Hello there!  Hmm…trying to decide how to start this post.  Lol

 

I’m feeling very happy 🙂 and sometimes I feel like I’m always starting posts by rolling my eyes or saying something to the effect of “how many times do I have to say this?”, but today I feel contented and like everything is going in a good direction.  Did I mention that we’ve had lots of great emails and conversations with you guys lately?  That may be a super-large contributing factor! 😉  Also my birthday is on Sunday (Golden birthday!  26 on the 26th!) and everyone was super sweet when I updated my profile picture on Facebook.  It’s been a good week. 😀

 

And so this post isn’t about telling you guys you’re doing something wrong or about trying to ask you to do more; it’s about saying “Thank You” for the things you’ve already done and asking you for feedback so that we can give you more content, get more of your questions answered and help you further on your way to being the most *you* version of you ever!  Basically, we want to get feedback from you on how to give you more of everything that drew you to aLBoP in the first place. 😉

And so I will ask you to *comment*!!!  Please tell us in the comments (or in an email if you’re not comfortable commenting… or have too much to say 😉  These are both common reasons for our full inbox! :D) how we can improve, especially in the areas I’m going to ask about in this post!  Just like how we’re constantly refining our understanding of cognition, like I talked about in the last post, we’re constantly refining how we convey all that information to you and our systems for communicating with you.  Finding new ways to do things just makes everything easier!  And while we might not implement every suggestion, or implement it right away anyway, due to time constraints, etc., we do want to hear all your thoughts and feedback and it may lead us to find new solutions we never would have thought of without you guys!

 

Here are some things I specifically want feedback about:

 

Site Organization

 

Heh, there are a lot of words on aLBoP. 😉  This is due to a combination of *so* much complex information to communicate… and a weirdo content author who types like she thinks.  Justin, my INFJ, often has to comb through my posts and fix really strange sentence structure where I’ll be trying to fit 18 thoughts into one super run-on sentence.  Long story short, (proving my point), it’s sometimes hard to find the content you’re looking for on aLBoP.  In blatant honesty, I don’t know what to do about this and it’s one of my least favorite aspects of working on aLBoP.

 

Between Justin and me, we are aLBoP’s two-man-band.  We’re the Research and Development team, the most behind-the-scenes, unseen job of figuring out, hypothesizing and experimenting on cognition… and researching faces until my brain literally hurts and everyone’s face looks like a squidgy incomprehensible mess.  We serve as content development and communications directors, keeping track of if we’re staying on-message and how to best get that message across.  We’re writers, perhaps the most obvious part of the process, which can make it nerve-racking, but is also one of my favorite parts (except also being editing and grammar… I make Justin do that!).  We’re the advertising department, in charge of all social media outlets and trying to hook people into coming to aLBoP in the first place.  Not one of my favorite jobs :P.  We’re customer service, in charge of handling and responding to all emails, comments, etc. left on all said social media outlets.  That often turns into serving as life coaches or counselors, which is one of our favorite jobs, but means that an email takes *so* much more thought and effort than if we were just running an entertainment, fashion or DIY site.  (Which is one reason we’ve recently put a stand-alone chat option in the aLBoP Shop 🙂  Real-time chats are *so* much faster and more communicative than email!!  Especially when it comes to applying these things to your individual lives.)  And then there’s other roles like film crew, film “talent” (lol!), hair, makeup and costuming (important to me!), film editing (tediousity :P), graphic design/art (one of my favorite things!  Even if the stick figures take a lot longer than they look ;)), CEOs, store managers, and of course People-Who-Type-You-When-You-Order-a-Personalized-Typing (I was trying to think of a title for that job and I couldn’t lol).  It is soooo awesome that with the internet, suddenly these roles that used to require a big team of a ton of people can theoretically be done now by a two-member team wearing pajama pants at side-by-side computers!  But… time is still a factor and often my highly tedious jobs of webmaster and tech support fall to the wayside.

