How did Journee Girls Club come to exist?
This is the story of how Journee Girls Club came into existence. Mostly because I was writing my /now update, and realised there was SO much more lore than I remember.
By the time I got back to Bangkok in November 2024, I'd slowly been losing my momentum with the Journee app and had started to get excited about other projects, such as Langsesh [edit: which is now live!] and building my Linkedin.
But at the same time, I'd felt a pressure building. A pressure that I was squandering my time by not working on something that I felt truly passionate about. And let's face it, looking at The Discovery Fund, it's not like the money was going up either.
Through this energy and pressure, I had somewhat of an epiphany. One of my most exciting ideas for the V2 of Journee was a discord community for all users. For accountability mostly, but also to make it fun with wellness & educational events, fun giveaways etc.
At the same time, I'd been spending a lot of my free time making friends and networking on Linkedin and IRL in Bangkok.
On the night of my birthday, just before Martin, Hannah and I went out to a drag show in Bangkok, I checked to see how many people were using Journee for the first time in months. Turns out, it was a lot more than I thought - and this was the kick I needed to jump back into the project. For the rest of the night, it stuck in my head.
The next morning, hungover AF, I was still thinking about the community idea.
My thought was: I've never had many friends who want to work on their businesses together, but are also really into personal growth, health and spirituality. If I could find more people like me and we pooled a bit of money together to pay experts to teach us stuff (but also worked on our businesses together) that'd be awesome!
So that was it. I started floating the idea with some of my new friends from Linkedin. They were - in their words - SO F**KING IN!
That left me with no choice but to build the thing. But I didn't want to make the same mistakes as I did with my last project - spend too much time thinking about it, talking about it and building all the bells and whistles first…
I did everything in my power to not 'productively procrastinate'. No fancy website, just a PDF with my vision. No long lead up, just speaking to people directly. No instagram page or ads, just my audience of 8K (now 24k ayoooo) on Linkedin.
I launched 4 days before Christmas. That was probably a bad time, but it still worked.
Through that, I managed to get quite a bit of interest. About 25 people signed up to be part of the first cohort, of which I accepted 15. I interviewed everyone individually and put together a group of the perfect people to make the community what I envisioned it to be.
Between the seed of the idea and the launch party of the first cohort, it was around 8 weeks. In that time, I felt nothing but fire and determination in myself. It had been a LONG time since I'd been so obsessed with something - and it felt amazing.
Of course, once people were actually in the community, the work really started. I learned a LOT about people, myself and about communities as a result.
But that about brings you up to speed on how this entire thing ended up happening.
Hope you enjoyed reading it as much as I enjoyed living it!
Promise I won't take an age to update you next time :)