Year three anniversary of this blog?!

I completely forgot about this when I was making the thumbnail (I'm so bad with these things) but then it dawned on me that technically by the numbers this is the 3rd anniversary of the blog which started over on Artstation and now became Beyond Extent as we know it, which is freaking mindblowing to me.

I'll just take this moment to first off all thank everyone for being a part of my personal and Beyond Extent's journey and the future of it, I could have never imagined it grew to this, but I'm super excited about what the future has in store and how this all came to be, so from the bottom of my heart, thank you so much!

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Let's take a dive into some chunk of history!

We're not going to do a full deep dive into all the phases, but I thought this might be a good opportunity to dive into some of my personal highlights that really stuck with me over the years.

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Starting this blog thing!

Allright, So let's see where it started and go all the way back to the beginning.

This is when I was thinking about starting a blog as a way to give back to the community but also just a nice way to grow my professional platform a bit too and just get my name out there for if I wanted to make an income with my art at that point.
But it turned out to be a really fun way off just letting off steam and talking about my week while offering some insights.

So even if it started out small, I didn't care about the amount of people that would read it, it was sort of like a public dairy with some resources attached to it.

Leaving Frontier and being stressed about the jobhunt

This was a really stressfull period, I knew that this was coming a month earlier because we hadded both planned to, but still that month flew by and it was a really big decision to leave my job, which was the first industry job without having another job to fill that gap. The timing just lined up, we we're getting kicked out of our apartment, I was feeling a little big stagnated in personal growth and we wanted to travel too. It came out great int he end tho, but this was a really iteresting period!

Starting my own Patreon

It always feels weird when as an artist you start betting on yourself and look for other ways to monitize what you do, but to this day everytime when I dabbled in new way to experiment with it I have never regretted it once, so don't let that stop you and keep building on it!

Moving pains

Launching Beyond Extent, no matter how great it was and how excited I was, was a really painful moment when it came to the content of the blogposts, there was no reliable way to export content from one platform to another in an automated way (which is how I started looking into automation in the first place) so the best that I could do was copy pasting the blogs in a massive CSV sheet that I could then import into Webflow to setup the blog collection system.

This meant that there we're issues in the formatting, so I had to go through them one by one, correct paragraphs that stopped at the wrong moment, spaces that we're misplaced etc...
Omg, thinking back at it there must have been a way better way to do that, because is hurt, an I think it actually showed in the blogpost too.

Beyond Extent Launch an leaving Artstation Blogs Behind

Even though I've been thinking about it for a long time now at this point it still feel weird to leave a platform behind where everyone know you can can connect with you directly to make your own thing. It's always a big risk and I've spend so much time awake thinking about "Will people even be interested in Beyond Extent?", "What will I do if people don't care?", "Will all this time be wasted if so?" plus all the other questions I had about SEO, how to make a proper website (still a work in progress to be honest ;P) and all the financial stuff that comes with that too, but I'm happy that I'm still here! :D

There so much more to dive into here

Like I've mentioned before, I just wanted some highlights from all the years I've been doing this.
So to round off here are some of the lessons that I've learned while doing all this are:

- Don't be afraid to do something new, keep watering that little seed and give it all your love and attention.

- Don't be intimidated by invisible internet people, people are awesome

- Focus on Value, what do people want from you? This was really helpful as a guide to next steps or what to write as a weekly tip

- Connect with people, message them about their art, tell them that you are a fan. And don't expect a response

- Share your insights, no matter how new you are you have something to offer

So again, thank you all for being here, and I hope to be talking with you all soon.

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