The Builder's Daily Begins Today: Here's How This Works

John McManus -

Seconds of suspense became minutes. Minutes slowed, dragged on and yesterday evening crossed into, my, what a long day it's been!

Then it happened. The Builder's Daily – for who, what, and why it is at birth – suddenly fed in its full-throated glory from The Cloud just before 10 pm ET, on Tuesday, April 14, 2021.

Hello.

Now, here's three reasons we're bringing TBD to you.

Also, from the get-go, this site, and the community we plan to serve, puts learning and knowledge and wisdom on an equal plain. Learning is going to get parental preference in our launch period, and we're not going to hesitate to take you first-hand into our learning and discovery period.

I'm calling it TBD Alpha.

And I'll get back to that. First, a couple of housekeeping notes. As we launch today literally from square one, a circle of friends is the very starting place of work we're going to love to do for people who deserve it and can prosper if we work together.

It's how, soon, this becomes the place the housing business comes home to everyday.

As thrilled as I am that the moving goal-posts have finally stayed put for a minute, there’s an awful lot of work to do to get the site, its services, its mechanics, and its flow of value to where I hope TBD can make an impact. I’ll be honest with you, we’ve got a lot to do, but some of that can never be done unless we start now.

To get where we are even now, I am so grateful for your patient support, counsel, commitment to the purpose, and engagement in ideas – all of which now run through the veins of what audiences and partners will experience immediately as well as what they don’t see.

A debt of gratitude, particularly goes to three intrepid charter sponsor partners -- Matt Ogden and his team at Building Industry Partners, Gerry McCaughey and the Entekra team, and Carol Ruiz and her team at New Ground PR & Marketing – without whom we could not be on the threshold of starting something exciting, and fun, and full of purpose.

The TBD Dream Team – each an individual leader in practice, in transformation, in deep insight, and above all, action and solutions – together adds up to what I hope can be a force in focus, motivation, empowerment, and ideas. You'll see in the disciplines each is a master of that as whole they comprise building's end-to-end life-cycle, with its gamut of value creation from ideas to real-world structures.

Further, the work on the plan, the creative development, and the launch content strategy intended to ignite a community that’s never fully recognized itself as one before has allowed me to spend countless hours with a couple of professional heroes, Frank Anton, whom many of you know, and Craig Reiss, whom many of you will soon have the opportunity to meet.

Also, there’s Maggie Goldstone, our creative and UX guiding light. I’ve worked with Maggie for the better part of a decade, but seeing her ideas come to light, her problem solving, and her care to the detail of all the moving parts of launching a web platform has been like nothing else we’ve worked through before. A star in the making. Maggie has run point on work with the awesome team at MSF Global, our tech partners in the development of this site. You can learn more about them on our About page.

Finally, here’s what comes next and how this will work.

  • The site is in working order and we’ve laid out our scope and subjects of coverage and mission. Now comes the fun part. Your voices and ideas, and your feedback and critique here are critical. Please email me at john@thebuildersdaily.com or Craig at craig@thebuildersdaily.com with thoughts, challenges, and one or two things (or more) you want us to do to improve.
  • We’ll start delivering the TBD newsletter daily each morning Today, with some important caveats I'll get to. From the onset we’ll be set on a single-minded goal – audience and partner value creation – that will manifest in three early-stage focal points:
Permission – securing our audience user’s blessing to become a valued few moments of every day to start with.
Dialog – making it exciting and easy to feedback critique, challenge, guidance, ideas, etc. early and often as part of the user-experience of feeding through the site and its channels. You'll see, in every one of our stories, a simple, seamless poll question. This will be easy for you, and when we feed back the data to you, we feel it will add up quickly to helping with your court vision and decision-making.
Ownership – our daily frequency and constantly deepening sense of what aspects of information and insight flow our audiences most value will allow us to be alert to how to best serve the community to illuminate paths to possible solutions.

This is just the start. We’ve now got a technological platform. It’s in 1.0 start-up condition, and we expect from the moment we begin we’ll be looking for a 2.0, a 3.0 and beyond so that this business community can truly get a shot of getting what it needs in the way of support, challenge, ideas, data, and, ultimately, empowerment.

I think of the next 8 months in three stages

  • TBD Alpha – April 15 to May 15 – to scope our breadth, depth, and timeliness of coverage, and to de-bug a brand new technological platform capable of growing into a community hub. [Note: After getting our feet wet through the end of next week, we will "press pause" on our TBD Newsletter for one week – from April 26 through April 30 – to take stock of what we learn, bugs we need to fix immediately, and how we can best turn on all the engines and begin to serve you. We'll be back on a daily basis – hopefully forever – starting Tuesday, May 4.]
  • TBD Beta – May 30 to August 1 – to establish the reach and refine more clearly the audience opportunity areas we can most powerfully impact.
  • TBD Re-Launch – Aug 1 through Sept 15 – with a fully-operating proof-case as a daily that begins to address unmet needs and wants in the community, we’ll unveil a range of business services and opportunities to ignite the full potential of the TBD community at work.

Thank you for joining us. We hope very soon that TBD becomes all about you and your world of opportunity in solutions none of us alone can fully imagine, let alone do. This is all about you and the nobility, the challenges, the purpose, and the passion you bring to doing your work.

That's why we come back to learning. We need to hear from you. Tell us what you think, what you want. how you do what you do, and what you come up against each day as you try to do it. This is The Stuff we believe this community needs. It's what makes today a step into a new frontier, and it's why we're saying TBD is the place where the people in the business of housing come home everyday.