A vehicle for self-understanding
As I mentioned in a recent post, I’ve started using Are.na again. I love everything about this post by Charles Broskoski, one of the co-founders, who after using the example of the 90s film You’ve Got Mail discusses why, for him, business is personal and doesn’t need to ‘scale’ to meet the needs of investors.
[T]here seems to be both an increasing intolerance for the impersonal and insincere, and a sharper collective radar for the people and companies that fake sincerity. The companies that stand out are the ones who have a particularly high-quality way of doing things. That quality can be traced back to the people who run and work for the company having a deep personal connection to what it is they do. When I started running Are.na with friends 14 years ago, it often felt like having such a personal stake in what we were doing would be a liability. Today it’s often perceived as an asset. I’m not especially pro-capitalism, but I am pro doing something really hard that you care about desperately and unabashedly.
Let’s term these types of businesses a Personal Business… A Personal Business is run by people who are truly into what they are doing, and invested enough to offer products, services, and/or experiences that are both high-quality and idiosyncratic. The type of business that both sustains and is sustained by a community. Think of the bodega down the street that will accept your packages for you, or restaurants that have been in operation for as long as you can remember, or a store that you stop in just to chat. These particular attributes aren’t strategic (though they are strengths). Rather, they arise from the people who run it, who are cool and love what they do. Maybe most importantly, a Personal Business is properly scaled. It doesn’t have to be small, but it should grow at a pace that optimizes for its own resilience rather than to dominate a market.
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Part of what prevents people from starting their own software company is the pervasiveness of a singular popular narrative: the idea that money is the primary reason to do so. That the way to make software profitable is to scale, and the way to scale is to get investment from VCs. Software, for better or for worse, plays an increasingly primary role in determining how we view the world, which in turn determines how the world actually works. There should be more than just one prominent funding model facilitating those experiences. There should be more businesses that represent a diversity of people and potential outcomes. It would be a much better internet if there were.
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When we started working on Are.na, over 14 years ago, the world was mostly in a phase of being enamored with social networks and the potential that they represented. It took a lot of effort at that time to articulate any kind of critique of these new types of businesses (we’ve sold a mug on our online store that reads “Fuck an algorithm” for over 10 years). Now, there’s hardly a single person that wouldn’t admit that the experience of being on most social media leaves a lot to be desired. There’s a broad understanding that “social media might lead to unhealthy outcomes,” but what’s less understood is one of the major forces that led us to this state: the type of funding that requires businesses to (again) scale rapidly or die.
With all this said, I can admit that it’s both terrifying and ridiculously hard to get something off the ground without a major capital infusion. Even with some help in the beginning, it’s taken quite a bit of time to get Are.na to a place of true stability. After our crowdfunding campaign in 2018, there was a period where my budget allotted me essentially two slices of cheap pizza a day. After that, I took up part-time freelancing, which I did until about four years ago, when Are.na’s revenue had grown enough to pay me a livable salary.
My motivation throughout the ups and downs was not that Are.na would one day make me rich, it was that we had to keep Are.na alive because it, the service itself, was part of how I understood (and still understand) myself. Similar to how Kathleen Kelly thought about books, we do not consider Are.na to be a vehicle for profit, we consider it to be a vehicle for self-understanding.
My point is that my reasons for working on Are.na are personal. Our endurance for continuing this work comes from it being personal. Our strength as a business comes from it being personal. And the rewards that I get from this work, and deciding to continue this work, are personal.
Source: Are.na