Sprint to the finish line

I feel a mix of emotions coming into our final class and presentation tomorrow. I feel prepared, but exhausted. My list of “do” feels overwhelming. This semester has been a ride, but it’s also been worth it. It feels like I am on the final lap of the race and I just need to push through the best I can.

Our team was able to have two meetings of three hours or more since our last class. It was incredibly helpful to find the extra time for us all to gather and talk through every point of our MVP, presentation and three-year projection. The feedback we received last week helped to guide us in the right direction and focus on the right pieces for improvement. Overall, the concept feels really strong. Jenn and I are going to meet with some potential clients through the Herberger Institute next week, so our presentation and pitch tomorrow will actually be preparation for us to pitch to potential clients soon after. I am hopeful that we will be able to host our first event for the Party Brigade during Fall 2018 Welcome Week at ASU.

Promoting healthy party culture for young people is something that relates closely to my own passions and creative interests. It is a difficult area to address that many choose to ignore, but I believe that we can offer a meaningful alternative to the typical bar and party scene. Through the integration of the arts with creative expression and social activation, I believe that we are offering a solid selection of programming that students will love and connect with. It has been an entirely new experience to collaborate with people from such different backgrounds, but the process has been rewarding and productive. I am grateful to my team for their time and efforts, for their investment in a topic that is outside of their own familiarity. Their insight and feedback has been invaluable for my future work. The process of “getting out of the building” is something that I will continue to utilize as I develop new ventures and concepts. Overall, this class has helped me expand personally and professionally as I prepare for my final year of graduate school.

What is next?

“We must be willing to get rid of the life we planned so as to have the life that is waiting for us.”

—Joseph Campbell 

This week is the final week of my Art Entrepreneurship class. Last week, Dr. Essig asked us a tough question “When you are the decision maker, and you create a start up with your team putting years efforts in it, and finally you have set up a successful enterprise, then, you might face a situation that people want to replace you for the enterprise’s further development. What will you do?” The question is tough but real.

I thought that if an entrepreneur was only money-driven by the first day he/she decided to be an entrepreneur. It might be much easier for him/her. During the “curtain call”, the entrepreneur can take the money that he/she deserves, and have a decent farewell with audiences. However, if an entrepreneur is only money-driven, how can he/she achieve a real successful enterprise?

OFO BIKE-FROM INTERNET

I cannot remember when it is the first day that I see many abandoned sharing bicycles on the campus. The bicycles are from OFO, an enterprise providing sharing bicycle system in Beijing, China. It’s glad to see an enterprise has an international credit, but what is next? In my first blog post, I have noticed that the entrepreneurship trend is everywhere in China few years ago. Thousands of angel investors, government grants, entrepreneurs, new ideas are released into the market. The concept, sharing economy, attracts billions of investments. In 2014, OFO enterprise was built, and it was the first enterprise providing a completed bicycle sharing system by four Peking University graduate students. Then, they take part of the national market. In 2017, Mobike enterprise was built by a technology corporation, the team took another part of national market due to their connections with other national big tech corporations. Then, they are the two big sharing bicycles providers in the nation. But from 2010 till 2018, hundreds of bicycles sharing system providers pop up in the market but ended up with failure. For example, Wukong bike, 3Vbike, and Dingding Bike announced bankruptcy during those years. Furthermore, it raised a trust crisis that they cannot afford the guarantee deposit to their consumers. Many customers just take their loss on themselves since nobody wants to assume a company to a court due to only a hundred bucks loss. Do the CEOs get what they want? Yes, annual salaries, and benefit. Even Mobike, which is still in the market, is sold to another big commercial corporation. If they are seeking for money, selling the enterprise to another big corporation, the corporation will pay for them, or even jumping into stock market, the public will pay for them. The start up teams get what they want if they are money-driven.

A sharing bikes recycle space-photo from internet 

But, the truth is, for many entrepreneurs, money is not the whole story.

Do you remember how many middle nights that you have spent in working in front of your desk? Do you remember the day when you talk with people to test your ideas although you are a person who doesn’t like to spend time taking with people that you are not familiar with? Do you remember your last failure? Even it is hard to admit your failure, but you feel happy because this failure will make a progress of the start up. Do you remember how many days you don’t have a date with human beings, just staying in the studio and establishing your minimum viable product? You have input your passion, commitment, personal emotion, and even your life in your startup and your product. When you are forced to leave the enterprise, you may lose passion, commitment, and your joy. 

