I have rebuilt the front door so many times that my friends and family have basically stopped making eye contact when I walk toward them.
And yes, I mean the metaphorical front door of the business.
Although, hilariously, I have actually owned and built two construction companies with my husband, who is a carpenter. We did finish carpentry and accessibility built-ins.
So if anyone was ever going to get emotionally invested in a front door, apparently it was me.
For Blackburn Studios, I kept trying to figure out what that front door was supposed to look like.
What happens when someone raises their hand?
Who welcomes them?
What do they get?
Where do they go?
What happens next?
What does onboarding look like?
I rebuilt it.
Then rebuilt it again.
Then changed the language.
Then changed the flow.
Then probably sent one of my poor friends another screenshot and asked, “Okay, but what about THIS version?”
Eventually I realized I was asking the wrong question.
Because before you can figure out how to welcome someone in, you have to answer something much bigger:
What exactly are you welcoming them into?
That question changed everything.
You Can't Build the Front Door First
A lot of businesses start with the funnel.
Get the lead.
Capture the email.
Book the call.
Send the onboarding form.
Put them in the community.
Congratulations. They have entered...
...something.
Hopefully.
But I didn't want to build a prettier funnel into the same old thing.
I wanted to know what was actually waiting for people once they walked through the door.
What did we believe?
How did we work together?
How did people grow?
How did money move?
How did someone know what to do next?
What made being here meaningfully different from joining another program, agency, group, or online community?
So apparently, in order to build the front door, I had to build everything leading up to the front door.
Which is extremely on-brand for me.
We're Welcoming People Into a Place Where We Play Business Differently
That's the answer.
And suddenly, the pieces make sense.
Blackburn HQ is building Money Octopus™ around a pretty simple idea:
Business can work differently.
It doesn't have to mean collecting twelve disconnected side hustles that somehow consume more time than the job you were trying to escape.
It doesn't have to mean constantly buying more equipment, software, courses, inventory, and infrastructure before you've made a dollar.
It doesn't have to mean everybody competing against everybody else.
And it definitely doesn't have to mean doing everything the hardest possible way simply because that's how somebody told us business is supposed to look.
We're building something different.
We play.
We experiment.
We use the tools that already exist.
We build income streams that connect to each other instead of creating twelve tiny jobs for ourselves.
We share what works.
We help the people beside us get better.
And when somebody discovers a smarter move, the whole team gets smarter.
That's what we're welcoming people into.
Multiplayer Mode Means Something
That realization also helped me understand Blackburn Studios better.
I've been calling Studios Multiplayer Mode.
At first, that was mostly because it fit the Money Octopus game language.
But it's actually much bigger than branding.
Multiplayer Mode describes how I believe business should work.
The internet taught us to treat everybody doing something similar to us as competition.
Protect your strategy.
Protect your audience.
Protect your information.
Protect your little corner of the internet.
Meanwhile, we're all standing around trying to figure out the exact same buttons.
That seems... inefficient.
What if we played like we're on the same team instead?
Your points still matter.
Your business still matters.
Your income still matters.
Your individuality absolutely matters.
But somebody else winning doesn't subtract points from your scoreboard.
We can build individual businesses while creating a stronger ecosystem together.
That's Multiplayer Mode.
And that is a place worth having a front door for.
The Front Door Is a Promise
That's the part I was missing.
Onboarding isn't administration.
It's not paperwork.
It's not, “Here's the link, good luck.”
The front door is the first promise you make to someone about what being inside your world will feel like.
It tells them:
You're in the right place.
Here's how this works.
Here's where you start.
Here's who can help you.
Here are the moves available to you.
And maybe most importantly:
You don't have to figure all of this out alone.
Once I understood that, I could finally see the front door.
Not because we had perfected an onboarding workflow.
Because we had finally built enough of the world behind it to know what we were inviting people into.
Build the Place First
There are probably a thousand business books telling you to build the funnel first.
I did not do that.
Naturally.
I built the weird little universe first.
The rules.
The language.
The products.
The systems.
The pathways.
The team.
The campfires.
The Money Octopus.
The whole ridiculous thing.
And now the front door finally makes sense.
Maybe that's backwards.
Or maybe when you're building something people actually want to belong to, you have to build the place before you worry too much about the entrance.
Because eventually someone is going to knock.
And when they do, you should know exactly what you're opening the door to.
Around here?
It's a place where we play business differently.
Come play.