For Starters is the essential weekly briefing for the next generation of small business owners. Inspiration and ideas, every Friday – for free. It’s curated by Danny Giacopelli, formerly of Monocle and Courier magazines.
Hey, starter! Read on for…
Inspiration ➠ Knowing when to stop
Advice ➠ Navigating death valley
Ideas ➠ Unhinged brands!
Resources ➠ A clever calendar
Town Hall ➠ Small biz in Minnesota
P.S. Check out this wonderful interview about For Starters published this week in Objectively.
👋 For Starters is read by thousands of business-builders, including new subscriber Diana, a product photographer in Portugal.
➠ Get inspired
1. Let’s take a walk. On a trip to Chicago back in 2017, Toronto-based architect Karl van Es was visiting a Brutalist library and spotted a huge, intriguing glass dome. He had no idea what it was, so he walked in and was blown away. He wished he knew about it beforehand. So, like any good starter, he decided to create a company that filled what he saw as a gap in the market. His biz Avontuura now makes gorgeous, illustrated architecture maps – ya know, the real printed things – of cities around the world.
→ I’ve been mulling over doing this with small businesses at some point. Whaddya think? Starter maps!
2. A return to analog. And speaking of Chicago, this story – featuring the wonderful Paper & Pencil shop – makes me very, very happy:
3. Starting is inspiring, but stopping can be too. For the past 5 years, Clara Infante has been growing a beeswax candle business, Copito, which began as an arts and crafts project in her kitchen. From the outside, things were incredible – online orders were through the roof, she got coverage in the likes of Vogue, her IG ballooned to hundreds of thousands, and the biz, which she ran from the Spanish countryside, was growing fast.
Yet last year she shut it all down – and wants to ‘deinfluence’ you from turning your passion into a business:
“There’s no faster way to stop enjoying your work than to put a bunch of admin and logistics between you and that hobby.”
→ You don’t normally hear stories like this, but they’re much-needed. Starting a biz is amazing, beautiful and life-changing, but it’s also *unbelievably* hard, and sometimes not the right thing to do. (See Starter Wisdom, below)
4. We’re doing it live! Live-shopping is huge in Asia, but still nascent most other places. Until now… Dan Frommer writes about the rise of the live-shopping platform Whatnot, where you can buy products straight from video streams hosted by sellers ‘who act as expert guides, entertainers, and community leaders’:
“Whatnot’s sellers are individual entrepreneurs and small business owners, typically organized around a category, like sports cards, sneakers and streetwear, women’s fashion, and electronics. Many start as solo operators; some have scaled into the hundreds of millions of dollars in GMV. One in eight now works selling full-time on Whatnot, up 20% from 2024, the company says.
The growth can be dramatic. A Boca Raton card shop says it went from $40,000 in monthly revenue into the millions after adding live selling to its business model, and expanded from two to 39 employees.”
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