Slack × Life admin: an experiment

Update 2024-09-25: the experiment worked, in that it made me realise that I will not be using Slack. The invitation has been disabled. Watch the blog for more updates but, spoiler: it'll be Discord.

There's been some great discussion in the life admin support thread on the forum.

In thinking about the next Quick Start pack, which will be 'Small business'¹, I'm interested in the idea of providing really specific support at the ID level.

I want to start this experiment with the life admin pack.

The goal

An example will help. Let's say we end up with
13 Finance > 13.11 Quarterly accounting.

The pack will give you a place to put that: but what if it was also your operations manual, so that you not only knew where to store your accounts, but how to do them.

Why does every small business have to figure this out for themselves? Surely we can be more efficient than that.

I can't create a small business operations manual by myself. But together, we can.

One channel per ID

The idea is that we'll use Slack, and each ID in the pack will have its own channel.

Then you can ask for help in that channel and get really specific advice. Perhaps someone is an accountant; or maybe they live in your state and understand your question about tax law. Or maybe they just did it themselves last month and have experience to share.

I'll extract this knowledge and make it a permanent part of the system.

Why Slack?

I'm wary of adding another comms channel to this system. It's something else to manage.

But my existing options aren't suitable. I want this to be the sort of place you can jump in and 'chat', so that rules out the forum. Discord could possibly work -- but I get the feeling that small business owners would rather not spend their day on a platform built for gamers.

So I'm going to try Slack. Like the title says: this is an experiment. Feedback is welcome.

Free now; not always

To seed this, invitations are currently open. When we create the small business pack later this year this will become a perk that is only available to those who buy it.

Because, to reinforce the point: this is place to get targeted advice on a specific Quick Start issue. So if you're not using the pack, it's not going to be useful.

Life admin

This all applies to the life admin pack, so let's try it out. Here's how it works.

1. You need advice about a specific ID in the pack. Say 13.21 Budgets & planning.
2. If that channel doesn't already exist, create it. All members have permission to do this.
3. Post your question.
4. Happiness.

Get access

Here's the link. See you there.