Slight return

It’s coming up to the first anniversary since I closed the most well-known part of my business, an arts/tech/society/criticism magazine called Imperica. It was making a significant loss and after 10 years of the website and 6 issues of the “real” magazine, it felt like the right time to cease publication.

Since then, I have thought on and off about the next business. Closing Imperica has not dulled my appetite for doing something. Running my own thing, however small or slight the impact, reinforcesd my sense of personal purpose. I need that thing which motivates me in my personal life, but also gives additional visibility and presence in my professional one. Imperica was a significant financial burden but it… well, it grounded me. It was absolutely heart over head — passion over profit — but there was only so much passion that the company’s bank balance could take.

I want to record some of my new ideas with the hope that one of them — at least one — crystallises into a real business.

There are some criteria which I have in a spreadsheet. These include where the business can be run from (ie does it require a physical base for some reason); the market size and opportunity; and whether it overlaps with any other paid work that I do. Here are four of them.

Idea 1

One of the ideas was a clothing store. I love retailers like Everpress who have genuinely carved out a market niche, selling limited-run T-shirts from designers who upload their work directly. It’s like a curated Redbubble/Cafepress but with a much higher quality product. The business idea, of course, doesn’t have to be original; it has to be better (look at Zoom for a recent example). But, it’s highly resource-intensive and a lot of physical product hanging around, with all of the postal/customs/general crap in the way too. The antithesis of a be-anywhere business.

Idea 2

The second was to bring Imperica back pretty much in its earlier form but with more material coming from its user base — ie a big repository of interesting stuff by, for, and about interesting people. I would personally like its critical edge to come back; a Silicon Valley monoculture is boring, non-diverse and often promotes the wrong behaviours. This is certainly the case with the recent Bezos vs Branson space race, where English-language critiques on this tedious and unnecessary endeavour are rare, when the earth is literally fucking burning. (The only articles that I have seen are Alice Rizzo’s brilliant takedown over on Watson, and Henry Mance being typically cheeky in the FT.)

But, as I know all too well from Imperica’s first incarnation, it’s a crowded market; US media companies absolutely dominate that space; and UK reporting is dominated by stuff like Exponential View which is more cut-and-paste curation than original content. I thought long and hard about this — it’s really, really tempting — but bringing it back could annoy those who had believed that it had closed for good last time, and it will of course make no money. So, no. Imperica in its original form is closed, locked, gone.

Idea 3

The third, and one that I am repeatedly coming back to, is coaching. Yes, everyone is doing it at the moment. But, I can see both a market niche and demand for this. I don’t come to coaching out of nowhere; I have been a certified Agile coach for a number of years, have been a personal coach for some years also, and have a coaching qualification. The additional dimension is that I am a bit like the beaten-up old washing machine that still works when newer models fail. I’ve had enough shit and regret in my life, some of which I was absolutely responsible for, that I have a different perspective. I don’t come to coaching cleanly. I come to it with all the symbolic dust, grease stains, dents, and broken glass which gives a richer and perhaps more robust experience. There’s a lot more which I can say here, but I won’t, although coaching is the highest-scoring idea on my spreadsheet at the moment.

However, if I proceed with Idea 3, then I’ll miss the fun that I had with Idea 2. I made some good contacts and associates with Imperica, and that social valve (for someone who is really not very social, at all) was valuable. So:

Idea 4

The fourth idea will be a website focussed on one topic only: brand. Everything about brand and brands: theory, practice, words, images, video, everything. Having been involved with brand management and consulting on and off over the years, and directly responsible for brand development in recent years, the concept excites, fascinates, and intrigues me. There will be interviews, submissions, and opinion pieces. We’ll leave the “do you like it or not” critique stuff to Under Consideration’s Brand New. They do a great job of that. We’re doing something else.

Right now, all of these would be, in the new parlance, side hustles to minimise risk.

All of my businesses so far have been started and run by myself. Doing it on your own offers a great sense of achivement but it is hard, and mentally punishing. I’d love to pursue any of these ideas with others. Share the load and the burden, but also the success.

I’m particularly interested in going for Idea 3 and Idea 4.

Drop me a line if you’re interested in anything regarding the above. These new ideas are as-yet unnamed. I would be delighted to hear your views.

Header image from David Shrigley