Getting Started: What the heck is Wandering Aimfully?

Wandering Aimfully is a new business and brand my husband Jason and I are starting.

For the past few years, we've both had separate, individual businesses. In my case, that means a business called Made Vibrant, which sells online courses and art prints for soulful creatives interested in personal growth, creativity and authentic business. In my husband Jason's case, that means a business called JasonDoesStuff making money from online courses about sponsorships, selling, and writing.

Last year we decided to team up to sell access to all of our combined courses, plus anything we ever will create in the future with a crazy idea called BuyOurFuture.

Initially we only planned to sell our products together as a one-time thing. But once we realized there was a pretty big overlap in our audiences—and that we really enjoyed working together and collaborating—it became clear to us that it no longer made sense to separate our businesses.

"I just think we're better together," Jason would say to me.

And I had to admit I felt like he was right.

So we started having conversations about what it might look like if we merged our brands/businesses into one. What would it look like if we stopped putting individual energy toward two different endeavors, and instead Captain Planet-ed this thing and started putting our collective energy toward ONE singular purpose?

These conversations started as questions, but quickly began to change into more serious talks about ALL THE THINGS (things like potential business models, what we would charge, branding, when to launch, who our ideal customer was, etc.) That's when we started thinking to ourselves…

Why don’t more entrepreneurs share the full process of making all these decisions?

(We learned that the answer is… because it’s a sh*t-ton of work!)

But we think it’s also partially because people are afraid of showing the real, authentic, not-always-have-it-all-together moments of starting and running a business. On the journey to a finished product that the end consumer sees, there are always moments of doubt, tension, overwhelm and stress... yet most business owners fear that revealing these less-than-perfect moments will turn customers off.

We, however, feel the exact opposite.

We feel that peeling back the curtain actually builds trust with an audience. We like the fact that while people out there are selling you the shiny, perfect dream, we can be over here showing you the honest-to-goodness reality of what it takes to actually make that dream happen.

Through our separate individual brands, we’ve always been committed to authenticity and transparency. But we feel this new business venture is our opportunity to turn that dial up to 100—to share every single step of the process we can from start to finish. So this site you've found yourself on is our chance to do just that.

We'll be sharing posts every day until the launch of our new business: Wandering Aimfully.

The good, the bad, and the ugly.

For your viewing pleasure, here’s a little teaser video we put together to give you an idea of what you can expect:

What to expect as you watch us build a business from start to finish

We will be posting every day, starting March 26th, 2018 until we launch on August 20th, 2018. When I say "post" I don't just mean an update on how we're doing and how much coffee we're drinking (though I'm sure there will be some of that.)

I mean, full-length soup-to-nuts posts on every aspect of what needs to be accomplished before we hit publish on our new site and slap that big ol' buy button on the interwebs.

Here are some of the topics and posts you can expect:

• The branding process from start to finish (you can see a few bits and hints on this “under construction” version of the site, but we’ll show you every step of how we designed the new brand identity)What it’s like to work together as husband and wife

• How we’re managing our daily tasks and what tools we're using to stay on schedule with building the business

• Designing the new website and working with a developer to build it

• Coming up with a content strategy for the website and the logistics of combining our existing individual brands into one

The list goes on!

Everything you’ve probably wondered about the process of building an online business will be covered. You’ll see every decision.

You’ll also notice that we’re trying to supplement these daily updates with more video content. (And yes, we will have a post where we talk about that decision!)

The plan is to try to post 1-3 videos per week, some of which will be shorter and focused on a specific topic, and others that will be full-length, unedited meetings talking about things like the branding process or designing the customer dashboard, etc. While we realize it goes against conventional wisdom upload a full meeting that’s an hour and a half long, we wish more business owners posted this kind of unedited, behind-the-scenes content... so we decided to do it ourselves. Think of it like a fly-on-the-wall podcast episode... for your eyeballs. 😜

Create the content you wish to watch, right?

(ps. If you enjoy video content and want to see as we evolve our video style, be sure to subscribe to the Wandering Aimfully YouTube channel!)

Can I interest you in a donut?

How about some coffee? (So what, we like breakfast, okay?)

Why the name “Wandering Aimfully?”

You might also be wondering at this point what does Wandering Aimfully even mean? Well, we’re glad you asked.

When Jason and I decided to sit down and come up with a name for this new venture, we wanted it to be something that represented us both equally. We’re approaching this as equal partners and we wanted to feel equally invested in the meaning of our combined brand. We wanted it to be something that felt central enough to our values as a team that it would last for the foreseeable future.

Jason’s existing brand name was never carefully considered (even by his own admission). He wanted a sort of catch all for his writing and various projects, all with the loose tie in around taking action. Hence, JasonDoesStuff. (Pretty straightforward there.) For this new name, his biggest request was that it be less about him (aka us) and more about our audience. He wanted it to feel bigger than us, like a movement that people could get behind.

My existing brand name, Made Vibrant, is something I love deeply, and it resonates with me on the same level—if not more so—than it did when I created it over four years ago. To me it encapsulates so many things: creativity, positivity, and the desire for the fullest expression of human potential. I wanted a new name that would feel as deeply resonant to me as Made Vibrant, yet would also incorporate Jason’s strengths and what we bring to the table as a team.

Turns out the brand name we were searching for was actually under our noses the whole time in the form of an idea that we’d never followed through on...

About two years ago we had this idea to start a side project together—a travel blog to chronicle our various trips. Now, as a couple, we have a unique interpretation of what we want travel as an experience to be like, and it isn’t the conventional “nomadic” one, backpacking across the world and staying in whatever accommodations reveal themselves. We’re much more intentional about our travel experience. We leave room for exploration and serendipity and wonder, yes, but we also know what we like and we plan out our experiences to ensure there's good food, modern accommodations and a certain level of comfort. We often joked that our approach was less like wandering aimlessly across the globe and more like wandering aimFULLY.

That our approach was all about exploration AND intention.

We never did follow through on the blog, but we did buy the domain and that name stuck with us. It would come up in conversation every once in a while and it started to develop meaning with us.

The more we thought about it, the more realized this idea of exploration and intention can be used to describe our approach to just about everything.

In life, and in business, this is our modus operandi.

We explore…

We experiment…

We create…

We wonder…

We are open to possibilities...

We WANDER.

And yet—

We have clear intentions…

We take action…

We know our guiding values…

We move forward…

We FOCUS.

We don't wander aimlessly...

We wander AIMFULLY.

This is the balance we like to bring to our lives and businesses.

We want to constantly evolve and stay open to change while we also staying anchored to intentions that are rooted in our values.

We also loved that the name could represent the duality that is present within us as a team and a couple.

While I certainly represent the more emotional and intuitive side of our duo that "wandering" speaks to, Jason brings an action-oriented and focused mindset to our partnership that the "aimfully" speaks to.

What never made it as a travel blog turned out the be the perfect name for our joint venture.

So there you have it. Your official introduction to Wandering Aimfully. We hope you’ll grow to love it as much as we do as you follow along on our journey bringing this business to life the next five weeks.

Be sure to sign up for email updates below if you want to check back in daily on our progress and see how the journey unfolds.

Like we said... it's the good, the bad and the ugly. We want to share it all with you!