Nvate Magazine (in-veyt) is a monthly publication available on Kindle, iPad, and Android; a limited selection of articles are available on Nvate.com as well. Nvate’s purpose is to highlight innovation, businesses and technology. The magazine covers a wide range of topics from automotive, science, technology, art, and much more. Entreviews’ had the opportunity of interviewing Beatty Jamieson, Founder and Business Developer of Nvate Magazine.
Read the original interview at Entreviews.
Daniel: Did you have a business or self-employment during your youth?
Beatty: Yes, I started my first venture in the seventh grade. Every Friday our History teacher would make us bring in two newspaper articles to present to the class, but everyone would forget to bring theirs. So I took a copy of my parents’ newspaper one Thursday night, cut out every single article, took a box of envelopes and packed each envelope with two articles. On Friday I came into school with my backpack busting with these articles. I sold the envelopes for $5 each all year long.
Daniel: In particular, did you have any sales or marketing experience? How important was it or lack of it, to starting your company?
Beatty: I didn’t really have any sales or marketing experience. The only sales experience I had was from selling fitness equipment at a sporting goods store. Experience could have made things easier, but I think that when you’re passionate about something your passion drives you to quickly learn.
Daniel: How did you spot the opportunity? How did it surface?
Beatty: I had been experimenting with different blogs, but nothing had taken off. Then I realized something. If you organized magazines and blogs by quality of writing going from left to right, on your left would be smaller independent blogs with only 1 or 2 writers, in the middle you’d have polished commercial blogs with many writers like Engadget and Gizmodo, then to the right you’d have actual magazines like Fast Company, Inc, and Popular Science. Basically, I saw blogs were related to magazines. Then I browsed the magazine section of the Kindle Store. I saw there were less than 80 magazines available to Kindle users. After a little research I was able to estimate the US Kindle user market consisted of 2 user groups, those that own a Kindle device and/or those that use the Kindle app on their iOS or Android devices. Combined, I estimated these user groups make up at least 1 million users looking to buy content in the Kindle Store. My plan was, “If I can be one of the first 100 magazines, I would get subscribers just from users browsing the store.”
Daniel: What were your goals? What were your lifestyle needs or other personal requirements? How did you fit these together?
Beatty: With any website I start, I just want people to use it. Even if it’s only 5 people a month, I want someone reading it. So with Nvate, my first question was, “can I recruit college students to write for us and believe in what I want to do?” When I was recruiting these kids in March, 2011, we didn’t produce our first issue until June. As you can see for several months there I had interns working for me and I was trying to recruit other interns that had no idea what we were doing. All they knew was that some random guy in Tennessee was calling them on the phone trying to convince them to spend their summer writing for me.
Daniel: That sounds hard to accomplish.
Beatty: Yeah, talk about a sales position. That was rather difficult. But, my first goal was just getting people on board with me and once we started producing content we paved a way for future interns to complete future goals. There were days when we only had ten people reading the magazine and it was horrible. Shortly after we began to snow ball and began getting picked up in different circles. I can recall the day that the Curiosity Mars Rover launched and we received around 15,000 page views in one day on that article alone. So then we began generating traffic and we saw it was time to monetize. We began monetizing on Kindle from day one, but I wanted to add advertising revenue to the website. I started talking to different ad reps all over the place and we were very lucky and got in with one of the top four ad reps in the world. They read our content and thought we would not be their largest client but found us interesting. Then we tried to find ways to tweak the content to be more appealing to our readers by introducing them to more revolutionary articles of things they didn’t know existed. Five percent of our readers have a Ph.D. So we are attracting that higher tier of educated people with people who are still in college writing for us. That’s awesome! Forty percent of our readers make over $100K a year and about 35% do not have children and they are dual income families.
Daniel: How did you evaluate the market for Nvate?
Beatty: We started off as a women’s business journal because I wanted to go for a niche market, but once I started developing the idea I kind of hit a roadblock. I brainstormed articles that we would have run and I sat down to the Women’s Business Journal idea and only had five ideas in a two-hour brainstorming session. That was all I had and that was never going to work. Taking it a step back, I went to the Business Journal idea and started thinking of all the business stories that I like as far as what I would want to write and all they had in common was innovation. They were about people like Elon Musk, who is being constantly told he can’t do something and then he goes out and proves people wrong. So I thought to myself, innovative business is a cool idea. But I also love green technology and other non-business topics. So I thought to myself that I wanted to write about those as well, so maybe innovation is what we need to be about.
Daniel: Did you find or have partners?
