About
One person, one problem, one piece of software.
Wayfield is built in Minnesota by someone who ran the workshops first and wrote the software second.
Origin
It started with too many jobs at once.
I ran photography workshops before I ran Wayfield. Every time I put one together, I was doing five jobs that had nothing to do with photography. I had to build a payment system on my own website and figure out how it worked. I had to keep contact information straight across emails and texts and whatever tool I was trying that month. I had to generate the images and the content to advertise it. And I still had to hope the logistics held together once people actually showed up.
Most of the time it worked out. But I spent more energy worrying about what I was getting myself into than I spent actually teaching. So I didn’t do many workshops. Not because I ran out of things to teach, but because everything in front of the teaching was more work than the teaching itself.
The clearest example of this happened out in the Black Hills, working a session with a friend. Mornings out there can be near freezing. By afternoon you’re roasting in a t-shirt. I needed to tell people fast, things like we’re running a few minutes late, or the weather is turning and you should plan for heat this afternoon. I didn’t really have a good way to do that. Whatever tool I had was built for something else. A scheduling app, a contact form, a group text that half the group wasn’t even on.
That’s the real problem Wayfield is trying to solve. It’s not one big disaster. It’s a hundred small ones stacked on top of each other that make you think twice before scheduling the next workshop.
The tools out there were all built for someone else. Booking software assumes a haircut, one person, one slot, one price. Payment tools assume you’ll figure out the plumbing yourself. Contact tools assume a client list, not a roster with a leader, a location, and a weather forecast attached to it. Every one of them worked well enough to be worth trying and badly enough that I’d eventually go back to spreadsheets and group texts.
So in Wayfield, a workshop is a real thing the system actually understands. Not a ticket, not an appointment. It has sessions. Sessions have capacity, a leader, a roster, and a way to reach everyone on that roster with one message. Someone can organize their own program and lead someone else’s without juggling two logins. None of that is clever, really. It’s just what running a workshop actually takes.
Mission
Run the workshop. Don’t talk yourself out of it.
I didn’t skip workshops because I ran out of ideas. I skipped them because the work in front of them, the payment system, the contact list, the advertising, the logistics, was heavier than the teaching itself. I don’t think I’m the only one who has felt that.
Wayfield’s mission is to take that weight off, in one place, so the decision to run a workshop comes down to whether you want to teach it, not whether you can stomach setting it up. A good working system takes the worry out of the process and lets people focus on what they actually enjoy. It’s also a way for people to share what they know and still make a living doing it, whether that’s in a studio, out in the field, or online. Everyone has something worth teaching. Wayfield is here to get out of the way so they can.
The name
Every path needs a waypoint. Every waypoint needs a guide.
Every creative path is really a string of waypoints: a workshop finished, a skill you can finally do without thinking about it, a piece you’re actually proud of. None of them happen alone. Somewhere on that path is a field guide: someone who already walked it and is willing to tell you what they know. When I was naming this thing, those two ideas, waypoint and field guide, kept showing up together until they became one word.
There’s a third meaning I didn’t plan for. The “field” isn’t only short for field guide. It’s the actual place learning happens. Not always a classroom. A mountainside before sunrise with a camera. A pottery studio covered in clay. A park bench with a sketchbook. A conference table mid-argument about an idea. That’s the field, and it’s where the real workshop happens.
It’s a small thing to build a name around. But it’s the whole idea underneath Wayfield: a workshop should move you to your next waypoint, and whoever’s running it is your field guide, not a vendor. That started with photography workshops. It holds up for anything anyone teaches.
Our values
What we believe
Nobody has a bad idea worth ignoring.
Every discipline we support, photography, ceramics, culinary, yoga, outdoor, fitness, performing arts, writing, business coaching, started with one person deciding they had something worth teaching. Wayfield exists so that decision is the hard part, not the software.
We build for a narrow group on purpose.
Wayfield will never be good at everything. It’s meant to be very good for independent creative educators running workshops, whether that’s in a studio, in the field, or online. That means saying no to things that would make it worse for the people we actually built it for.
Your participants are yours.
We don’t advertise other organizers’ workshops to the people who signed up for yours, and your list never leaves your account. Every workshop also gets the same safety net: a participant report goes through a real review, not an inbox nobody checks.
The quote is the bill.
One subscription, one percentage. No per-participant fee, no module you have to add later to get a feature you assumed was included.
Get in touch
Questions go to a real person, and that person is the one who built this.