The year 2020 is over and a new year begins.
It has been a wild ride for sure, who could have predicted that we would experience a pandemic in our day and age. Despite the rough times that we faced last year, creativity bloomed and continued to prosper. With the majority of us working from home or quarantined, we were online more than ever. More and more people were forced to utilize online chat services such as Discord.
We think now more than ever — with practically every student now having experienced online learning because of the pandemic — that The Spot has a place within what already exists for online education.
This year, we continued to grow together. Read on for a look back at the fantastic year we had in The Spot community. We are so thankful for all the support you have given us and we are so ecstatic to give you a sneak peak of what is to come.
2020 was a kickoff into The Spot’s 2nd year anniversary. Early in the year we celebrated the marriage of The Spot and the official r/design Discord server. This brought an influx of members, opportunities, and became a great source for more inspiration for our community.
The Spot also came together to deliver educational content made for you. We started the On the Spot podcast in March, where we interviewed professional creatives in the industry to share insights into their careers and to offer advice to those in the path of learning. Not only this, The Spot featured hundreds of community creations on our weekly Spotlight, which were also shared on our social media pages for more people to see and appreciate. We flexed our writing game by uploading written articles to our Medium page, written by The Spot and by our community members.
The growth of our community in 2020 was exponential and we continue to gain numbers to this day. At the start of 2020, The Spot had around 2,000 members (After the merge with r/design). In just one year, we gained over 2,000 new members! Users had sent around 110,000 messages at the start of 2020 and there have been more than 1,000,000 messages sent on the server to this day!
May was a great month: we released a Kickstarter campaign to develop The Spot’s platform, which will provide a place to help individuals embark further in their creative journeys by offering challenges, tutorials, and curated resources. The goal was $3,000 and in the first 24 hours alone, 50% of the goal was reached! In the end, together we raised a total of $3,217! To all who contributed, THANK YOU! We cannot wait to show you the finished product.
Now, what is next for The Spot?
We are happy you asked! First and foremost, our developer and staff are hard at work in completing The Spot Design website. The website will be released on March 1st, 2021! For certain tier Kickstarter supporters, physical rewards will be shipped out soon so keep an eye out for important announcements! We are also working hard to perfect The Spot+ membership for members to get the most out of it. The Spot merch store will also be developed after the release of the website.
The Spot will continue to provide you with awesome content with even more podcast episodes, Twitch streams, continuing to post our weekly Spotlights, and providing you with fun new creative competitions and challenges. We also want to host more community events such as movie nights or Jackbox game nights to strengthen the bond of our community.
In conclusion, we would like to extend a big thank you to our community members and supporters for sticking with us through and through! We are so excited to see what 2021 holds for The Spot Community. Happy New Year! If you are not a member of The Spot yet, what are you waiting for? Check us out on our website and join our discord server!