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 ➠ SimCity for starters
Advice ➠ Tales from the job hunt!
Ideas ➠ What’s an A-Corp?
Resources ➠ An award & an event
Town Hall ➠ Community shoutouts
—Danny (tell me your biz dreams: [email protected])
👋 For Starters is enjoyed by 10,000+ business-builders around the world. Thanks for being one of them. Read more.
➠ Get inspired
Bok | Credit
1. Like SimCity for starters. I’m a decade late on this one, but Bok, a former technical high school in Philly, is literally one of the coolest development projects I’ve seen… anywhere. The colossal 340,000 sq ft space has been repurposed into workspaces for 200+ local makers, businesses, nonprofits, entrepreneurs and artists. Residents include a glassblower, clarinet repair shop, bakery, woodworker, bike shop, chiropractor, cheesemaker, hair salon, bridal boutique, tattoo parlor, architect, daycare, coffee shop, filmmaker, and fashion designer – all under one very large roof (and that roof has a big bar on it).
The brains behind Bok: design practice Scout, who liked the playbook so much they’re running it again with the new Village of Industry & Art. → Can’t love this enough. The sheer ambition… 🚀
2. Spread joy. Meanwhile, London-based photographer Alexander Meininger this week launched Playrise, which builds play structures for children living in disaster-relief sites around the world. “About a year ago I had the idea to bring playgrounds to kids in crisis,” he writes. “Kids who don’t have access to anything like a playground or other play facilities. After one year of research, design and fabrication the first prototype is ready and will be shipped to Ethiopia soon.” → You can just do things. Read more here. 👏
3. Buy these businesses. I spotted two businesses on the market: an adorable bakery in Nova Scotia, Canada, and this indie bookshop (along with the flat above it) in a beautiful coastal town in West Cork, Ireland. Check 'em out. 👀
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➠ Starter wisdom
In 2016, Rachel Meade Smith emailed 50 friends with a simple question: want me to send you some good jobs every week?
Ten years later, it turns out the answer was yes. As the editor and writer behind Words of Mouth – a free weekly jobs newsletter – Rachel has built a 72,000-strong readership and an equally massive 72% open rate – all without ever running an ad.
Now she’s made a book. Her new anthology, Search Work: A Collective Inquiry into the Job Hunt, brings together writers, artists, researchers and career changers to dig into something almost all of us have gone through but rarely want to talk about.
→ Below, Rachel shares her spontaneous decision to create a book, what the jobs market looks like from her vantage point, and what a decade of running a one-person content operation actually teaches you.
Rachel Meade Smith | Photo: Georgia Hilmer
💬 Hey Rachel, after 10 years of Words of Mouth, why’d you decide to make a book?
The book was a pretty spontaneous decision. It was just over a year ago, a year out from the 10 year anniversary of the newsletter. I’m sometimes sort of hands off when it comes to marking big dates with the newsletter. I try not to draw attention to it. But I realized there’s this massive community that’s grown around the newsletter and yet the format doesn’t really allow for a lot of dialogue between me and the community, or between the community members and each other. The newsletter’s gone out weekly for 10 years, but a hundred years from now, if you were to look back at the archive, you’d lose the magic of what this community actually is.
There’s also an underexplored area of inquiry around what it means to job hunt. It’s one of the most significant experiences of our lives, but we don’t really investigate it because it’s something most of us hate. It’s something we have to do and it can be very painful.
All of this led me to think, what if I could create an artifact that 1) celebrates the 10 years of the newsletter, 2) brings people into conversation with each other, and 3) allows us to investigate this act that we all do relentlessly, with some depth and critical analysis.
I thought about it for a week and said… I’m going to do this. I’m someone who puts things into the world and then lets fate take its course. So I said it out loud, I put it out there, and things just started happening.
💬 How did you choose an anthology as the format?
I’m an editor and also a very collaborative person who hasn’t been able to collaborate on my newsletter because it’s just been me. I thought an anthology would be the perfect format, as it allows me to engage deeply with community members. It’s not about my job hunt experience or perspective alone, it’s about what we can learn about the shared differences and commonalities of our experiences. Fourteen months after I sent the first email about the book, it’s now being printed. I still haven’t held a copy in my hands yet.
💬 More than a thousand people pitched you ideas. How did you narrow that down? Did you have specific themes you wanted to touch on?
In the pitch call I included a list of around 25 subjects. But I was also open. I didn’t have quotas. Some topics got zero pitches and others – like identity or bias – got hundreds. I had a few contributing editors who helped me filter, hone and ultimately select pitches. I did a first pass on all 1,100 pitches and I pulled out probably 500 that were worth considering. And then we all went through and ranked them into yes, no, and maybe, and tagged them by theme as the list got smaller.
