Welcome to the second season of our podcast. Help- I started a business, now what? At the beginning, there are so many decisions to make and so many things to do. It can feel like everyone else has their business figured out. It’s also really easy to compare your brand new starter business to others that are well established. In this podcast, we will talk about all those hairy first big steps that come with starting a business. For this episode, we’ve brought on Jon Lincoln from our sponsor goimagine!
Check out the show on YouTube, Spotify, Apple Podcasts or read the transcript below. We’ve even included timestamps in case you want to zero in on one part of the show.
Episode Transcription
00:02.47
Amber Christian
Hello everyone and welcome to today’s edition of the Help I Started a Business Now What podcast, affectionately known as the Now What show. Today, I’m pleased to actually have an interview with our sponsor, goimagine. So we have Jon Lincoln here from goimagine and he is going to be, he and the company are going to be the focus of our interview today. Now, I promise it’s not going to be boring and it’s not going to be a big sales pitch. So don’t hit that off button. We’re going to learn more about the platform and some really interesting and unique initiatives that goimagine has going on. So Jon, can you introduce yourself to everyone here on the show and tell us a little bit about your background and goimagine?
00:42.14
Jon Lincoln
Yeah, absolutely. First off, thanks for having me, Amber. I appreciate you having us here. And for those who don’t know goimagine, my name is Jon Lincoln. I am the founder of goimagine. We are a handmade platform that came out right before the pandemic, which was wonderful timing that I did not expect. My personal background is I’ve been in technology for well over 12 or 13 years now. And we found a real need years ago with my partner, Steph Romkey, who is a handmade seller, that there was really a big lack in the industry of a handmade community platform, one that’s focused on handmade, one that’s focused on social good. So we decided to start one. And so goimagine is a marketplace for handmade goods, connecting makers and artists with sellers I mean with buyers. But we also have a lot of other things that we’re providing sellers as well, including our social media app, our training, and a lot of other things we can certainly discuss.
01:38.74
Amber Christian
Now we have something exciting that’s been going on with goimagine that I’ve been keeping it a secret for a while. I’ve known about it. But I wanted to have Jon talk about it on the show. You’re adding some things that I have long wished marketplaces would add because you’re kind of going to start to tap into that local consumer. So can you tell us more about this Buy Local initiative and what you’re doing on goimagine to facilitate that?
02:06.79
Jon Lincoln
Absolutely. I mean, this is actually something I’m personally very excited about. I think what you see right now in the world is more and more, I’ll call it global marketplaces. And they’re wonderful. I mean, this is not a knock on the fact that you can go onto Amazon or you can go onto any of these sites and buy products from people from anywhere. They can be products from Portugal.
They can be from Brazil. They can be from anywhere, right? um But there’s really a lack of a way to support local online. So for people who do want to say, you know what, I’ll buy things from anywhere, but occasionally I’d like to support the the makers and the small businesses down the street from me. So what we’re doing and we’re launching it as we speak is, as you mentioned, a shop local initiative. That’s going to make it very easy right from the home screen for people to search for makers and artists products within their state.We’re creating shop local collections, which you can browse products within your region.
03:04.08
Jon Lincoln
So if you want to browse products from makers that are you know near you, you can do so easily with goimagine. And and the idea here is just we’re trying to create the yang the yin to that yang. right Global marketplaces are going to be around forever, and they’re going to be fantastic. But we do believe there should be an alternative for those who want to occasionally have that alternative. And that’s exactly what we’re doing. And we’re going to be digging our heels into that shop local. ah initiative throughout the year. and And we think especially coming into Q4 at the end of the year, it’s going to be extremely powerful.
03:36.50
Amber Christian
I mean, I think of how often I go to my local markets here in the Minneapolis area, and I can go to all sorts of different markets that I didn’t know you were here. And the same exists for everyone else. Or you know It’s almost sometimes like lightning strikes, especially if you’re selling at a local craft market. Even online, it can be incredibly hard to find those other local artisans. And so then as a consumer, you think about it and you’re like, it’s man, it’s nearly impossible for me to find this. So for a while, we saw the rise of sites that did curation
right? And you still see that where they’ll curate boxes and that’ll be of certain makers.
