What I’ve Learned from a DTLA start-up accelerator
For the past eight weeks, my newly founded company, Trivia LA, has been a part of Grid 110, a non-profit startup accelerator based out of DTLA. They don’t take equity, they don’t charge money — their funding comes from the mayor’s office and they’re vested in growing a diverse start-up ecosystem in the city.
Here are some of the biggest lessons I learned.
- You’re probably undervaluing yourself, and by extension, underpricing yourself.
This was my biggest takeaway from the program. In the early stages, it’s easy to feel like we need to price ourselves cheaper in order to compete with the market — after all, we’re new and unestablished. Why would companies and bars choose to go with Trivia LA if not for lower prices?
Nonsense.
Between the two of us, Chris and I have a combined 15 years of experience hosting, writing, and playing trivia. We may not have been running a company this whole time, but we’ve been in the trivia scene for a hot minute and know what it takes to facilitate a great game.
We’re experts at what we do and we’re goddamn good at it.
We ought to be pricing ourselves based on the value we bring, not based on fear of the market and competitor pricing.
We’ve also learned that for large companies, team-building events are a tax write-off. Thus, trivia night is a tax write-off. All the more reason we shouldn’t be dirt cheap.
Since the program, we’ve increased our prices for private events by 300%, and we’ve been told that we need to go higher. This may sound like an enormous jump, but it makes sense given our level of expertise. Chris used to run a very popular game at Rock & Reilly’s in DTLA, and I ran an enormous game of 23–25 teams/week at Angel City Brewery in Arts District.
At our most recent event, I was even tipped $100 on top of the new price. Clearly many of these companies can afford our higher rates, and when you divide our rates by the number of people participating, it’s much cheaper than taking the whole office out to an escape room or paint night.
Know your worth. Know your value. And charge for it.
2. You need a co-founder with complementary skills.
I didn’t realize this until we were going through the program, but it’s so important that you and co-founder don’t have matching skill sets. Otherwise, you’ll only want to do the same jobs, and other jobs will be left on the backburner.
Thankfully, Chris and I have very complementary skills — Chris is a wizard with Photoshop, and he’s the one who designed our logo, our color scheme, and our answer sheets. In short, he addresses all things requiring Photoshop magic. Thank God. I have no eye for design, and sitting on Canva putting together Instagram posts is torturous (Speaking of which, follow us on Instagram and Twitter! Reward all my hard work on Canva!).
I take more of a lead on the pitching front, and I’m constantly bothering friends to CC us in an email with their company’s events manager or local bar owner. Oh hello there friend reading this. Do refer us!
3. When you’re branding, keep in mind who you’re serving.
One of our key breakthroughs during our time with Grid 110 was our logo design. We struggled long and hard on this. My initial instinct was something sleek and urban — I envisioned something black and white, incorporating the LA skyline. Chris was aghast. Black and white? Good God Lynn.
We then hired someone to do a mock-up for us, and she came back with a bright orange logo with an L shape. It was interesting, but ultimately not what we were going for.
During one of our Grid 110 sessions on branding hosted by Nikolay of Subb, we had an epiphany — our company is very vested in serving the people of Los Angeles, especially downtown Los Angeles. We wanted a logo that would be of the city. We would incorporate the LA metro lines into the words TRIVIA LA — the LA would be white on a black circle, much like the Metro logo, and we would have multi-colored train lines snaking through the word “TRIVIA.” After all, what is more urban than a city’s public transportation?
But then one of our advisers at Grid 110 pointed out that the Metro is not nearly iconic enough. If this were New York, yes. People in LA don’t really register the Metro. They do, however, register road signs, since they spend so much time sitting in their cars.
The most recognizable road signs are the green rectangles that dot the freeways of Los Angeles. But we didn’t really want our colors to be dark green and white.
Then something hit us — the LA street signs are all blue. They have a distinct font and color scheme and shape.
We would keep the same font and go with a lighter, friendlier blue. This ultimately led us to our current logo:
I’m a huge fan. Simple, clean, and evocative of the LA street sign. Hire us, LA.
4. There’s a lot more resources out there than you realize.
Both Chris and I come from the entertainment industry. As artists, we’re used to being broke and scrabbling together rent money while trying to write/act/music; we’re surrounded by a lot of friends who are in similar situations.
In Grid 110, we learned a lot about Series A funding, VC funding, equity, and the whole shebang. One guest speaker number-dropped a dizzying array of figures — “Yeah with this company, I raised $10 million off a deck, then with this other company I raised $25 million off a deck.”
Grid 110 is a part of PledgeLA, an alliance organized between major venture capital firms and the mayor’s office to encourage diversity in LA’s start-up ecosystem. In 2017, LA regional venture capital raised $5 billion.
What in the hell.
There is so much money out there for the taking, so many resources and spaces and funding up for grabs — it’s about knowing it exists and nabbing it.
I mean shit, there’s so many resources out there that a small trivia company like ours was accepted into what was essentially a free MBA crash course, something I imagine would be unthinkable in Silicon Valley.
Do your homework. Get what’s yours.
5. Know why you’re doing what you’re doing.
I thought Grid 110 would give us a lot of nuts and bolts information, such as “What is the difference between an LLC and a C-corp?” (I still don’t know). Instead, a lot of our sessions involved workshopping our WHY.
WHO AM I?
WHAT DO I DO?
WHY DOES IT MATTER?
I sometimes felt like I was in a spiritual counseling session … for my company. I know this was incredibly helpful for many people in the program, and I think anyone starting out should be asking themselves these questions.
Trivia LA has always known why it’s doing what it’s doing.
- We want people to have a good time.
- We want people to learn more about the world around them.
Trivia just happens to be the forum in which we’re doing it.
A lot of people have asked us about scaling. How will we scale? Won’t our name make it difficult to expand nationally? Will we design an app?
Trivia LA is intended to be the ultimate day job. I’m still pursuing a writing career and Chris is still pursuing an acting career. Once the machine of Trivia LA really gets going, we should hopefully be spending at most 20 hours a week on the company.
So no, we’re not looking to start a national trivia empire. We’re not worried about scaling. (Also please see: LA Fitness. They’re doing fine despite having a regional name).
We want people to have a good time.
We want people to learn more about the world around them.
So come play.
Thank you to Grid 110 for our start-up life crash course! Thank you to Alex, Miki, Justin, Emmanuel, and the Cross Campus staff for carving out a space for us in DTLA. Thank you to all the wonderful people in our cohort for being so amazingly supportive (and a special shout-out to Frances, founder of Come&Gone, for taking professional photos for our website). Y’all are inspiring, and I can’t wait to see you get what’s yours.
We’ll see you around the city, friends.