💬 Such a big project!
Yeah, it was a real sprint.
What path will you choose?
💬 I’m curious at what point the newsletter transformed from a casual project into “Shit, I’ve got 70,000+ subscribers, a revenue stream, and a real business”?
The newsletter really just existed and grew in an organic way. I didn’t do any big pushes. It was really just steady growth. Then, in 2019, I was working full-time – and had been for a while – but I wasn’t enjoying what I was doing. I realized I didn’t need to be doing it. I don’t remember how much money the newsletter was making at the time – it certainly wasn’t enough to live on in New York – but I’d given myself the leeway and latitude to not work full-time and to work on things that I’m more interested in. It was a leap of faith.
💬 The newsletter was just your cushion.
Yeah. I’ve never only lived on the newsletter, by the way. I’ve always had freelance work since leaving my full-time job. So I wasn’t leaving my full-time job to focus on the newsletter; I was leaving my full-time job to go freelance, which I could do because I had the newsletter. And my freelance work isn’t related to the newsletter.
💬 So walk us back a decade – why did you launch Words of Mouth in the first place?
The newsletter started just like the book started. I thought of the idea one day and said, “Oh, I should do that!” Then I emailed a bunch of people and asked, “Would you be interested in this?” They said yeah. So, I was like, “Cool, I’m going to start doing that.” I didn’t think I’d be doing it in 10 years! I probably thought I’d do it for a few months. I was in my late 20s. I wasn’t thinking about the rest of my life. Now I’ve got a family and I have to be responsible. Ten years ago, it was more, “I’m going to do this cool thing.” And, again, 2019 was when I started to understand it as a business that could support my life in a certain way.
💬 Classifieds is how the newsletter makes money. How did you land on that model?
All of my income on the newsletter had been ’voluntary’ up until that point. Meaning, people would submit jobs and they’d donate if they wanted to. If five people submitted in a week, I might get one donation from a submitter. I wanted more predictability and stability, so I started classifieds as my first step towards formalizing or stabilizing my income. And classifieds are, to this day, the anchor of the newsletter’s income – it’s what I can count on the most.
💬 You must have such an interesting vantage point on the job market right now…
All the anecdotal stuff about there being fewer jobs, it’s true. It’s real. There are certain weeks where I’d get 20 submissions for jobs and I’d take 15 of them. Last week I got like six submissions and I didn’t want to take a couple of them. This feels different. It really does. Obviously the precariousness of the job market also affects how hard it is for me to do the newsletter, in terms of the work I have to do – if I have to go out and look for all the jobs versus people sending them to me. But it also affects the quality of the newsletter. I don’t want to fill it up with jobs that pay $20 an hour or that aren’t quite a fit. I’m definitely seeing and feeling the squeeze of the economic climate in different ways.
💬 What about job titles – noticed a change?
It used to be that I would search for anything with the word editorial in the title and all the jobs I’d see were actual editorial jobs. Now it’s “editorial” jobs at AI training companies that have all these like cool job titles like arts history expert or whatever, but it’s really just to train AI! I don’t think I’ve ever accidentally posted an AI data annotation role. There are also fewer good entry-to-mid-level jobs. And there used to be lots of ‘strategist’ jobs. That was a title you’d see a lot. You very rarely see strategist in the job title these days, because everything’s more specialized.
💬 You should totally do an annual ‘state of jobs’ report!
Yeah… it would be pretty depressing right now though!
💬 It’s like that New York Magazine feature of how much $$ people are making these days in NYC. A fascinating insight into where things are heading.
Oh my god, I liked that one.
💬 Okay, final question: who do you want to link up with or collaborate with? A dream partnership, company, brand.
I’ve got one, but it’s not very fun…
💬 It doesn’t have to be fun.
The Autonomy Institute, a think tank in the UK focused on the world of work and labour. That’s my dream.
💬 Autonomy Institute, if you’re reading this, hit us up.
Yeah, let’s link up! ☼
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➠ Good ideas
A-Corp 🎨 → You might’ve heard of a B-Corp (a for-profit biz with a baked-in public benefit); an A-Corp is a new type of company being tested in Colorado that’s designed for creative people.
Repair Bonus 🧵 → In France, the Bonus Réparation lets customers claim back part of the cost of repairing clothes and shoes, applied directly at the till at certified cobblers and workshops.
Front Yard Businesses (FYBs) 🏡 → Austin City Council approved a resolution to allow small businesses to operate from residential front yards and porches – think farm stands, plant shops, artisanal goods, and repair services.