04:12.21
Jon Lincoln
Yes.
04:14.26
Amber Christian
But as a consumer, it was really hard to be able to initiate that whole shop local. So the other other part that I love about that too is just facilitating that from the comfort of my couch. I can be doing those activities and finding those activities that I otherwise wouldn’t have really found.
04:34.70
Jon Lincoln
Well, that’s exactly it. You might want to make it to that craft fair that’s coming up, but maybe you were busy that day and you couldn’t go there the times it was open, right? Well, so now you’ve lost the opportunity from to shop from any of those local makers that were at your local craft fair. Heck, maybe there was bad weather that day and it was just no one wanted to go out in the rain and cold to that fair. And unfortunately, those makers just lost a lot of their local buyers, right? um And to your point, just the comfort of doing it from your own home, you want to support local, but I mean, there’s some people who just don’t have the ability to go out. And so this is going to be hopefully an avenue for them to be able to support their local makers. um Yeah, so there was one other thought I had there, too, that it slipped my mind. I’ll probably think of it as we keep going.
05:25.62
Amber Christian
The other big thing that I come back to is about building local economies, right? And that’s that whole, you know, your point of having that heart for shopping local. I mean, there’s sound research that I’ve read over the years. I can’t tell you exactly where I’ve read it. I might have to dig it up for the show notes about how money spent in local economies tends to stay in local economies.
05:48.30
Jon Lincoln
Yeah. Uh-huh.
05:50.92
Amber Christian
And that’s where it’s actually quite helpful. And so you start to think about you know if money is spent with the local businesses, they’re then hiring other local business or buying supplies from other local businesses.
05:54.03
Jon Lincoln
Absolutely.
06:02.29
Amber Christian
There’s a real way to re-inject and reinforce and help your own local economies by being able to do this. And it was just that other marketplaces just didn’t really do that, where you know they’ve gone that go big, expand more global, and you’re like, well, I actually know I want to go home. There’s a whole go big or go home.
06:21.41
Jon Lincoln
Yeah.
06:21.56
Amber Christian
You’re like, no, I want to go home.
06:21.92
Jon Lincoln
Yeah. And this, this is a kind of a social experiment for us as well. Cause we’re going to find out pretty quickly how much people actually care. Right. I mean, you know, I mean, there are buyers out there that really just care about how fast it’s delivered and how cheap the product is.
But then there are buyers out there that I believe are looking for high quality items and supporting their, their local, local economy, so to speak. And, uh, We’re going to find out quickly how many of those people there are. It might not even be as big, but it’s going to be a big enough market that I think can really help drive its own marketplace. It’s enough that there are people out there that can support a yeah ah new platform that’s focused more on that.
07:03.50
Amber Christian
Now there’s another thing that you’re doing that I also found really interesting. I believe you started doing this late last fall with some of your gift giving guides at the end of the year.
Tell me more about some of these gift guides and what your approach as goimagine has been with these particular gift guides because that strikes me as unique.
07:23.43
Jon Lincoln
Yeah, well, I mean, it’s similar to the shop. Well, it is the shop local, but it was really last fall. We realized that when you look at most gift guides that come out from marketplaces or just retailers in general, they’re often focused on specific holidays, the mother’s day gift guide, the father’s day gift guide, or, or they’re focused on a category, you know, the jewelry gift guide, the home and living gift guide or whatever it might be. Um, we decided to take that approach once again, but being more local and shopping where we started doing what we call regional gift guides, uh, guides that really are not about a specific category, but rather about where the makers are so that people can easily browse products based on that region. So we have like the Mid-Atlantic gift guide. We have the New England gift guide We have the Pacific Northwest gift guide and and that really actually took off pretty well in q4. We could see things were selling out of the gift guides a lot. It actually reinforced our decision to keep digging into this shop local initiative because we saw how good it went in Q4. And those, then those collections are coming back. They’re going to be on the front page of our website by the time this podcast is actually released. So if you go to our site, you’ll probably see those collections that are on the front page.
