Carolyn Jack

Editor and CEO, Geniocity.com
A project of The Genius Group LLC

Creative Nerve: What It’s Really Like to Start a Business

We passed our first milestone Thursday. After two years of imagining, planning, learning and struggling on every possible level, we at last launched this site you’re looking at. Geniocity.com finally exists somewhere besides our own caffeine-enhanced daydreams.

The party we held that evening for our treasured friends and supporters felt like a combination of theatrical opening night and graduation: With pride and anxiety, we presented our creation, the sum of all our efforts, for the whole world to see. Now, will it – and we - measure up to the future we envision for it? 

The only two things I know for sure about that are, 1) it’s going to take an awful lot more hard work before we find out and 2) an appalling amount of the hard work will involve attracting some money.

Now, I knew money was getting harder and harder to find in the nonprofit sector. It takes a combination of individual and corporate donations, earned income and government grants to keep those groups alive and, as an arts journalist, I’ve seen that running a museum or performance troupe takes about 168 hours a week of fund-raising per person. Many nonprofit groups also find they have to develop money-generating sidelines such as CD sales or gift shops in order to make ends meet.  

But our company is a for-profit.  We looked forward to having a self-sustaining enterprise than would not require us to spend the rest of our lives vying for a place on our knees before the available gazillionaires and filling out grant applications.  (Have you ever applied for a grant? O. mi. god. They come with straws, the faster to suck away your will to live.) And we thought there’d be tons of money available for entrepreneurs in the commercial business world.  

And we were right. There is. The problem is persuading anybody to let you use some of it.

For instance: All those venture-capital firms and business incubators you hear about? They’re interested in backing new ventures … if they’re biomedical outfits developing some new C. diff-eating bacterium that will make investors a $5 billion profit in five years.

Banks? They have small-business loans to offer, if you’re a special case or if you care to put your house on the line as collateral. If you have a house. If you are starting a very small business.

Local governments? Well, they tend to insist that you do something like raise $100,000 before they’ll give you $75,000. The usual Catch-22 – you have to have what you need before you can get it.

What we discovered is that if you want to start a medium-sized business that employs about 15 full-timers and probably won’t make billions, even in 10 years, the official start-up resources aren’t interested, no matter how desperately your community needs companies that create new jobs and bring in outside revenue. So guess what? We found ourselves faced – much like a nonprofit – with what we saw as the choice between wooing individual investors and applying for the few grants that we’d qualify for, or not starting.  

And we had to start. How else would investors be able to see what they’d be investing in? Catch-22 again.  

Yes, we were naive.  Probably like many first-timers, I guess we sort of thought our idea was so irresistible and worthy that stunned investors would just let their checkbooks fall from their limp fingers into our laps. Realizing the truth has been hard and coping with it has been even harder, both emotionally and practically. Some personal adjustments had to be made.

So what have we done? Well, speaking for myself, the most important thing I think I did was to decide that this project was going happen no matter what. My business partner and I have always told each other that failure was not an option and so it wasn’t. Period.

The next most important thing was finding a way to start smaller. With that part, we had a stroke of luck: One of the people we had asked for advice thought up a way for us to get original content on our site without having to set up the entire news operation our plan called for. A full news webzine about creativity and innovation remains our goal – we’re simply developing it in more modest increments that we can pay for ourselves. This adviser rescued us with his idea, a demonstration of the value of talking to many people.

And third, we’re going to keep improving the site and what it offers until we start turning a profit or looking promising to investors, or both.

Our launch, therefore, was kind of like that first Mercury rocket. We can see where we want to go; we’ve got a model that should get us off the ground; and we’ll just keep solving the problems until we build the one that’ll take us to the moon.  Even if we don’t have all the resources yet, we’re going to prove we have the right stuff.