Sometimes, for entrepreneurs, an enterprise is and expression of their idea, value, and mission. But don’t be afraid of your future loss before you start your work, life is a dream, don’t plan it, realize it, and see what it will bring us.

Cheers

Dong

We are Disruptors

It seems rather surreal that the end of the semester is here already. While we have discussed how close it multiple times, the reality of our final presentation taking place in just two days is finally sinking in. Box of Artists has become a part of my daily conversations with people and with the close of this course and project, it got me thinking about how much our venture is a disruptor.

Let me go back to one of the first classes we had in this course. In class we discussed the theories of Schumpeter and Kirzner as they relate to the market. As I reflected on their theories, I went back to this mentality of disruption. We spent a great deal of conversation around the topic of arts entrepreneurship as a disruptor or not. Is it always disruptive? What does it look like or mean to be a disruptor? Does it mean finding Kirzner’s [1] holes in the market, or is it breaking into Schumpeter’s [2] “circular flow” and changing the world we know? For Box of Artists, I believe it is both.

Box of Artists came from our discovery that artists needed a place to connect with one another. They desired to find a social space where they could learn from each other, build authentic relationships, and perhaps even find opportunities. There was a “hole,” so to speak, in the market for us to fill. We also discovered that society, especially artists, were dissatisfied in the algorithms and social media platforms that sell your data to make a profit. There was another opening to make ourselves a premium site, where data was protected and humans connected humans. We fit within Kirzner’s model, but we also fit within Schumpeter’s.

During our research process on revenue streams and income generation, I remember a colleague saying, “Nobody has ever paid for social media and they never will.” That quote haunted me for a long time as the Box of Artists team built our model. Were we messing with a system and doomed to fail? Could we undo this mentality of free social media space? Through countless conversations with artists and organizations, as well as long discussions amongst our team, we found that charging a nominal fee was not wrong. Many artists saw that there was value in paying to have their information protected and their relationships curated by another person. We obviously did not speak to every artist in The Valley, but we did find enough validation to keep our price. I know that the battle for this pricing strategy is not over. People are going to push us on why we chose this. Some people may get a little annoyed that social media is costing them money. But, this is how we are disruptive. We are coming in with a new way for social media platforms to be utilized. This isn’t about having 1000 friends. This isn’t about ads and marketing based on the tracking of your latest Amazon purchases or past Google searches. This is about creating spaces where relationships between creatives can thrive and opportunities can flourish. This is about integrity in protecting information and transparency in how a business is run. That is something we don’t see often, if at all, in our social media world today. Box of Artists is stepping up to the plate to disrupt that “circular flow” and change the mentality around social media sites being free.

What started out as a seed of an idea is now a website with projections and designs for future implementation. We have countless people from past interviews and even current conversations asking us about the reality this venture will have after the course. I don’t know where the venture will end up, but I do know that through it all I’ve learned to be a little more disruptive. I’m not so worried about changing the tides. We asked, and people answered. We used our means to get where we are. Change is good. Disruption is healthy. Sometimes, disruption is even fun.

I’m excited to share about our venture on Wednesday with our guests. It will be exciting to share the journey and explore the potentials for our class ventures. Good luck to my fellow disruptors! Let’s turn the world on her feet and make change one arts centered venture at a time.

[1] Schumpeter (1961) “The Fundamental Phenomenon of Economic Development,” from The Theory of Economic Development: An Inquiry into Profits, Capital, Credit, Interest, and the Business Cycle. Cambridge MA: Harvard U Press.

[2] Kirzner, I. M. (1999). “Creativity and/or alertness: A reconsideration of the Schumpeterian entrepreneur.” The Review of Austrian Economics, 5-17.

Now or Never

 

It’s crunch time ladies and gentlemen.

We are counting the days here as I warily watch all these impending deadlines creep up. As long as we stay true to our four-week plan, all will be will.

I’d love to take this opportunity to thank the people saving my life right now. My team is made up of such an awesome and varied group of people, and all our skills come together to balance and work together. There is no way I could be organized enough to make these details come together by myself. Their help and patience with me has been legendary!

