There’s more than ample documentation.

https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLpN3EyTtjDMtQt5rAWn3TcRee5ss65bfV

Ah so you don’t want to actually run this business then. You want to own and manage it.

Please be warned that you’re not dealing with grandmas here. You’re courting a very online community—one that values independent makers, local businesses, justice causes, ethical practices, and skill. I would recommend a pause for some serious research—I can’t overstate that the responses you’ve gotten here, on Reddit, and Twitter barely scratch the surface.

I would personally like to see patterns with embedded video tutorials! When I write patterns I often include links to videos I make, but I’d love to be able to insert the videos. Maybe even do a mouse-over for less-known abbreviations that would remind someone the definition when reading the pattern?

Asking for the knitting community to give you free feedback for your business probably won’t help your credibility.

If you want to make those relationships better, actually pay designers fairly. Almost nobody does. If you have $80k for a domain name, you should be able to properly compensate designers :-) And if you actually *do* pay designers well, you might actually get knitters on your side.

As for what’s fair, here’s a good thread to get you started: https://twitter.com/HunterHammersen/status/1374359916304027648

Hi Elsa – I share some of your feelings when it comes to crowdsourcing. In ecommerce, crowdsourcing is a big thing, and I’ve never loved the idea of a bunch of people competing for a ‘lowest cost wins’ mentality (and along the way, work sometimes being taken without ever being compensated for).
You’re right about their being tons of great content already available. Finding a way to make our content different and hopefully more instructive to a new knitter (like myself!) is the only chance we’ll have for success.

Hey Judy – clearly! I checked out your blog. Fascinating story. Showing my naivety again, I never knew knitting specifically for actresses/actors on film sets was a thing.

You have expressed your intention to make serious money with this venture, therefore, any feedback you receive on your content (once you manage to figure out what that will be) should be compensated. This smacks of crowdsourcing something which you hope to use to make money, and just …. no. That’s exploitative and gross.

You should also consider whether or not, as a person new to the fiber arts, you are in a position to really understand what the market is lacking or will bear. For heavens sake, there are a plethora of knitting how-tos already available on YouTube and various websites. Did you bother to do any in-depth market research at all?

Thanks Nancy for your response! Before we even started this project, we sat down for a couple of days with some people from the industry and they expressed to us how there is quite a bit of distrust in this space between people like ‘us’ and the pattern makers. It’s something we want to be as cognizant of as possible, specifically in terms of compensating fairly and not ripping off anyone’s designs. I’m not sure if you’re a designer yourself, but if there’s anything specific we can do that would make that relationship better, I’d love to hear.