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

EntrepreneurFest? My company has started getting invitations to take part in business shows and media promotions – the types of things designed, not just as ways to let the public or business community shop for services, but also to give companies that buy tables or booths or advertorial space the chance to do some marketing.

These things always look like great opportunities … until I see how much they cost. 

They’re never priced for start-ups like mine: small, undercapitalized, struggling. Doesn’t that describe an awful lot of start-ups?

What we founders of tiny (for now) creative enterprises need is collaborative promotions of our own on the edges of the big ones. They could be to mainstream business shows and promos what the Fringe is to the Edinburgh Festival, a lively showcase of the independent, nimble,  daringly different, even weird little efforts of entrepreneurs who are stretching the fabric of the industry establishment.

Tables, booths and ads here on the outskirts should cost little – maybe $50 for a two-day conference or a sixteenth-of-a page magazine space – and cheap-chic inventiveness should be the aim of the presentations. Stuff as many of us as possible onto the sidewalks or corridors of the business-show arenas or into the back pages of the booklet so the atmosphere provides a thrilling little hint of the chaotic and experimental, and the start-ups’ displays spill over into one another’s the way entrepreneurs’ ideas bubble out of the box. 

Humor, spontaneous interactions, impromptu collaborations, visual connections – a sort of live business improv theater promising adventure, discovery and fun to the openminded – wouldn’t that be a terrific contrast to the staid and proper business-card exchanges taking place among the suited masses in the main show? 

It might turn out to be something the general public demands to experience because it’s so much unexpected fun and showcases so many new ideas. And best of all, it would give start-ups an affordable and outstandingly cool way to promote themselves.

Any takers?