Newsletter #03: Feeling grateful
Welcome to the third monthly-ish newsletter from Practice, a startup helping people make joy from their creative hobbies.
Fitting for this time of year, we’re feeling very grateful for all of the people who support Practice (including you!) and are excited about the momentum and progress we’re making.
What’s New
We are unbelievably excited to share that Dr. Anne Kirketerp, the psychologist, talented craftsperson, teacher, lecturer, and author of the book Craft Psychology: How Crafting Promotes Health is now an official advisor to Practice!
She is the originator of Craft Psychology and the preeminent expert on the “scientific evidence for the life-affirming, health-promoting and protective effects of craft,” so as you can imagine, it’s a perfect match. We look forward to continuing to learn from her in her role as an expert advisor to Practice. And together we can help spread the word that creative making and crafts are self-care!
We are also so excited to share that we have raised a small but mighty Friends and Family round! These funds will allow us to cover operating expenses (mostly SaaS products ) as we continue to otherwise bootstrap this business.
We are so grateful to the folks who participated. If you’re interested in learning more about investment opportunities, send us a note!
And one more exciting update! A second engineer, Matt, has started sipping the Practice Kool-Aid and is helping us out. This means that we have started building Hobby Match in parallel with activity tracking. And now our Slack has 4 official members!
Sometimes you have to slow down to speed up. We paused on client-side development for our activity tracking app to build out APIs and the backend to support Hobby Match. So we won’t be ready to launch our MVP until later in the month, but due to the holidays, our updated MVP target is January-ish.
Considering the fact that we are all working on Practice as a side project (dare I say: hobby?), it’s pretty miraculous that we’ve made so much progress, but we’re all itching to get our MVP out there. We can’t wait to go live!
Related Reading
Some highlights from our weekly-ish blog, Practicing
Here are a few posts you may have missed:
Meet an expert: Sara Davis, LCSW-C - Learn how a clinical social worker uses crafts to help treat trauma
Defining a "Practice Hobby" - the criteria we established to determine what is—and isn’t—a Practice hobby
The SaaS Ouroboros - a laugh/cry about the infinite loop of startup software
Erica really likes the weekly ritual (practice?) of writing these posts. Subscribe on Substack to reinforce her.
See Erica’s minis in PRINT
This is an odd cross-post/shameless plug for this newsletter, but Erica has an editorial and DIY feature in the latest issue of Shrunk. Magazine. See page 7 for a shoutout to Practice. Check out her signature red nail polish celebrating New Year’s Eve at home, and get step-by-step instructions on how to assemble a mini modern bookshelf. Erica’s also co-hosting a mini holiday party celebration with Shrunk. on Instagram later this month.
Survey says: creating arts and crafting “is associated with significantly higher life satisfaction, happiness, and a sense that life is worthwhile”
We recently came across this research paper, published in August 2024, that explores “whether engagement with Creating Arts and Crafting (CAC) predicted subjective wellbeing and loneliness, above and beyond known sociodemographic predictors.” It’s based on an n=7,182 (!) survey out of the UK. And believe it or not, the results show that folks who engage in creating arts and crafting making see tons of positive benefits that exceed sociodemographic predictors.
The paper’s authors concluded that creative making is “a useful tool at a public health level, noting that relative accessibility and affordability creating arts and crafting.” Agreed!
