Everyone growing a business has a theory: which offer will sell, which channel to focus on, what to charge. Most of it comes from instinct or someone's best month.
Bookmark collects what founders, operators, and creators actually tried and what happened. We pull from our panel, public data and conversations with people building things. Then each report shows what held up across all of it instead of one person's highlight reel.
Experimenting alone is slow because you only learn from what you try. When you can see what everyone else tried, you get there faster and can decide what to try next.
I co-founded Fathom, an underwater drone company that raised over $190,000 on Kickstarter and went through Techstars. I made every mistake a first-time founder can make and it turned out to be a pretty good education.
I spent the next five years at Yale's Tsai Center for Innovative Thinking building entrepreneurship programs and working with hundreds of founders. That's where I first noticed a pattern that's held true ever since: most people are building in silos and working through the same problems on their own. Bookmark is how I'm building bridges between them.
These days I run community at Bamboo Grand Rapids, a coworking and event space in Grand Rapids, Michigan. It's also where we host Show & Tell, a night where people present what they tried and what happened. I've worked with founders, operators, and creators for years at Yale and now at Bamboo. Bookmark is the resource I always wished I could hand them.