Joanna, Huixian, and Sam, if y’all are reading this, you all rock and I owe you the world! Y’all are incredible and I’ve had so much fun working with you this semester! 

The 3-year plan has been occupying our days and nights. So. Much. Research. Every number needs to be justified. Every rate and ratio must be explained. The nice part is that the more details that come together, the more faith I have in our venture. I understand why this plan is so essential for investors now, as the research really solidifies so many of our suppositions.

I have reached out to a marketing company to get some rates for advertisement design. I know nothing about design or marketing, but I know I am in the minority regarding this on my team. It makes perfect sense to add an ad design service to our service, since our team is so knowledgeable on the topic! Once the marketing team gets back to me regarding design rates, we will have a ballpark on what to charge our patrons.

Between Huixian’s experience with social media creation, Joanna’s awesome knowledge on accounting and her stellar organization, Sam’s excellent technological prowess, I could have not been luckier to have a team like this. These past few weeks have cemented my theory that the most successful startups come from varied teams. The vaster the skill spread, the better chance some of those skills will come in handy. Lean startups are all about what you start with, and we are so lucky to have been dealt a pretty good hand.

 

Lets take it home!
… and as always, thanks for reading!

 -Will VI

Celebrating the Process

The end-of-the-semester crunch time tends to be a little disheartening. This week has been a rather rough one for me as I have navigated my normally busy schedule with the increase of demand on my time from school, as well as emotions from life changing. When going through this stress and anger, it is only natural that one begins to lose hope. You lose sight of where you have come from or what you have worked on for the past semester. At many points, you hear yourself saying things like, “Does this even matter anymore? Will it really make a difference? What on earth is the point now?” The emotions that you rummage through can take their toll on your outlook on life. One way to confront this and begin to move from apathy towards healing, is through reflection.

This weekend I got to revisit my alma mater. I was approached about a month ago by a college friend who told me that our beloved Fellowship director, Dr. T. was retiring and the fellows from his years as director were getting as many people as possible together for a surprise retirement party in his honor. I knew that crunch time would be here, but I had to go. Dr. T was the first person to teach me about entrepreneurship and leadership. It was through this fellowship program that I learned about being a leader who guides and inspires, rather than dictates. He taught me the art of mediation and balancing differences in a group. There was no way I could turn down this opportunity.

As I enjoyed my jam-packed weekend with past fellows, Dr. T, and others, I had to reflect on where I as prior to my time at ASU. Faculty still asked me if I was loudly running down hallways to rush to the many jobs I took on while in school. They asked if I was still acting and directing. One even asked if I was still hogging practice rooms so I could play for 5 hours straight singing every song I knew as loudly as I possibly could. While some things asked are still true today, many are not. I found how much I’d changed from just 3 years ago when I was prancing around the crumbling sidewalk of Eureka College. I was far more interested in business and accounting now than I had been in undergrad. I hadn’t performed since my senior year of college. My life was papers and Haiti and research and work. It was so much different, but I was inspired by this change.

This made me think about our ventures and the space our teams are in now. We may feel stressed out by the crunch as the semester comes raging toward us. We may feel intimidated by the presentations coming and the reflection of our process. We may even feel overwhelmed by the prospect of our ventures truly becoming reality. Even still, it is inspiring to look back at where we were in January and see all the changes we have undergone, both as teams and as individuals. It is motivating to reflect on the lessons Dr Essig has brought to the table, her feedback for improving, and her guidance for moving forward.

When the stress and emotions and changes around us begin to weigh too heavy, we lose sight of how much we have accomplished already. We have room to move forward and grow more, absolutely! But, we also must acknowledge our growth and strengths and endurance thus far. We aren’t the same class that started THP 552 in January, just as I’m not the same Joanna from Eureka College. We have grown, we have improved, and we have endured plenty this semester. One of my favorite Mexican proverbs says, “They tried to bury us, but they did not know we were seeds.” Life tries to bury us plenty and workloads near finals most definitely do. But, we are seeds. We have been growing roots into the ground of our education for a long time. It’s time to break out of the shell and begin to sprout some more. We got this. Keep building. Keep designing. Keep testing. The work must go on, but we must take pride in what has already come.

Progress

We might just be able to swing this.

This week I interviewed and re-interviewed non-musician artists. Some had expressed interest in our venture before, and others had not. I specifically tested the viability of having sponsored curated content on our website.