Beatty: No, it was just me in the beginning. I had people I would bring in to work with me and a bunch of interns that had great ideas.
Daniel: Did you ever seek any other financial options when you were starting Nvate?
Beatty: No, but I wish I had known that Kickstarter had existed when I started Nvate. I would have liked to have done a crowd funding project. We’re not the largest website but people are really interested in us when they find us. We don’t pay to advertise ourselves and I think that if I could have gone back and started it with the articulated message of what we are now and then do a Kickstarter funding project. I believe we could have had a stronger start if we could have had just a small pool of money to buy advertising and not only launch on Kindle, but launch on a dedicated iOS and Android app. That’s something that we have struggle with and have not been able to accomplish, but have always wanted to create a dedicated app. The development costs are just so high.
Daniel: Did you have a startup business plan of any kind? Please tell me about it.
Beatty: I did. It was only about a paragraph. I believe a business plan can be half a page.
Daniel: How much time did it take from conception to the first day of business? How many hours a day did you spend working on it?
Beatty: I started developing the idea probably five months before I executed it, before I started recruiting my first interns.
Daniel: About how many hours did you spend on Nvate in the beginning?
Beatty: I can get really obsessed with things and it’s easy to let it occupy all my time. I was easily working 40-60 hours a week on Nvate. I would come home from class (I only lived a mile from campus) and I would just obsess over it.
Daniel: How much capital did it take?
Beatty: I spent $15 on the domain name and that was my only startup cost. I looked into buying a name that was more inline with the innovation theme, but they were way too expensive so I made up a name that fit the theme and arrived at Nvate (pronounced in-veyt). I used a free WordPress theme that I liked and then I hacked it up into something more appealing and unique for Nvate. For our content management system I used WordPress because I was familiar with it and it was free. The server that I hosted Nvate on was already paid for because I was developing other sites and blogs on it, so it really didn’t cost me any extra to put Nvate on there. I needed unpaid interns just because I was committed to starting this thing with no money. So when I needed to start recruiting paid people, then I would try to work out a percentage and give them part of our profits. We grew slowly, but the advantage was that there was no risk of losing any money since we were just bootstrapping the business. Each time I start a venture it’s my goal to start it with as little money as possible. $15 is definitely my new record.
Daniel: How long did it take to reach a positive cash flow?
Beatty: I think our first month on Kindle we did no promotion and received 100 subscribers just from people stumbling onto us in the Kindle store. Then we were growing 30-40% month over month. But then after about a year of being on the market Amazon opened up the flood gates and let 550 new magazines hit the market and it diluted everybody a bit and slowed our growth.
Daniel: Did you ever feel pressured when you started Nvate?
Beatty: Hell yeah! In the beginning I was acting as our editor-in-chief and I remember one night I had all these interns blowing up my inbox with their articles. It was a mess and very stressful. Between that, hand coding our monthly Kindle issue, driving traffic to the site, and posting content to the site I felt a ton of pressure.
Daniel: What outside help did you get?
Beatty: We kept it pretty internal, starting with interns and promoting them into different positions. Now we have some staff writers, Linzy Novotny was one of our first interns, and now she is the editor-in-chief. We just brought in our own ideas from the outside and put them into the magazine.
Daniel: Did you have experienced advisors? Lawyers? Accountants? Tax experts?
Beatty: No, I wish.
Daniel: What do you perceive to be the strengths of your venture? Weaknesses?
Beatty: I think that one of our strengths is also a weakness. When readers find us, they recognize us as something rare, but at the same time that is a weakness because it can make us a niche magazine. It makes it difficult to easily explain to readers who we are and what we do.
Daniel: So it is like a double-edged sword, you are on the border of being a niche or being innovative.
Beatty: Exactly!
Daniel: Well you’re not going to please every demographic though.
Beatty: Yeah, we’ve never been worried about writing the magazine for a specific demographic. Linzy and I, just want to be happy in what we do and so far it has been good. Maybe we could be bigger if we did it differently but we’re happy with it, we’re happy with the results.
Daniel: What was your most triumphant moment?
Beatty: I think, getting that ad rep to pick us up was really exciting. Their largest client gets one billion page views a month and for them to take us on was pretty flattering. That they saw so much potential in us and wanted to add us to their advertising portfolio.
Daniel: Your worst moment?
Beatty: Failing to extend our brand with a print issue. Linzy and I had been working all winter on launching a Denver based print issue. She worked tirelessly on making this amazing layout of an 80 page magazine. We went to a printer and were all set to launch, but I couldn’t get enough sponsors to work with us. Businesses I talked to liked the concept and we had many distribution partners, but I just couldn’t get enough paying sponsors together. Linzy’s a phenomenal person to work with and we have some very talented writers. I really felt like I let down her and our staff.
