The startup path less traveled.
By: Emily Best
Tags: Startups, Creators, Crowdfunding, Diversity, Growth

Seven years ago we never could have predicted where Seed&Spark would be today. And startup stats will tell you: it’s unlikely that we made it here at all. And right out front I need to acknowledge with profound and unending gratitude the community of creators, arts organizations, brand partners, investors and advisors who made it possible for us to be here today. So what follows is the winding road to understanding ourselves, our customers, and the business we’re building not to capitalize the fastest on the market that already exists, but to build a new market with the values, ethics and purpose that got us started in the first place.

For our 7th birthday, we gave ourselves the gift of a brand new homepage!

When we launched Seed&Spark in December of 2012, we had a simple dream (LOL): make it possible for any creator anywhere to build a direct connection to their audience that would give them the power of creative freedom, financial independence and career sustainability. It’s what I felt like I had discovered crowdfunding could give me when I used it for my first feature film.

Easy, right? Well, crowdfunding for creative works is not the same as crowdfunding for products and physical goods. The big players in crowdfunding really geared their platforms towards design and technology, and probably didn’t realize the coastal mentality with which they were building those tools. Those platforms sort of assumed you had a robust creative community rich in expendable resources and familiar with concepts like arts patronage. It didn’t actually account for creators who came from under-resourced communities, who didn’t have a prestigious university network or a hometown full of eager arts funders. You couldn’t just launch a crowdfunding campaign and expect it to succeed unless you were pretty much already set up to succeed in life.

My first crowdfunding campaign for my feature Like the Water: a wordpress site, a paypal link AND A DREAM

When I was trying to get Seed&Spark off the ground, I didn’t have the resume of someone who “should” start a company. I was a waitress producing some independent theater and film on the side. I did not know what “VC” was. Nor was I by any means a film industry insider. I was just a gal trying to make a film that better portrayed women on screen that Hollywood seemed to want to. It was the experience of producing my first feature that launched the whole crazy idea in the first place. What I didn’t know at the time was that there were thousands — probably millions — of “outsiders” like me who needed the same things I needed: education, access, and a clear path to make the things I wanted to make.

In 2012, I raised just about $250,000 to build and launch the entire Seed&Spark platform — around the same time Kickstarter raised $15M and IndieGogo raised like $150M. We simply couldn’t build our company the way companies with a lot more connections and resources could. We had to find a different way. Over the next two years I would raise little increments of money as I slowly expanded my network, person by person, but it was never enough to make major headway.

So in 2014, I got in my car in Los Angeles, I scooped up my co-founder Erica Anderson along the way, and we traveled across the country teaching workshops we had developed to answer creators most pressing questions about crowdfunding. It was called “Crowdfunding to Build Independence,” and we taught it in every city we could find an arts organization to host us — sometimes to 150 creators and sometimes to two. We taught 35 workshops in 65 days that trip. But we weren’t just teaching. We were learning. We were learning about the challenges faced by creators in Atlanta and Chattanooga and Savannah and St Louis and Albuquerque and Houston… (Also where to get the definitively best ribs in America: Roper’s Ribs, Florissant, MO.)

The upper right photo is of Roper’s — we ate the ribs so fast we could only photograph the empty containers.

We were learning that a lot of creators out there had no interest in “making it in Hollywood”. They wanted two things: 1) to build robust and sustainable creative careers and 2) to bring visibility and resources to their own communities. Their work was (and is) about much more than representation — making sure that people can see themselves on screen and behind the scenes — it’s about making sure others see them as worthy of being the center of a story. It’s about building bridges and expanding empathy.

So we set about building Seed&Spark’s platform, processes and practices for these creators — always keeping in mind this was not just about representation but building a new space where everyone belongs. And today, five years after that first road trip, we have the highest crowdfunding campaign success rate in the world, with projects from 413 cities and more than 40 countries. And we continue to teach 100+ live workshops a year all over the country, and we’ve added an absolutely unparalleled team of creator-instructors to help us meet the demand for education. (Seriously, go check them all out and see if there is one in a city near you — and check out their work!!)

This number increases everyday, so for the latest stats, visit our homepage ticker!

But while we’ve been on the road since 2014, the entertainment industry has been undergoing the largest consolidation in its history. Not just megacorporations gobbling up their competitors (AT&T eats Time Warner, Disney eats 21st Century Fox etc etc), but the actual business models themselves have been consolidating. Now all these mega corps are spending BillionS (capital B capital S — what’s that spell??) on subscription streaming. That’s it. Just one business model they’re collectively going all in on. Which means in order to compete with each other, they’re competing not just for more subscribers, but more of their viewing time. (At some point, they will realize this is a fixed resource — we can’t seem to make more time. Cue #NetflixandTimeTravel). To maximize their share of viewing time, the big players are perfecting these personalized recommendation algorithms, which currently drive approximately 85% of what people watch.

(The fact that sleeping beauty at a laptop is a widely available meme should, I dunno, say something.)