I personally was very worried about having any sort of promotions on our website. How could we justify having users pay for an online service while still displaying ads? Luckily, I remembered our value propositions and had an epiphany. As long as we stay true to our values and our users, I think we will be in the clear.

As I was re-interviewing a photographer I met at Mesa Spark Festival, I remembered that it was he who recommended that we take our venture in a social direction. He specializes in artist and art photography and connections between artists and himself fund his entire career. He couldn’t think of a better business to support his work and has been a supporter since the beginning. During our conversation, he expressed he wouldn’t be against promotions, if and only if they applied to artists.

This is gold to me. What if we allowed, or even encouraged artists on the website to advertise themselves? What if we allowed special rates for those already on the site?

Again and again, everyone I interviewed was ok with ads as long as they applied to artists. Two interviewees even mentioned that they only wanted to see promotion for local opportunities and artists. People want to see promotions for things they actually might be interested in.

I am beginning to think that our firm needs to add “local” to our values. As a wise woman once said, “When you market to everyone, you market to no one.” Lets market to our own back yard. It makes both the advertiser and those advertised to feel special and tailored, without all the nasty data mining like our competitors. It makes the content relevant.

 

As long as we remember our values, all will be well.

 

… and as always, thanks for reading!

 -Will VI

Teamwork

Building a three-year projection is not an easy task. Add the growing lessons from each of us on what consumers are saying about advertisements, and the need to have as much reasoning for each choice we place in the budget, and you have yourself one battle that is not easily won. This week has been a trip trying to locate the data to project numbers. We have come to a place where we know that there are groups who want to pay. We know that our prices are validated. I even sat in the MU this weekend and, to my greatest embarassment, asked random people passing by if they would “answer a couple questions about social media and creativity for me.” It was great to find our prices as strong for our two main revenue streams, but when you start going into advertising in a curated way, and trying to find out how many people would be willing to do that, THAT is another ballgame entirely.

We spent almost 3 hours together this morning trying our hardest to come up with numbers that had data behind them. We combed through budgets, articles with conversion rates, 990T forms. We tracked back through everything we had talked about before and learned by testing numbers during this past week. It was a challenge. Even so, I think the greatest lesson learned was something outside this whole numbers game: you have to trust your team.

While our group didn’t always find the same answers or always agree with one another, we did have a mutual respect for each other’s findings and opinions. I think this was echoed a lot in our own work time outside of class. We listened, we adpated, and we kept thinking on how people communicated and felt in the time we worked together. When we divided work out, everyone did what we had asked them to do. I think that was really helpful, especially this week when we had spread out our jobs on who was covering what aspect of the 3 year projection testing.

I’m really grateful for this team. We all have different personalities, goals, backgrounds, and ideas but we are forming something. It is a slow grow, which is how it should be. We are figuring it out together and learning through this process how to be active listeners who trust the talent and knowledge of those in the group.  I’ve grown a lot through this process, and there is more time and room to grow still. Here’s to launching Box of Artists soon and trusting each other through it!

Finances and Future Steps

This week was all about gathering data for our team. We spent lots of time in the last couple of weeks finalizing aspects about our offerings, branding, and artistic motives for launching this product, and then came the financials. Initially we felt like we were floundering to find the data to even begin to make decisions about pricing, cost of goods, etc. We each spent our fair share of time on Google, and emailing potential clients, and companies we felt were doing similar work. The information came in slowly, but luckily it came in and we have been able to piece together our numbers in a way that seems to make sense both from a revenue and sustainability point of view.

I for one appreciated this week’s task of stepping out of the more creative and communications sides of our business in order to focus on hard data and numbers that would help move us forward into a real working business model. As a theatre artist, I have always been more comfortable focusing on the artistic and creative sides of any project that I am working on, and I’ve never found my greatest talents to lie in the math, money, and data. (As someone who is hoping to go into commercial theatre producing, I recognize the irony). However, working on this week’s task has further expanded my appreciation for the numbers side of the arts, and has helped me to improve on a skill that I feel I need to develop before I graduate with my MFA. Do I expect that we may be tasked to make some changes, or better back up our projections with more data? Potentially, but I also feel as though I personally made great strides this week in being able to sit down with a blank spreadsheet and create something sensible and usable from it.