08:42.99
Amber Christian
Now, do you curate them? Is it done programmatically? Can you tell us a little bit more about this whole process around creating gift guides? How does that work for goimagine?
08:52.13
Jon Lincoln
Yeah, we curate them right now, right? Not me, but I do have two other people that are really good at finding the good products that are on the marketplace and curating those collections so that they are, you know, I’d like to say high quality, right? um It’s a challenge and it’s especially a challenge curating collections in a handmade world because a lot of times there’s one of a kind items. So you put the product up,and it sells, and now there’s a blank space on the page. Because you know you’re like you’re like, hey, buy this, someone buys it. yeah Something else has to go there. It’s you know like yeah You think of it like a supermarket, like if you see boxes of cereal, there’s 15 honey nut Cheerios, you take one, there’s one right behind it. But the problem is that it doesn’t exist in handmade, because sometimes it’s one of a kind.
09:39.50
Amber Christian
It’s one of a kind, yeah.
09:40.50
Jon Lincoln
You pull it off the shelf, the shelf’s now empty. right So you gotta have ah someone rush over and put the next item up. So, to mention to your point programmatically, we’ve solved some of that because we’re, um, working on a way to feed the next product into that spot essentially. But we still need someone curating that feed so that when one comes off, the next one pops up and it’s always full.
09:59.29
Amber Christian
ah Right.
10:05.65
Jon Lincoln
Um, but right now it’s a, it’s a, I mean, our company is very, uh, you know, I want to say very human powered. I mean, obviously we do a lot of tech, but you know, as a handmade organization, the whole idea of handmade is very human, you know, and, and we’ve been looking into some AI type stuff and AI is getting more and more popular, but we are very cautious around any of that, because I think a lot of the charm and a lot of the interest we get from our community is the fact that we are human and that we are people and that we are caring.
10:33.11
Amber Christian
Right.
10:41.59
Jon Lincoln
And when you put in too much automation, you know, people can sniff it out. They can sniff out that the human wasn’t there. It was a robot. It’s like when you call, when you call customer service for some large companies and they they’re getting to the point where it feels like you’re on the the phone with someone, but really, you know, this isn’t a human, and you know, or the chatbots you talk to online and say, Hey, how are you doing today, Amber? Like you’re not even a person. You’re, you’re a robot asking me how my day is. Cause you want me to think it’s a person. That’s not us, that’s not us.
11:16.69
Amber Christian
I’ve resorted to saying I need to talk to a human. I say that a lot with the chatbots to try to bypass.
11:20.15
Jon Lincoln
Yeah, human please. nice
11:24.21
Amber Christian
Well, let me try to help you know I really need to talk to a human because I wouldn’t even be on here if I didn’t need a human.
11:31.54
Jon Lincoln
Yes. Yeah. I’m the same way. Human, please. Just give me a human. And you’re like, uh, yeah, no, I’m, I’m with you. But so, and then I get it. I get it. But again, we’re trying to do things differently. You know, there’s a place in the world for both and we’re hoping to fill that other void.
11:47.45
Amber Christian
I mean, the other practicality is, you know, but both you and I have tech backgrounds, right?
11:52.76
Jon Lincoln
Yes.
11:52.73
Amber Christian
I came into the craft industry and I’m very honest with people, but my love of craft and I have my pop-up craft food business, and my background’s finance and technology.
11:59.24
Jon Lincoln
Mm-hmm.
12:01.75
Amber Christian
I just happen to love this industry. And you know for so many years in the tech world, everything you hear about is about how everything is supposed to be infinitely scalable, like without humans involved.
12:11.48
Jon Lincoln
Right.
12:13.11
Amber Christian
And at a certain point, I’m not sure if you felt this way about the tech world, but I was like, no, I’d like a few humans involved. And sometimes I want to talk to people and I want to know that humans were involved.
12:20.53
Jon Lincoln
Yes. Yeah.
12:25.67
Amber Christian
It doesn’t mean that they have to be involved in every product and everything, but gosh, there’s certain times where I just, I really actually want to know so a human made this or that a human is behind it or looking at it for problems.
