Have you ever had one of those illnesses that just keeps hanging on? The kind of head cold that makes your skull feel like it weighs 50 pounds? Mucus only stopped with a meth-precursor decongestant, where you have to sign your name and promise not to become Walter White? This was my life for more than a week, and with the addition of mid-grade antibiotics, things finally turned around.
Last Tuesday was the first day in a week where I didn’t have ibuprofen for breakfast. I spent the weekend before dozing in a recliner in my family room because I was up half the night coughing. I’ve consumed so much orange juice that I’ll never develop scurvy in this life or the next. Of my family, I was the last to catch this plague. I thought that I was going to escape it, since I quarantined the wife and kids and spent most of my time well outside the coughing zone. Boy, was I wrong.
During that week of illness, I canceled all of my in-person meetings. I was still well enough to talk with people over the phone, and I was able to move some of the in-person stuff to the phone. Since my time mentoring at Iowa Startup Games a couple of weeks ago, I’ve had a noticeable uptick in the number of people contacting me for both advice and as potential clients. I don’t think that it’s directly related to the weekend of mentoring, but it’s been fun talking with folks about what they are doing, and how I can possibly add value or create something meaningful.
I think this is the key to freelancing: creating value and meaning. There are thousands of freelancers out there doing exactly what you are doing. It doesn’t matter what field you’re in – Web design/development, photography, video production, writing and proofreading, etc. There are limited opportunities to gain clients, so how do you stand out from your competition? Do they care how proficient you are at Photoshop, or that you know seven programming languages? More likely than not, clients choose you based on that interpersonal connection you cultivate, and what you as a professional in your field add to their project, beyond the obvious stuff.
My goal as a freelancer is to become a trusted resource for people who don’t have the time or energy to solve problems alone. It’s not just the creation of the product, it’s the follow-up and the continuing service that counts.
These are the things that I’m hoping to emphasize on the upcoming Freelance Media Podcast, which I’m just starting to produce. I got the Web site up and running during my week of quarantine, and I’ve been putting together the interview list for a few weeks now. In the next month, I’m hoping to have 10 interviews done with various freelancers and have the first episode ready to go the week of EntreFEST in May. If all of the freelancers on my interview list agree to do the show, I should have a wide variety of professions and opinions represented in just the first few episodes of the show.
With the power of the Internet, I shouldn’t have to travel too much to conduct the interviews for the podcast. I’ve already taken to the road twice in the last two weeks, traveling to Des Moines for several big events. Last week, I attended the inaugural Freelancer Happy Hour at Gravitate in Valley Junction on Tuesday evening, spent the night in Des Moines, and then attended the fireside chat with Governor Kim Reynolds at 1 Million Cups on Wednesday morning. I traveled back to Des Moines again this week and attended Monetery and came home again that night.
The trips both weeks were incredibly useful, and it was great to reconnect with friends in the Des Moines entrepreneurial ecosystem, as well as make new connections with creators of all stripes. At the Freelancer Happy Hour, the biggest question seemed to revolve around engaging freelancers in coworking spaces. As a whole, freelancers tend to be a diffuse “group” of people, and it’s more difficult to connect with them. Like myself, many freelancers work from home. I have to be plugged into the community in order to find out what events are happening. I wasn’t sure how to plug into the entrepreneurial community until 2014, and I only found out about it because an old friend of mine was running a meetup in Coralville. Without that connection, I wouldn’t be where I am today.
How do we, as leaders in the entrepreneurial community, connect with folks in the position I was in four years ago? How do we promote coworking spaces to freelancers who work from home? How do we build the type of community that startups enjoy? These are the questions that I hope to help answer over the coming months and years, through the podcast as well as a possible upcoming project that may involve building out a Web site and a community for/of freelancers with a few friends – a project that we just started formulating on the way to Monetery this week.
Both trips into Des Moines this month have involved officials from state government interacting with entrepreneurs. In the case of 1 Million Cups, it was the governor. At Monetary, it was the director of the state economic development agency. It’s good to see that state officials are beginning to show interest in startups, even at just a top-level view. Over the course of the next few months of this election year, we’re going to see a lot of ads claiming that the candidates are really in it with us, but it worries me that they may not have any answers for some of the major problems that face entrepreneurs in Iowa.