 

I enjoy setting up systems, like the “Browse by” pages, but when maintaining them is a drag and I fall behind, they’ve grown a little unkempt.  Feedback on how *you* browse the site and how to make it easier for you would be quite welcome, because I’ve grown a little unhealthily apathetic about how easy it is to find things on aLBoP, which I know probably shows. 😛

 

Patreon

If you’re not familiar with Patreon, it’s a fantastic crowdfunding website similar in concept to Kickstarter, but for ongoing instead of one-time projects.  Crowdfunding is an awesome thing, again made possible by the internet, of having lots of people contribute smaller amounts of money to fund a project they care about, rather than having to have a single venture capitalist, grant, producer or employer front the cost themselves.  In other words, spreading the cost of an idea, invention, production, etc. across many people in little chunks instead of needing a large upfront sum.  This has enabled so many cool projects to be accomplished that would never have gotten going without the internet!!  And the consumer can get the product they want instead of waiting for a big company, foundation, etc. to give it to them!  Cool, no?

 

And in return, the contributing consumers get rewards for backing the project, both on a personal and group scale.  The more a backer contributes to a project, the bigger rewards they receive, and the more backing a project has overall, the more rewards the group as a whole receives—such as a better version of a product, more features or more content, etc.

 

Patreon specifically is for ongoing projects that don’t have an end date, for people like YouTubers, musicians, bloggers, web comic artists, etc. who are continually putting out new content that their audience is going to continually enjoy and want more of, rather than a product that once finished is finished, and doesn’t need more upfront capital (which is more what Kickstarter funds).  “Patrons” of a project can decide how much they want to contribute on a monthly basis (which, as I understand it, is usually set up to be automatic, but can be canceled at any time) for different tiers of personal rewards, while knowing they’re also contributing to the bigger picture of the project and receiving more, better content for their efforts! 😀

 

Anyhue, it’s the perfect way to help you guys get the content that you want, faster!  It has the benefit of both personal rewards, similar to how our current Support aLBoP system gives, and group rewards like *POSTS!!!* lol  But tell me what you guys want for rewards!  I need your input!

 

Even if you can’t be an aLBoP Patron at the moment (and we totally understand if you can’t!  Though remember, even $1 makes a big difference to us!  And contributes to the group goals), I want your ideas and input anyway!  Maybe you’ll be in a position to back aLBoP down the road, or maybe your ideas will get other people to want to contribute which will get you posts faster too! 😉  Crowdfunding is a win-win.

 

Here are some of the group rewards we were thinking so far:

 

A Monthly Patreon Thank You Video

Yes, I know we only did one thank you video.  Yes, I know I promised them in February.  Yes, I know lots of you supported aLBoP a *year* ago and we still haven’t made them.  Yes, I feel like I deserve to have rocks thrown at my head. :C  I may *always* be behind on things—it’s the hard combination of learning how to handle specific action when it doesn’t come naturally for me… and working with the fact that we’re a two-person company trying to do a much larger job—but I *never* stop appreciating you guys and the wonderful feedback and support you give to us!  I may not be prompt, but I *will* show you guys I care and appreciate what you’ve done!!

 

Ahem.  Anyway, this will be a fun, little video of us doing something silly, that anyone supporting our Patreon campaign can help vote on, even if you’re just contributing $1 a month!  This will probably be the lowest reward tier that we’ll do pretty much if anyone supports us on Patreon at all. 🙂

 

Guaranteed Big Posts Every Month

*Guaranteed* big posts every month, like thorough letter comparisons (“How do Judgers and Perceivers Use Action Differently, but Equally?”), Type Heroes (and the crowd goes wild), the “Super Simple” Series (straightforward explanations anyone can use, with no previous psychological background or reading, that should make everything make more sense), and before too long, Facial Typing Posts (don’t even get me started on how excited we are for you guys to be able to use this system for yourselves!!)!

 

Character Spotlights!

Giving our insights on how certain characters tick and our typing process.  You guys have already requested so many great characters to type, or our reasons behind typing the ones we’ve already typed, and it’ll be fun to talk about how characters apply to real life and real people’s cognition.  Also, it’s crossover heaven!

 

Q&A Quickies

You guys ask amazing questions!!  So. Many. Of. Them.  Lol  No guilt tripping, seriously, I’m so glad you guys ask us questions and give us feedback because that’s how we learn to communicate these principles more effectively!  But I also feel the tremendous weight of over 18 months of backlogged questions riding on me.  This will hopefully give us the chance to remedy that problem.  Regular Q&A videos will give us the opportunity to answer questions for the whole class so you guys can get answers once and for all!  (We’re also *unbelievably* excited for the forum on Phase 2, where you guys can get together and answer each other’s questions too!)

