Photo by Martin Reis, via Flickr

I wanted to write a post about beginnings, about why I decided to start…

“You shouldn’t say start,” Josh tells me. “You should say: ‘I have.‘”

It’s better to beg for forgiveness than ask permission, is one of the things I’ll need to add to the Jellybean Boom Manifesto, if I ever get around to writing it.

I have a tendency to plunge headlong into things. In the online space, that makes sense. Overnight success is rare and most of the best initiatives I have orchestrated came into the world with a whisper: a tweet or a short first post, and then ratcheted up in visibility incrementally over time. They didn’t start with a press release or a launch party but instead with a vision and maybe a reckless desire to just go for it, go out on a limb even when resources were scarce. Trying, risking and doing just a little bit at a time until one day you wake up and have an extraordinary community of people all around you, amplifying and shaping and supporting your efforts.

In 2010, I was lucky to have been able to achieve some really cool things on micro budgets. Working with the Museum of Modern Art and the Film Society of Lincoln Center, I built the first co-branded web destination for the New Directors/New Films festival, which led to the best ever online sales for the event.

I built on that success with an even more complex website for the New York Film Festival, which, true to our opening night film, The Social Network, offered users sophisticated social integration with Twitter and Facebook, as well as robust content discovery tools that stimulated almost a million pageviews during the festival site’s first month of existence.

In 2010, I watched two grass-roots online communities that I organized surpass 11,000 and 30,000 fans respectively, all without the benefit of great budgets or traditional marketing.

In 2011, I want to help more individuals and organizations use the web to build community and affinity. I want to help do everything I can to demystify the process of creating and growing online visibility, and foster the kind of DIY, bootstrap philosophy that has helped me accomplish huge efforts and initiatives that shouldn’t be possible with limited resources.

So this isn’t a start, really. I’ve already started.

But sometimes it’s helpful to declare one’s intentions. Set a premise for the whole thing. In this case the idea is simple:  I’m here to help those who have been told: you can’t, that’s crazy, why even try, and then they go ahead and do it anyway.

It’s also important to offer thanks to all the numerous friends and colleagues who have offered great advice as I begin this journey. To Karen Weeks, who is responsible for the Jellybean Boom visual identity. To Tamar Arslanian, who eagerly signed up to be an early client. To all of you guys, I am extremely grateful.

Jellybean Boom already has a number of ambitious plans and projects going on, from the web redesign of I Have Cat to social media consulting projects to working on new WordPress themes that will make it even easier for non-technical people to make cool websites. We may not stop until everyone we know has a kick-ass web presence.

In the meantime, you can stop by the Small Blog for lots of resources especially meant for the little guy and gal: articles on emerging tech trends, ideas that are easy and cheap to implement, cool books for the entrepreneurial-minded, and lots and lots of pictures of our mascot dog, Juniper.

If this all sounds promising, I hope you’ll keep in touch. You can subscribe via RSS, email, or by throwing us the thumbs-up on Facebook. You can also catch me on Twitter.

See you in the new year!

xoxo,

Amanda