So, how do you find your team?

You don’t.

Think about it. If you have an idea, a world-shatteringly brilliant notion of how to recast the shape of your writing for a digital platform, then that idea has been gestating inside your head for the best part of a year or more. Probably more. You’ve lived with it like a second skin, a portion of your brain that keeps knocking on the door of the rest of your life demanding to be heard. It’s yours, and for now, you’re the best person to figure out what happens next.

Don’t ask for help.

Show people how they can help.

This is where a writer’s key talents—communication, brevity, creativity, shaping things, doing not telling—come into play.

The best way (caveat: this is not the best way, but we’re being provocative, and want to offer something more useful to you than the usual advice about gathering a trusted and talented team around you, which is just so bloody obvious that it should be struck from every guide to digital in print) to find your creative partners is to get them to come to you.

Show them how they can help.

Make work. Make it badly, and make it well. Make it with the few tools you know how to use, and make it with the tools you’re just learning to use. Make paper versions, and figure out what it is you’re trying to do. Use photography and a pen and a cheap printer. If you can’t afford a cheap printer, use your local library (in fact, use your local library regardless: they’re important and they’re warm) and print there. Learn incrementally, and learn in public. Get better and figure out what it is that you want to make.

As Austin Kleon would tell you: Show Your Work.

Then talk about it. Make the conversation as public as you can. Online, at conferences, at meetups, anywhere you like. If you’re open to collaboration and the work is interesting, then have a little faith in humanity and see what happens. You aren’t alone, and a well honed idea has a better chance of seeing the world, and being seen, than your first draft, your first sketch on the back of an envelope. You’ve then got a refined idea, and if you’ve been at all diligent about the ‘learning’ aspect of our advice, you’ve got a few verbs, a bit of the basic grammar and a smattering of the sentence construction required to talk to the people who do know how to do the things you don’t.

Then, and only then, do you ask for help.