Daniel: What were the most difficult gaps to fill and problems to solve as you began to grow rapidly?
Beatty: Mostly finding talent. Sometimes we would get really talented writers through our internship program and then school would pick up and they would disappear. We noticed this pattern where we would have an awesome magazine for the first two months of the semester and then finals would roll around and then suddenly our November and December issue doesn’t have enough content and we would be scrambling to fill it. One time I was on a road trip and writing articles in my car, tethered to my cellphone, uploading them to the website to make the deadline. We looked into incentivizing students with a paid internship, but instead we try to promote them to become staff writers.
Daniel: Have things become more predictable or less?
Beatty: More predictable. I think with business you find a rhythm. With my early e-commerce ventures I always found a rhythm of what to do and how much cash would be coming in and out. With Nvate we’re finding a rhythm with what kind of web traffic we get and how the internship program works. However, the rhythm isn’t written in stone but our internship is getting more popular and now we are getting overwhelmed with applicants. That’s a great problem to have. We used to want to take anyone that we could, but now Linzy would go crazy keeping up with everybody if we took all the applicants.
Daniel: Do you spend more time, the same amount of time, or less time with your business now than in the early years?
Beatty: I spend less time with Nvate than in the past. Because when Linzy took over as Editor-in-chief, she was real quick at taking responsibility from me. Especially when I moved to Denver, where she has her entire time with Nvate, she was able to take over the majority of my responsibilities so I could focus on other areas of expansion. I do the manual coding and more abstract things for Nvate and she does nearly all the rest, she does too much for me to list off the top of my head.
Daniel: Do you feel more managerial and less entrepreneurial now?
Beatty: I feel more entrepreneurial. As I have developed this business with Linzy, I’ve learned a lot about what works and what doesn’t. When you learn a new skill in business, it’s like putting a new tool in your toolbox. You might not exactly know what to do with it, but it’s there if you ever need it. Nvate has given us a lot of experience to help us go after new things. We feel like Nvate is a great success, but we’re really excited about new areas to expand. One new area is a political news website we’ll be launching soon. We’re taking that same idea behind Nvate that has attracted so many people from diverse backgrounds and applying it to a polarizing topic like politics in America. We are really excited to have the opportunity to apply what we have learned to do something even bigger and better than we did before.
Daniel: In terms of the future, do you plan to harvest, to maintain, or expand?
Beatty: Expand, definitely expand. You have to keep generating forward momentum or else you slow down and can potentially lose ground.
Daniel: In your ideal world, how many days a year would you want to work? Please explain.
Beatty: Well even on vacation I work. I get very focused and obsessive so I tend to work 7 days a week. In my perfect world I would live in an apartment above my office so I’d have an excuse to live at work.
Daniel: Do you plan ever to retire?
Beatty: No, I do not plan on it, especially because I have heard too many stories about business people dying within two years after retiring. I think it would be fun to one day teach business at a community college. I’ve been to a community college and I have been to a university. There’s nothing wrong with either one, but the people at the community college had full-time jobs and they really understood that they were choosing their time off work to go to class. They just seemed a little more passionate, more focused.
Daniel: Have your goals changed?
Beatty: Yeah, they are always changing. Every time we meet a new goal we expand our goals. They’re always inflating and getting bigger. We want to do something bigger than we did before.
Daniel: Has your family situation changed?
Beatty: Not really. I sold all of my possessions and my wife and I moved to Denver, Colorado in December 2012, but that’s about it. It’s pretty nice out here.
Daniel: Do you put back any of Nvate’s profits back into the business?
Beatty: With Nvate, we typically can bootstrap any expansion. I pay myself a small percentage of profits and put everything back in the business.
Daniel: How much time do you current devote to Nvate?
Beatty: Very little time on Nvate, but I spend a lot of time on the other projects Linzy and I are preparing to launch.
Daniel: So it is more of a passive income for you now?
Beatty: Yeah, definitely. Right now what Linzy and I are trying to figure out is how we can streamline Nvate so that when we launch Politickin.com, she and I can both be working without adding to her hours. Because she has been so phenomenal that I do not want to make this a grind for her, I want it to stay a fun job. We need to be sure whatever moves we make, if Politickin.com is going to require ‘X’ amount of hours a week from her then I want to free up ‘X’ hours a week for her from Nvate. So, we are working on some different models.
Daniel: So what exactly is Linzy’s background then?