12:33.82
Jon Lincoln
Yeah. Boy. I mean, you pointed out right there, the whole idea of infinitely scalable, right? And that mentality is really the mentality of, for lack of a better term, I’ll say Wall Street, you know, it’s, it’s, it’s just keep growing bigger, you know, and, and then always reduce expenses.
12:49.67
Amber Christian
Yeah.
12:56.00
Jon Lincoln
And in doing so, that’s where the robots come into play. um I don’t believe that every business has to be infinitely scalable.
13:01.79
Amber Christian
Right.
13:04.52
Jon Lincoln
You know It has to be successful, it has to work, but you know I would much rather to grow a company to $100 million dollars a year, but it still stays intact with its its ethos and its ethics and its mission, versus grow to a billion dollars a year, but sacrifice all the things for the reasons you started it in the first place. right um you know the whole idea of infinitely scalable didn’t exist in the world, Until probably 150 years ago, right? Because you think of the good going tangent here for a second. But you know you look at like the industrial revolution with logistics and transportation and the railroads and then and an internet comes along and now it’s information highway and before that. Before the Industrial Revolution, you couldn’t be infinitely scalable.
13:46.87
Amber Christian
Mm hmm. Right.
13:50.68
Jon Lincoln
How fast could your horse walk? But like you couldn’t you know If you owned a pharmacy, you could be the best pharmacy in town, but you can’t own every pharmacy in America you know because it would take days to get to the next pharmacy. Right, it’s like It’s technology has created this globalization where one company can rule it all. And, uh, I don’t think that’s necessarily a good thing. And I think that, uh, having companies that are mission focused still grow big, but aren’t to your point, infinitely scalable. Like that’s not always the goal.
14:21.36
Amber Christian
Yeah.
14:22.16
Jon Lincoln
It shouldn’t always be the goal. But anyway, that’s my thought on it.
14:24.39
Amber Christian
Yeah. Yeah. No, I agree with you. I mean, I’m not trying to infinitely scale Handmade Seller.
14:29.78
Jon Lincoln
Yeah.
14:29.85
Amber Christian
I’m trying to serve a market, help people build more stable businesses that they can be proud of that make money because I believe that that’ll make a big difference in the world. And I’m not, I’m not trying to grow to some enormous number.
14:40.12
Jon Lincoln
Right.
14:45.21
Amber Christian
I’m just trying to have a sustainable business here.
14:47.78
Jon Lincoln
Absolutely.
14:47.97
Amber Christian
I think a lot of it comes back to this definition of enough, and we could get super philosophical about that.
14:48.10
Jon Lincoln
Yeah.
14:53.03
Jon Lincoln
yeah Right.
14:53.10
Amber Christian
But I think that’s part of it too. When there’s outside capital, outside investors, and people are expecting exits, you start to see some of those kinds of things. where you know with other things where One of the things I love about the fact that you’re a public marketplace is the aim is different.
15:09.18
Jon Lincoln
Yes.
15:09.30
Amber Christian
The aim isn’t about becoming this large publicly traded company that’s going to have these massive earnings for shareholders. It’s about creating something that supports all these small businesses in a way that helps them grow their businesses, much aligned philosophically with kind of how I think about Handmade Seller. And so that’s one of the things that I’ve always really appreciated and admired about how you guys are approaching goimagine.
15:27.91
Jon Lincoln
Yeah. No, I appreciate that. And I always get cautious saying that, like, whenever I say Wall Street, I don’t say it in this negative way to scare people off. But I just think that and if you see this is on our mission page and goimagine if you check out the mission page, but the whole idea of like you mentioned public marketplaces, there is no public land in the Internet, right?
15:57.11
Amber Christian
Right.
15:57.27
Jon Lincoln
It’s all privately owned, which is ironic because it’s the government in our tax dollars that built the internet. So the public paid to have the internet created and now all corporations own the internet. And I would contend that digital land is just as valuable as physical land now. If you own Facebook, you own the market square. You own all the communication. And it doesn’t mean that in the real world there shouldn’t be private corporations. There should be, but there needs to be an alternative as well. There has to be a little bit of that balance between the two. And I think that online there can definitely be businesses that offset the, that corporate mentality. Don’t get rid of it. I think it’s great. It’s just offset it. Just, just a little bit, just a little bit. You don’t like, you know, Jeff Bezos, you don’t have to own everything. but You can own a lot.