One of my questions that I would have asked, had there been question and answer time during 1 Million Cups, involves registering LLCs in the state of Iowa. For some background, if you want to register a company in Iowa, you have two ways of doing so: either go to the Secretary of State’s office in Des Moines, or fill out a form online. My last stop before returning to Iowa City last week was to register two LLCs – Cider Finder and a parent company for Jay Cooper: Freelance Media Producer and the Freelance Media Podcast, which I named The Jayton Company (based on an ongoing joke from childhood.) Between drawing up the documents the night before and the wait time in the Secretary of State’s office, it took less than 30 minutes to register the companies with the state – with the drive there and back, I spent less than 5 hours on the entire endeavor. Had I used the online form, it would have been 3 or 4 weeks before I would have heard anything from the state.
Aren’t online forms supposed to speed up processes? This can’t be the only case where this happens at the state government level. (I worked in state government for 2 months as part of my Master of Public Health capstone course – I know how slowly things move there because bureaucracy.)
I would have also liked to hear information on what she would do regarding Iowa’s tax code, as it relates to small businesses and startups. Yeah, it’s great that the state is encouraging large multinational companies to build offices here through tax breaks – the state and counties are at least receiving part of something rather than all of nothing. Why not extend some of this goodwill toward the people building companies from the ground up within the state?
Health insurance and the formation of insurance groups among small businesses and freelancers are also topics I’ve seen bounced around some of the statewide startup forums. At the state level, they are doing just this for farmers through Farm Bureau. Why can’t we extend this to startups and companies of less than 100 people? Why just farmers? I don’t know the exact numbers, but there have to be as many people in the startup/small business column as are in the farmer column. Tax and insurance issues are causing some people to stick with their large corporate jobs rather than strike out on their own, and it could go a long way in bolstering the entrepreneurial ecosystem we’re building both in central and eastern Iowa. Reynolds mentioned during the 1 Million Cups fireside chat that the legislature was doing something related to insurance with small businesses, but we will see if that makes it through before the end of the session.
This week, several of us made the trip from eastern Iowa over to Des Moines for Monetery, an event put on by the folks at Dwolla. This was probably one of the best-run and most worthwhile events I’ve been to in a while. The programming consisted of three hour-long panels, mostly composed of venture capitalists and fund managers based throughout the country, followed by a networking hour.
The VCs on the panel gave us a rare glimpse into what they look for when they meet with growing startups, as well as what they believe communities can do throughout the country when trying to build their entrepreneurial ecosystems. Events, like what I’m trying to do with Iowa City Open Coffee and Startup Weekend Iowa City, form the foundation of the ecosystem. In Brad Feld’s opinion, there needs to be a steady stream of events in order to keep the momentum going – he suggested having one every day, but I don’t think we have the concentration of people yet to sustain something like that. We have our fair share of meetups, but we need to get a substantially larger pool of people interested in what is offered now in order to get to that saturation point.
Would cheese stick egg rolls count as “wow”?
The panelists also agreed that we need something that would draw outsiders to our community, our “wow.” Not sure what that would be at the moment – there are plenty of great things that keep my family and myself here in eastern Iowa. The university is a big draw, and downtown Iowa City is amazing. We’re incredibly fortunate to be this close to so many larger communities – within a 5-hour radius of my house, I can reach most of the large cities of the Midwest. Could a combination of these things add up to a “wow”? I suppose it depends how you package it, and that job belongs to the economic development folks.
In these next few weeks, I’m back in more of a building mode. My next trip is in mid-April, to the Young Entrepreneur Convention in downtown Des Moines (a location becoming very familiar to me.) Until then, there’s plenty to do around the house and in the office. Cider Finder and BondingBox are moving along smoothly, the podcast is gaining steam, Startup Weekend Iowa City ticket sales are in full swing and the advertising blitz begins soon, and the change from “winter yard” to “summer yard” will happen in the next month, before I travel west again.
Hopefully the family and I will stay well over the next few weeks. Here’s hoping.
You must be logged in to post a comment.