Beatty: Linzy graduated from Metropolitan State University of Denver in 2011 with a bachelor’s degree in Journalism. She’s also interned with her local newspaper and began at Nvate as an intern. She was one of our first interns and did an amazing job. She seemed to really understand what Nvate needed to be in the early days when we had only been around for a couple of months. So I did whatever I could to keep her around.
Daniel: What have you learned so far from both success and failure?
Beatty: I’ve learned that when you fail it is more satisfying when you fail for your own reasons. I have a saying and I don’t know if I came up with it or borrowed it from something I read, but it goes like this. “Whatever you do today or tomorrow, own it.” It’s tough to fail when you take someone else’s advice. If you told me that we should write a certain article and we did and it received terrible reviews and we lost traffic because we offended people, I can’t blame that on me. I’d have to blame it on you so it wouldn’t be satisfying, I wouldn’t own that failure. If I make a bad decision and it hurts the magazine I learn something from that, I can own that failure. If you succeed you’d own it right? That’s especially true when you fail. Own your failure. People will respect you for it and you’ll learn a lot from it.
Daniel: What were/are your most demanding conflicts or tradeoffs you face (e.g., the business versus personal hobbies or a relationship, children, etc.)?
Beatty: Time management and communication. Everyday I get a ton of emails and I don’t have time to go through all of them. So really it’s staying organized staying in contact with everybody.
Daniel: Was there a time when cash was hard for Nvate?
Beatty: Yes, at the beginning when we first began to see a little money trickle in. We had all of these really talented interns that were from the first couple groups that came in. I really wanted to hire them on, for their talent, but we were limited by our funding.
Daniel: Right but you have been a rare find being able to offer any compensation through an internship. The majority of internships offered pay nothing at all.
Beatty: Yeah, especially writers, nobody pays for them. Usually companies give writing interns crap jobs, but we really value the ideas of our interns and their passion. During an interns interview they pitch three article ideas. Based on those three article ideas is how we decided who we want to work with or not. When I did the interviews, I would always reject one weakest idea and talk about their best two. I’d flesh the ideas out with them to see how receptive they were to direction. Your passion would come out in your article and you would be able to pump out a two or three thousand word article that was about all the possibilities around a topic. I think that is one way we’re really different. I had done some consulting work for a magazine previously and they had a seniority issue. They thought if you were an intern that your ideas shouldn’t go to print. They thought that your ideas should be completely ripped apart and then thrown away eventually. Here at Nvate, we really value our writers’ ideas and their passion. I think that’s where we differ from other internships.
Daniel: How has Nvate affected your life positively?
Beatty: It’s fun to see young writers get a start from us, to use us as their career launching point. I get a lot of joy from that. When I was finishing my Entrepreneurship Degree from Middle Tennessee State University, it gave me a lot of confidence to have a success like Nvate to show my peers and professors.
Daniel: Negatively?
Beatty: Time management once again, we had some tight deadlines in the beginning year. When I was in school, there would be time I might go that entire night not sleeping from coding our Kindle issue. I’d code for fourteen hours straight. Once I got done uploading it to the server and testing it then I would hop on my bike and go to class, maybe do poorly on a test since I had not slept in a day or two. There have been several times where I had to miss sleep because things weren’t quite done on time, but it’s one of those tradeoffs that you’re happy to have. The negative things are kind of fun, you can still learn from them.
Daniel: Has your wife supported you through all of this?
Beatty: Yeah, definitely.
Daniel: Have there ever been situations?
Beatty: No. Entrepreneurs have to know that if you’re in a marriage that’s a partnership that comes ahead of any other business partnerships. You have to know when to back off of certain things. Sometimes I’m not as self-aware as I should be. Those times Lynell has to reel me back in. She’s helped me stay in step and pay attention to our relationship, while still encouraging me to go for what I believe will be successful.
Daniel: What do you consider your most valuable asset, the thing that enabled you to make it?
Beatty: Creativity.
Daniel: An intangible asset.
Beatty: Yeah, I think creativity is really important and I think a lot of people in business school do not teach it enough.
Daniel: Well, it is rather difficult. I find business to be more of the structural grounds to capture creativity.
Beatty: Of course, but there were certain classes that we had to take in business school that seemed a bit misleading. Where the name of the course would imply you were going to create and critique a business idea, but really you’re writing a sixty-page business plan. You know exactly what class I am talking about.
Daniel: Indeed I do.
Daniel: If you had it to do over again, would you do it again, in the same way?
Beatty: I would have liked to see it develop quicker, but I’m happy with where we’ve been, where we are and where we’re going.
