Advice for Media Entrepreneurs
STARTING YOUR OWN MEDIA BUSINESS
If you are thinking of starting a media business, you’ll find no shortage of advice and no single answer to the distinct issues your project will face. Fortunately, J-School students who want to be entrepreneurs have people to whom they can turn for help, both on campus and off.
“Nobody knows everything,” says David Lerner, Columbia University’s unofficial entrepreneur-in-residence who directs the Venture Lab at Columbia Tech Ventures (http://www.techventures.columbia.edu/). "But there are a lot of universal themes in entrepreneurship, and pitfalls to avoid.”
While most journalism students seek more traditional paths to employment, lately the J-school has seen a rise in the number of business-minded students and alums, no doubt owing to the vast opportunities offered by the Web. Student demand for help on media entrepreneurship prompted the J-School to offer hands-on guidance in the 2008-09 academic year with Huffington Post co-founder Ken Lerer’s “Lerer Lessons.” Since then, various media entrepreneurs have visited the Journalism School to share their stories.
This page was created in the spring of 2011 to help students and alums who are thinking about launching their own media business. We’ve asked entrepreneurs to share their advice as well as stories of their successes and failures.
Here’s a short recap of Ken Lerer ’s “Lerer’s Lessons”:
1. Be passionate. Don’t start a business for the money because you might not make much, at least not at first. You have to be willing to make this business your life.
2. Know the market. Study what people are doing, who’s winning and who’s losing, and where the opportunities are. Make sure that your business idea is unique. Learn what’s hot, and what’s about to get hot.
3. Pick the right partners. If you’re not a tech person, find someone who is. And choose your financial backers carefully—they could make or break your business.
4. Be scalable. Nice small projects won’t make money unless they can get bigger.
5. Meet everyone. Don’t keep your startup in a cave. Meet as many people as you can who might be able to help. Test your product and re-test it.
6. Be flexible. About 70 percent of what you think will happen will turn out to be right for the business. Thirty percent won’t work. Building a company is like creating an oil painting. If you make a mistake, you can paint over it. In other words, if something’s not working you don’t have to abandon your whole idea, just the part that’s not working.
If you weren’t able to take Lerer’s class and you’ve got an idea you want to bounce off a professional, you can make an appointment with David Lerner. As director of the Venture Lab at Columbia Tech Ventures with 17 years experience launching businesses, Lerner heads a team within Columbia's tech transfer office that reviews and guides business ideas that grow out of the research efforts of Columbia’s faculty and become spinoff companies. A few years ago Lerner realized that students needed business guidance, too, so he began holding entrepreneur office hours that anybody at the university could take advantage of. Predictably, most students who seek his help come from Columbia Business School. But he’s well versed in the media industry and says he’s happy to talk to journalism students with business ideas. Lerner can be reached at dl2303@columbia.edu. He also publishes a blog on entrepreneurship that will help you ask yourself hard questions as you develop your idea: www.davidblerner.com.
When students come to Lerner with an idea, he’ll ask a lot of questions, including:
What problem are you solving?
What’s the pain point in your industry that you will respond to?
What do you look for in a partner?
Who is going to do what?
Lerner told the story of a three roommates who came to him with a promising idea. They had a business plan, and had already divided up shares of the company. He asked them, who’s going to run this business after you graduate? One was on his way to Africa. One was going to law school. The third person was going to continue the business, but Lerner told the three they’d have a hard time raising venture funding with two out of three founding members off doing their own thing yet contractually entitled to pieces of the company.
"Sometimes you make the decision not to launch, and that’s a valuable lesson, too,” he said.
Here are links to interviews from three J-Schoolers who’ve launched businesses:
Here are some links to sites started by J-Schoolers:
David Cohn's spot.us, plus this explanatory video on YouTube