As our team ventures further into this project and draws closer to our MVP (a proposal package), I do feel like we’ve been able to create something that people have a desire and need for. Many of the potential audience members and customers that we spoke with during the last week expressed a great deal of excitement about our new business, telling us that they would most certainly use its services in order to bring meaningful arts experiences to their university students. Seeing this excitement has made me consider how a model like this might work in my own future career, and how the work we’re doing in this class can inform my future artistic endeavors, and potentially my MFA applied project. Whether or not we stick together as a group and launch this particular venture, I do feel the information and data we have been able to collect has been useful to all four of us in a variety of different ways, and its almost more exciting to see what else we might do with it beyond The Party Brigade.

Doing the right thing or doing things right?

When you look long into an abyss, the abyss looks into you.——Nietzsche

pic from internet

Entrepreneurship Philosophy

This class, art entrepreneurship, is like an alarm, warning me every single day that doing the right thing is the most important thing. As my former posts notes, when we are building the website which puts artists on the center, aiming at curating connections for artists. Every time when we make changes, we think back our value propositions.

I am from Shanghai, a place full of plastic dreams. In one night, hundreds of startups get their venture capital, and hundreds of companies announce that they are bankrupted. When I was in Shanghai running my little app, several investors and corporations came to me to discuss possibilities. At that time, I was one of the pioneers who focused on art social media in Chinese market. But I was young dumb and didn’t care much about the app’s possibilities. Now, I appreciate the younger and dumber me that I just happened to catch the right timing in the market, but I didn’t have a clear values about the app at that time. 

Think about that, a young curator who is planning an exhibition, and her key value for this exhibition are 1)social practice, 2) putting artists on the center, 3)engagement. Then, she went to a corporation foundation to seek the financial support. She got feedbacks about 1)what was the gain for their branding? 2)if it was about social practice, they might take the risk of the government side. It is not a good deal overall unless she changes the value propositions, and also puts their social benefit but not the exhibition on the first place. Yes, this is the conversation happened between me and a former corporation partner. Following their rules can help me financially, but following my values can help me do the right thing..

The website progress 

This week, we worked together for our revenues and set up our three year projection. We have researched every number in our projection. I appreciate to our class’s knowledge that 1) every number should be realistic, 2) it’s usual that the first year might not benefit financially. The process is tough, but it helps us control the uncertainties and risks. When we are building the website, the problem is that if we charge more from artists or focus on buyers, honestly, we can have better revenues. But it is against our value propositions, so, “doing the right thing” is one of the main power which helps the website to be what it is today…

Fear and Uncertainty in Tempe, Arizona

Now, I am worried.

Our venture has pivoted once again. We have now begun strides in a social media direction. In the wake of recent scandals regarding a certain social media giant, now might be the perfect time to jump in this red-ocean market. We still intend to focus on the connecting artists with patrons/vendors side, but at the moment this social media aspect seems to be our chief focus.

Only one problem: Most social medias make their money through advertisements. Not just any advertisements, but ones hand picked by complex algorithms that feast upon the information of the users. To employ such a tactic couldn’t be more against our values, most notably our focus on transparency. Wouldn’t it be a shame to try and fill the void, and end up still making the same sins as our predecessors?

All this leaves us with a dilemma. Quite a funny and embarrassing one to put to words, but here I go: Where is the money coming from? Ads are a no-go. According to artists whom I’ve personally interviewed, they have no interest in paying for a service like this (sort of… I’ll explain below). Venues and contractors have no need for a service like this, as they have little difficulty finding artists as it is. As a friend and mentor of mine whom I interviewed yesterday stated, “Will, you know this is a saturated market right? There is no shortage of artists…”

I am worried we’ve put the cart before the horse here. My interviews with venues/patrons/contractors this week has not left me with much hope.

Some of my partners have expressed that their interviews have yielded different results with the artists side. They say their artist interviewees would be interested in paying to use the website. The artists I interviewed did have their eyes light up at one prospect I mentioned. They would be willing to pay if they got a gig out of it during some sort of trial period.

Perhaps we should run with the “free until you’re gonna be making money off of it” model? Perhaps some sort of transparent healthy arts based adspace? Perhaps there’s no money in this at all?

 

Less than three weeks till launch. Oooooh boy.

…and as always, thanks for reading!

-Will VI