When a company is trying to make sure you stay on their platform, you can bet they’re not building algorithms to challenge your world view. In fact, research has shown recommendation algorithms drive content echo chambers in streaming just like social media’s opinion echo chambers. So if you’re making something and the best you can hope for is to land on a streaming platform, that platform is going to make sure you’re preaching to the choir (if it surfaces your content at all, but that’s for another blog post.)

So while we have the rise of equity and inclusion in entertainment, the delivery mechanism for that entertainment is effectively built to thwart its cultural impact.

So while we have the rise of equity and inclusion in entertainment, the delivery mechanism for that entertainment is effectively built to thwart its cultural impact.

There are exceptions of course — banner content that gets good visibility because it’s negotiated by the major studio producing it. But if you don’t have that major studio, how do you ensure what you’re making can really have an impact?

You don’t have to search very hard to read endlessly about how social media has created more loneliness and more divisiveness, how our phones are really seriously probably causing cancer, and how rates of depression and anxiety are increasing the world over. Yet artists are sold a story that they have to use social media to get discovered by a big platform and the big platform will make all their dreams come true! When the artists we meet on the road tell us what they want to do is represent the underrepresented, be a voice for the unheard and heal divisions — we cannot possibly continue to insist on pumping them into a business model built to thwart these efforts.

Similarly, as a startup, we’re only fed one story about how a successful company is built: have a targeted and focused product, raise a lot of money to scale it quickly, leverage online ads to grow your market share, sell to private equity or go public, drive investor or shareholder value until you die. What Seed&Spark *should* be doing, according to this story, is trying to use the internet tools to drive infinite scale, just like those companies with all the BS — I mean BillionS — are doing. But we can’t compete with billions of dollars. (Here is the long story of how it went when I tried.)

And we don’t even want to play that game — if we want to help our creators build sustainable careers, we can’t then create huge investor or shareholder commitments that compete with money we should be paying to creators. And if we want to maximize the cultural impact of their work, we can’t compete to build platforms that actually divide people.

The truth is, if you want to connect people, the most meaningful way to do that is in person. It’s what we were doing all along with our education program. We were offering workshops, and because of that, creators were not just meeting each other, they were meeting their local arts organizations and festival directors and theater owners. And those workshops got us invited to places we’d never otherwise go — we met people outside our industry echo chamber.

So the team at Seed&Spark has spent the last year working on ways to help creators break out of the echo chamber and connect people in person. We worked with the intrepid team on the film Bite Me whose Joyful Vampire Tour connected thousands of people across the country around a sweet romcom about vampires and the IRS. (Seriously.) Using their incredible case study, we’re helping to develop a roadmap for creators to leverage community screenings as part of a distribution strategy. We launched our own community arts event series in Atlanta. And we’re also on the road with Mark Duplass, Erika Alexander and more bringing Creative Sustainability Summits — free one-day conferences for creators telling stories across all media — to somewhere probably right near you through 2020.

And we started researching the unconventional places outside the entertainment business where we might connect people through stories that matter. We discovered that the workplace is the most diverse place most people spend their time. We dove into research about the challenges workplaces face in building inclusive culture. And we discovered we could make an impact there, using film. So we launched a first-of-its-kind workplace inclusion practice built around short films — getting our films in front of people no streaming algorithm ever would. We’re piloting it right now with some incredible companies at various stages of resources and scale. This opens up a new way for creators to monetize their work by reaching the audiences who would never otherwise see their films. And the program encourages the very thing that storytelling does best: create meaningful conversation, allow for diverse perspectives and experiences to bring us together as people — right where we spend the bulk of our time (work! because capitalism!).

We’re bringing back the watercooler conversation — with a purpose! (and thanks purewaterpa.com for this adorable image)

This winding road that started in my car on the highway has led us to see that what we’re doing is not just about representation or the film industry. It’s even more ambitious than our original dream — which was already pretty ambitious. We exist not to fix something broken in the entertainment business but rather to connect people through stories that matter, online, in person and in the workplace.

It took us almost seven years to be able to articulate this. If you’re working on something you really believe in — keep going.

How we talk about ourselves today, on our new homepage and to anyone who will listen, reflects our desire to serve the real needs of our creators: to help them build sustainable careers right where they are and to maximize the cultural impact of their work. It’s storytellers who have always been tasked with keeping the community together around the fire or connected across distances. Storytellers use imagination to help people connect to themselves and to one another. So just because the platforms that tell stories CAN be built for infinite scale doesn’t mean they SHOULD. (Somebody please tell Zuck.)

Seed&Spark’s growth over the past seven years has been slow by startup standards, but unlike most startups, we’re still here. And we don’t have the kind of investors who are breathing down our necks to produce massive returns (mostly, they’re popping in to ask smart questions and encourage us to persist!). We plan to continue to grow this way — through our relationships with hundreds of remarkable arts organizations across the country and the intrepid brands who have allowed us to offer national education programs for free; through the real connection with our creators who we interact with every day online and in person. And moving forward, we’re also building by connecting people together in the workplace. What will never change is our investment in the success of communities built by creators, everywhere.