Daniel: As you look back, what do you believe are the most critical concepts, skills, attitudes, and know-how you needed to get your company started and grown to where it is today?
Beatty: I think being open and understanding of the people to work with. You may believe that people are below you, that they might just be an intern, but they may have better ideas than you and you need to be open enough to recognize that. I think you need to be open to recognize good ideas and people with potential. It’s like the saying, “the cream always rises.” It always does, but only if you have an open atmosphere where you value ideas over someone’s ranking. I think a lot of businesses miss out on talent because they are not open to people’s ideas.
Daniel: What about for the next five years?
Beatty: I think we definitely need to keep openness and keep passion. We need to be more connected so that we have a sense of these new ideas that no one knows exist, so we can help lift those ideas up and really get them popular.
Daniel: How do you see getting that point across to everyone else that is on your team? Isn’t that going to be difficult using interns that will come and go?
Beatty: Oh it’s going to be hard, but the thing is our magazine is all about passion and creativity. You cannot teach passion and creativity to people. They just have to have it. So the way we can accomplish that goal and keep longevity in the business is to be very careful of who we bring in as interns. We need to make sure that when we see talent and passion that we do whatever it takes to keep them happy and working with us. Hopefully over time we will accumulate this big team of talented, passionate, creative writers that want to change the world by writing for Nvate.
Daniel: How would you say it compares with other “hot seat” jobs, such as the head of a big company, or a partner in large law or accounting firm?
Beatty: I’m sure they feel more stressed. Our organization is so small, a lot of times I don’t sweat making a weird or risky business decision because I’m thinking, “who am I going to hurt?” We don’t have 2 million subscribers; we don’t have a 500 member staff.
Daniel: Right, it’s a service you are providing, all you can really do is offend people or provide misinformation.
Beatty: Right, or we just don’t meet their standards.
Daniel: Right, but that doesn’t really hurt them, they have either the voice of choosing you or not.
Daniel: What things do you find personally rewarding and satisfying as an entrepreneur?
Beatty: Seeing people really flourish, seeing their content on our website, and seeing people reading it. That is what gives me the warm tingles for Nvate. When I see an intern’s content hit our website, and I see that it got liked on Facebook 70 times in a day, that lets me know that my website gave that person a portal to get that out there.
Daniel: What have been the risks and tradeoffs?
Beatty: The risks would be connecting myself to something that could possibly offend people. I don’t want to connect my personal self to my business self, but I’m forced to. Tradeoffs, I guess you’re putting yourself out there and if the website fails, everyone is going to know it. All my friends know this is my website, all my family knows it, people I don’t even know, know it.
Daniel: Who do you feel should try to be an entrepreneur and who should not?
Beatty: I think everybody should try. I think that it’s hunger and a willingness to learn, a curiosity about the world. The hunger keeps you working harder than everybody else in your market. It’s like what Elon Musk says. If he’s willing to work 100 hours a week and his competition’s willing to work 40 hours a week. In five months he will get accomplished what it would take them a year to do. So I think that hunger encourages you to not sleep at night and just work and curiosity feeds your hunger by never being satisfied. What I was curious about was how would a web business like Nvate work. I had never in publishing before and my hunger and curiosity and kept me pushing along.
Daniel: What advice would you give an aspiring entrepreneur?
Beatty: Try something as soon as possible, don’t wait, don’t wait until you’re out of college. I hated that when I was in business school and people would say, “I’m going to start a business when I get out of college.” I would ask, “what business do you plan to start?” and they would reply, “oh I don’t know…” It’s great that you’re only in college for twelve hours a week because you can spend the rest of the time thinking of what kind of business you wanted to be in. In my 4 years at MTSU I created and sold 2 e-commerce sites, a vending machine business then started Nvate. It’s the best time of your life to take a risk.
Daniel: Can you tell me the three most important lessons you have learned by being an entrepreneur?
Beatty: Manage stress, I can be a very impatient person sometimes, I want things done now. Sometimes I get very stressed out just waiting on someone to get back to me. If there is a confrontation I want to resolve it then and there. Sometimes you have to wait several days before you can resolve something with somebody and you can’t lose sleep over it. You just have to put it to the side and move on, because you don’t want that turning into a grudge with that person. I may not get along with that person but they may be key with helping your business succeed. Relationships with people are also important, keeping the peace, resolving confrontation, respecting people’s space and time. Also, not letting yourself get so bogged down that you are forced to stop creating and innovating. I think that with any business it never hurts to innovate. Keep growing and keep learning from both your mistakes and successes.