 

aLBoP Meet-Up Trips

As a stretch-goal, one that we’ll let build up over months, we hope to come and visit you guys in your natural habitats!  We want to make special trips (starting domestically of course, international flights are pricy ;)) to come meet up with you guys, spend time with you, help you in person, hold aLBoP workshops, and just get to be closer friends!  Honestly, we’ve had an absurdly large amount of aLBoP excitement from the Pacific Northwest (Washington and Oregon) so that would probably be our first destination, but since we live in North Georgia and would be traveling by car, there are plenty of places we could hit along the way if you’d like us to swing by and grab lunch and a selfie together (I think that is the first time I have *ever* typed the word selfie…).

 

As for personal rewards, I would extra love to get your input there, because I’m not sure what you guys would especially want.  I want to give you rewards that you’ll be excited to receive monthly, not just one-time.  That’s been an odd thing with the current Support aLBoP system, the rewards if you donate more than once aren’t especially “stackable.”  I don’t want to give you a bazillion of the same type’s wallpapers, for example. 😉  I also need to make the rewards reasonable to deliver to you without getting in the way of writing posts, etc., while still being exciting enough for you guys! 🙂

 

Digital things are pretty easy (*really* easy if I can give the same thing to many people).  I’ve considered rewards like a new aLBoP desktop wallpaper each month (with stick figures, etc.) or backer requested stick figures of your favorite characters, such as stick-Avengers, stick-Star-Wars or stick-Fellowship-of-the-Ring.  But I don’t know how much that kind of thing means to you guys or what you might like better… so let me know!!

 

I’m hoping to have our Patreon page up and running by early August so that it can fund September’s posts!  😀  Oh, and if you’ve donated to aLBoP in the last few months and I haven’t given you your rewards yet (my bad), I’ll add the amount you gave to our August group total, and you can have the new version of the personal rewards if you want!  (If I haven’t given you everything from a long time ago, you can still have the new personal rewards instead if you want, but I may not be able to count your contribution toward the group total.  You guys understand.)  That way you don’t need to feel like if you had just waited a little while to donate, it could have gone toward posts, etc.  We really appreciate those of you who gave earlier!!!

 

And now that we’ve better streamlined our Personalized Typing system with the COGs, and as we’ve been talking to so many more of you lately, especially in live chats (which, remember, have a stand-alone option now!  Ooooo), we are getting *soooo* excited to release aLBoP Phase 2 and the Forum!!!  If you don’t know what I’m talking about, I announced it here.  We have so much more to share with you on Phase 2, ways to help you more fully implement what we give you here on Phase 1.  And the forum…!  The massive percentage of you who email and chat with us, and are so awesome and have so much to contribute to the world… but feel alone.  We hope for the aLBoP Forum to be a way for you to meet together digitally, share your ideas on anything—aLBoP related or not—and just hang out and get to know each other.  It’s like when you have two friends from totally different parts of your life, that both mean so much to you, and you want to introduce them so they can be friends with each other too!  That’s how we feel about all of you!!  And all our recent conversations with you guys have made us want to get there even faster! 😀

 

Aaand… I think that’s all I specifically wanted to bring up at the moment… Oh, wait!!  We’ve added two new pages to the beginning of the COGs in order to dispel the immediate myths and misconceptions that come to mind when you hear about each type, so check those out!  Also we now have a deal on Personalized Typings, that if you buy 3 at a time, you now get an additional Personalized Typing, free!  We wanted to make that bundle option available so it gives you a discount if you want to type a whole bunch of friends, family, etc.!  (We had requests 😉  Don’t feel bad if you don’t want to type everyone you know right away!)  It applies to any price tier, though we only have one each of the $5 and $7 “Love Me Anyway” versions at a time until they get fulfilled and then we replenish them, just FYI.  But you could get like one $25 chat option and two $15 base price and then use the chat to talk to us about all four typings, for example.  You just have to email us pics of each of the four people you want typed, from multiple angles, blah blah blah.  I hope that makes sense. 😉  The discount will apply automatically in your cart… supposedly–this is our first promo so let us know if it doesn’t work for some reason!

lol I think I’m done now!  So go, my pretties!!  Fly to the comments and write your thoughts and feedback!  Nicely though, please.  It is almost my birthday. 😉