Radical candor 🥸 → Is it the secret to being a good boss?
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➠ Toolbox
🛠 Resources
How it Wears — Tools for showing how materials behave, what care they need, and how they age over time.
3pts — This consultancy, which helps artisans turn their craft into a biz, has launched a $3,500 ‘Artists and Makers Impact Fund’ award. Application deadline, April 27th.
Brand Blitz — For Starters subscriber Ellie Kime has curated seven speakers to talk at her new event (17 April) all about ‘how to run a business that not only is successful, but that you actually enjoy too.’
📚 Reads
Notes on going solo: celebrating 6 years of Studio Self. JA Westenberg (an excellent read)
The space behind what you can see. Finding order and beauty in a world not built for the neurodivergent. Untapped
Why AI is exposing design’s craft crisis. Doc
Understanding the emergence of creative third spaces in China’s small towns. A growing number of youth-run cafés, libraries, and cultural spaces are emerging across China’s smaller towns, but why now? Radii
The shirt whisperer. Oliver Church has a monkish existence, stitching bespoke shirts in his Paris studio, to be worn by his devoted fans across the globe. The Times
Meet Cabagges World: #FoodTok’s coolest home cooking content creator couple. F Zine
🧠 Findings
38,000 bananas → A shop meant to buy 380kg of bananas, but instead accidentally placed an order for… a lot more.
🙃 Fun
And this: “Every time someone suggests getting into CPG food I send them this text from my friend in CPG food.”
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➠ Town Hall
Edinburgh-based For Starters subscriber Danielle Mustarde, who formerly worked at London’s go-to magazine shop magCulture, has launched a mag called Tell Me How You Really Feel. I asked Danielle to tell us about it…
Danielle, was your own print mag inevitable?
“It might actually be impossible to work somewhere like magCulture and not find yourself dreaming up a magazine. The beauty of that role was coming to know magazines by osmosis. I’m trained as a journalist, not a designer, but after four years of being in the shop and studio daily, you come to see the world of print really broadly – spotting trends in colour, typography, format, and theme. You also get really good at recognising which publications are offering something NEW and exciting. Learning which magazines are going to make the cut when it comes to being stocked and which don’t has been invaluable – especially now.”
What’s the focus of the mag?
“It’s called Tell Me How You Really Feel (I have a soft spot for wordy titles), and it features 12 essays by queer writers from the UK – some are BIG published authors, some have never seen their words in print. There’s also original film photography throughout. Something that makes Tell Me (as we’re affectionately calling her) a little different is that all of the contributors are anonymous—their names are in there, but they’ve been ‘playfully redacted’. The idea behind this was to allow people an opportunity to write honestly and openly – they can tell us how they really feel and not have to worry about ego, their usual style of writing, or that ex stumbling upon a copy. Thematically, this first issue explores ‘Home’, which is an idea I think we all come up against at some point – especially LGBTQ+ people. I want the magazine to be a safe space for exploring BIG human themes from a queer perspective.”
You were a mag seller, but now you’re a mag maker. What have you learned?
“It’s true what they say – it’s a BIG effort in terms of time and money. But I can personally vouch for the fact that it is also possible. Granted, my past experience working in both the commercial and indie magazine worlds has helped. But I think if you’ve got a GOOD idea related to something you genuinely care about and a decent community around you, it’s all to play for. Oh, and having a fantastic designer by your side helps – shout out to my dream partner, Osman Bari (Chutney Magazine).”
Tell us about your Kickstarter!
“Most inconveniently, I’m not rich, and I don’t have any rich relatives, and one thing that can be a real barrier to publishing your own magazine is the cost of printing it. Paper isn’t cheap. Good quality paper, even less so. But that’s where platforms like Kickstarter can be a real leveller. It allows you to sell pre-orders so that you can pay upfront for printing – without which Tell Me wouldn’t be possible. We launched our Kickstarter last week, and it’ll run for 30 days. Amazingly, we’re already over 70% funded, which is very reassuring as Kickstarter is an all-or-nothing platform – if you don’t hit your target, you get nothing. Nil points. But I’m feeling confident. Plus, the more pre-orders we sell now, the more copies we can print. So don’t be shy…”
Who do you want to connect with?
“I recently moved to Edinburgh and one thing I miss about being in London and at magCulture specifically is that daily interaction with other magazine makers. There’s a lot of great creative stuff happening up here in Scotland, but magCulture was a unique gig in terms of being deeply woven into the indie publishing world. So, if you’re based in Scotland and you’re a publisher – let’s grab a coffee? And if you happen to be a long-lost rich relative of mine, you can support the magazine here.”
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