing more with you; whether that be via email, a Discord message, or a new post.
Thank you for joining us along this journey as we move into the next chapter of Playful Programming.
Best,
- Corbin Crutchley and the Unicorn Utterances Playful Programming Crew