At Spoon University, we are a fundamentally new kind of media company, where all of the content is created by a network of contributors all over the world. Spoon creators have produced tens of thousands of pieces of content (thousands of which are videos) garnering over half a billion impressions every month.
People often ask us how we motivate a massive network of people to create content on Spoon. The answer is simple and less of a silver bullet than many would hope: we consider our contributors to be our top priority and primary customers. …
A couple years ago, Mackenzie Barth and I started a student publication at Northwestern. Then we had the crazy idea that we could turn it into a company. We had no clue what we were getting into.
We Googled how to incorporate a company. I taught myself to code. Kenzie talked with hundreds of students to see how Spoon could work at their schools too. About 6 months into the startup grind, as we were beginning to lose steam, we got into the Techstars accelerator program here in the city, and we learned exactly how much we didn’t know. …
A typical 30-second ad that you see on a Times Square screen probably cost about $300–450k to produce*. If you don’t find that shocking, you probably work in the industry. It’s even more shocking when, today more than ever before, “ordinary” people can produce high quality content without fancy gadgets and hundred-thousand-dollar budgets.
At Spoon University, we know this. …
