Why I built Worksparks, and why it’s on Indiegogo right now.
There’s a moment that happens at work that no training program has ever really covered.
You’re standing outside a room. In ninety seconds you have to tell someone something they don’t want to hear. Or disagree with a client who is paying you. Or respond to a person who has just started crying in front of you, and every option you can think of feels wrong.
Nobody is opening a learning platform in that moment. Nobody is remembering module four. You are deciding what to do next, alone, in about a minute — and whatever you do becomes the thing that person remembers about working for you.
That moment is where leadership actually happens. And it’s the one moment the entire development industry, including mine, has been structurally unable to reach.
The arithmetic
I’ve spent eighteen years building leadership programs. They work. People leave those rooms changed.
But a facilitator can only be in one room at a time, and coaching has a price per hour that doesn’t bend. So the same arithmetic plays out in every organisation I’ve worked with: the development budget goes to people who are already senior, already identified, already doing fine. The two-day program. The 360. The external coach on a Thursday.
Meanwhile the team leader promoted six weeks ago — the one now managing people she used to have coffee with — gets nothing, and is making decisions with more impact on culture and retention than anyone on the executive.
That’s not a talent problem. It’s an access problem, and it’s one of budget arithmetic rather than intent. You cannot buy traditional coaching for four hundred frontline leaders. Nobody can.
I got tired of the answer being “that’s just how it is.”
What we built
Worksparks opens with one question: what’s going on right now?
That’s the whole interface. No dashboard. No modules. No framework to learn before it becomes useful. Someone describes a real situation in plain language — sixty seconds of talking, or typing if they’d rather — and gets coaching that’s specific to what they just described.
Before the conversation they’re dreading. After the day that went badly. In the ninety seconds outside the room.
It isn’t a replacement for the deep work. That still needs a room and a facilitator. It’s what happens in the eleven months in between.
And it isn’t only for people with a title. Some of the hardest situations at work belong to people with no authority at all — managing upward, a workload nobody is saying no to, feedback that landed badly.
The boundary we built first
The question everyone asks: can my manager see what I write?
No. On a team account the administrator sees who holds a seat, whether each person is active, and how much the group is using it. They never see content — not the text, not a summary, not an excerpt. Group usage figures are suppressed entirely below five active people, because below that an average stops being an average and starts being a person.
If people can’t be candid in it, it doesn’t work. So that came first, before anything else.
Why Indiegogo
Worksparks is built, live, and in use today. The campaign isn’t to build it.
It’s to build what comes next, and each stage is funded in order: the AI Leadership Coach and Courageous Conversations first, then Motivation and Momentum, then structured leadership pathways inside the app, then Pulse and Surveys, Recognition and Rewards, and eventually the full Worksparks OS.
I’m giving you the sequence rather than dates, because I’d rather be honest about order than confident about timing.
Founding pricing exists once and won’t return. Team Spark is ten seats for A$1,950 — A$195 a person, held permanently, against A$4,200 a year at standard pricing.
If you’ve been looking for a way to give development to the ninety percent of your organisation that has never had any, this is the least it will ever cost.
Back the campaign → https://www.indiegogo.com/en/projects/soniamcdonald/worksparks
One ask that isn’t money
If you know someone leading a team who’d get something out of this, send it to them. One person, not a broadcast. That does more for this than a pledge does.
And if you’d rather talk it through for your organisation first, message me. I’d rather have the conversation than the click.
— Sonia