16:59.59
Amber Christian
But then who would bookshop go make fun of on threads if Bezos hadn’t done what he had done? Affectionately referred to Spaceman and all their posts, which huge shout out.
17:07.41
Jon Lincoln
That’s a good point. Oh my gosh.
17:11.84
Amber Christian
I love whoever runs the bookshop threads account, it’s quite humorous. But sorry, I digress now.
17:19.29
Jon Lincoln
Yeah.
17:20.92
Amber Christian
So tell people, how do they learn more about goimagine? We haven’t talked about your free circle app yet either. Let’s talk about that, and then we’ll talk about where they go online to find more about goimagine.
17:28.65
Jon Lincoln
Oh yeah. No, I love that. So yeah, so yes so we we often talk about the marketplace and people look at goimagine as a marketplace. And from a buyer perspective, it is a marketplace, right? From the seller side, though, we really look at ourselves more as a handmade community. And the marketplace is just one facet of what we try to offer the handmade world. You mentioned we have a social app called Maker Circle.
17:52.47
Amber Christian
Mm hmm.
17:53.86
Jon Lincoln
It’s on both the Android and the iPhone app stores. It’s free. And that’s our version of, I’ll call it Facebook for the handmade world. So for anyone listening, you for free can download Maker Circle, join the community and start talking handmade. We have a lot of great groups in there that are always talking handmade, ah various, various topics, just like you would on any social app. Now inside of Maker Circle, we also have something called Maker Business Academy. And Maker Business Academy is our version of education teaching sellers how to sell better online. You know, so we offer a lot of tips and tricks and we do what are called shop critiques, teaching people what to do with their shops by using sample shops live. So education is a piece of what we do.
We also offer handmade websites, so maker websites. So if you’re looking for Shopify or Wix, we have our own version called Mosaic. And really at the end of the day, everything I’m talking about here is all different ways to provide back to the community, right? What can we give the handmade community we can help them with? That includes even locally. For anyone who’s in central Massachusetts, we do monthly meetups. um So we have food we get together in person.
So if you’re ever in central Mass, we do free classes and then we also do Just socials get together at a local restaurant, have some drinks and then talk handmade. Um, so yeah, so we offer a lot of different things there to find out more information to your point. I mean, we’re a website, goimagine.com. That’s the easiest thing. Go to goimagine.com. You can look at our mission page, browse the site, go to become a member if you want to become a member and see all the different benefits of different members. But, yeah, go to goimagine. That’s the place to be.
19:34.48
Amber Christian
Wonderful. Well, thank you so much for joining us today and thank you for being our sponsor for the season.
19:38.69
Jon Lincoln
Yeah, yeah, we’re happy to, listen, you’re supporting the handmade community as well. And for us, we want to support you because that’s really what it is, what it’s all about for us.
19:48.13
Amber Christian
Wonderful. All right. Well, you heard it here. GoImagine.com everybody. Go check it out and thank you so much for joining us today for our show.
19:55.64
Jon Lincoln
Thank you, Amber.
We hope you enjoyed this episode on a financial management system you won’t hate.
Want more of the Now What Show? Check out these previous episodes:
Episode 9: How I’m fusing jewelry craft, culture and education with Doug Napier
Episode 8: A financial management system for your business you won’t hate
Episode 7: How I’m iterating and learning to refine my target market with Megha Mundandishe
Episode 6: Creating marketing strategy through brand collaborations with Elaine Kinney
Episode 5: Getting Ready for your first craft fair with Nicole Stevenson
Episode 4: How my first wholesale order happened with Livvy Ramos of Fera Fox
Episode 3: Getting your first PR with Stephanie Blanchard
Episode 2: Establishing a web presence with Erica Martin
Episode 1: How I got my first large custom order with Lindy of apothecary 19
