Hey everyone, figured this was the right place to have this conversation directly with you all rather than just posting stuff and hoping it lands.
I’ve been doing some thinking over the last few months, and honestly I took a step back from creating almost entirely for a while. Not because I was burned out exactly, but because I wasn’t having fun. And if I’m not having fun making it, you’re probably not having fun watching or reading it either. That’s just the truth.
The alternative platform and content creator space was something I genuinely cared about for a long time. But it’s moved on. A lot of the platforms I covered are either dead or on life support, and the big education voices in that space have moved on too. I stuck around longer than I probably should have, kept paying for tools and subscriptions I barely needed anymore, and kept making content that wasn’t sparking anything for me. At some point you just have to be honest with yourself.
So I made a clean break. Cancelled a lot of subscriptions, moved the old content into an archive playlist, and gave myself some breathing room to figure out what’s next.
What’s next is this: making stuff with my hands.
Woodworking has always been something I’ve done on the side. The Murphy bed, the cabinet with the drawers, the shelving unit you can see in some of my videos, I built all of that myself. And building it was genuinely fun in a way that recording a tutorial about a dying platform wasn’t. That gap in enjoyment got too wide to ignore.
I’m setting up the garage as a proper workshop, there are already a couple of projects queued up, and I’ve got a podcast in the works with a solid backlog of episode ideas ready to go. The whole vibe I’m going for is laid back, project focused, no pressure. Not a tool review channel, not a “watch me be an expert” channel. Just showing the work and talking through it honestly.
I wrote up a longer version of all this, including some of the specific projects coming up and what the channel direction looks like going forward. You can read that here: https://themakerdad.com/creating-the-maker-dad-channel-a-new-direction/
But I wanted to post here too because this community matters to me and I didn’t want it to just be a one-way announcement. If you’ve got thoughts, questions, or you’ve been through a similar pivot yourself, drop them below. I’m curious what you all think.
Let’s build something.
Josh