HeroPress Rising

We’ve spent the last weeks looking at everything we know and planned for HeroPress.  Why we’re doing it, for whom, how, etc., and we’ve made some changes.

Audience

Our original audience was WordPress developers and users struggling to interact across cultural and linguistic barriers between the stereotypical Western and non-Western worlds.  We realized those same barriers exist in far more places.  There are people in New York, London, Berlin, and every other place in the world who similarly have NO idea how to move from where they are in life to someplace better.

Our contributor-to-audience relationship is the same as before.  Contributors are addressing a specific problem they overcame, talking to people similar to them.  The difference is that now we’re not limiting “the fringe” to specific geographic or cultural areas.  We’re inviting contributors from places like St. Louis Missouri, San Diego California, and everywhere else in the world to speak to their peers.

Product

We were originally going to release videos with translation.  We realized two problems with this.

Cost

Hiring professional videographers in every location was going to be very expensive.  Additional costs came from transcribing the video to text and translation.

Size

Much of our original audience lives in places where bandwidth is low.  Videos can be difficult to access in a meaningful way.

In light of that we decided to switch to text based essays.  They’re easier and cheaper to make, translate, and are much easier to download over low bandwidth.

What’s Next

We’ve been gathering essays from contributors and we should begin releasing them in the next few days. What we’ve seen so far has been tremendously inspiring, we’re excited for you to experience them as well.