I woke up super early for some reason one day last week.
I decided to see what Squarespace was all about and spin up a website for a little project a few friends and I have joked about.
It’s called Brutally Honest Coach.
The idea is that any kind of life or career guidance or advice is usually given in the context of a friendship, family, colleague, or customer relationship. This can be just the thing, since those people have some reasons to care about you and give you advice in line with your long term well-being. This can also be just the thing to keep you blinded by your own bullshit, because nobody who knows you personally wants to be the one to give you uncomfortable feedback, and you may not want to ask uncomfortable questions.
It’s the reason confessionals are done behind a veil. Anonymity or pseudonymity can be powerful forces, like wearing masks, that allow us to access truths and see things too hard to see or hear as our normal selves.
So anyway, I thought it would be fun to see if I could get the site up. Amazingly, it took me under and hour to set it up.
I even got a cadre of experienced advisors and coaches to agree to respond to queries from a shared inbox under the BHC moniker. So no, it’s not me. (At least not just me.;-)
It’s kind of a fun experiment. I may or may not keep it live, but I’ve wondered if there’s a demand for this kind of thing. I actually envisioned a more open forum type experience, like an anonymous Quora, where everyone could see answers and questions but no real names were involved, but I didn’t want to spend the time to mess with that. Plus quality control sounds like a lot of work.
The number of little ideas like this floating in my brain is too great to spend real time on any of them while I’m building a company, but I think it’s been important for me to not shut down this kind of stuff entirely. It’s the non-techie equivalent of doing open source stuff on the side.