Welcome to The Paper Crane Factory.
By Cal McAllister
We consider ourselves to be a venture capital firm, but our capital is creative time. We were founded in 2018 on the principle that creativity solves everything, and put that into practice as a full service agency and incubator that works with a different premise.
In our past lives, everything was about the billable hour. In order for an agency to be successful and grow, it meant jobs needed to take longer, or have more and more bodies thrown against them. Our clients were asking for exactly neither of those things. That proved to us the billable hour was broken as a business model. Everything became about the budget, not about idea. It was messed up.
In our new model, we partner with early-stage companies and take equity instead of profits. Of course there are still hard costs- media comes with a price tag, our landlords don’t accept high fives as payment, etc. But in joining founders and betting everything on their success, it allows us to focus on how best to solve business problems. Since we aren’t making money on their money, budget conversations are entirely about who and how many people we can reach, not if we can make any money on the job. Simply, it turned clients into partners.
We’re constantly learning about this. There is no shortage of people with great ideas and not enough money to bring them to life. So we developed a series of filters to guide us in spending our most valuable and limited resource as mentioned above- our time.
Compelling ideas are table stakes. We look at three other things. People, market, and timing.
We are truly going into business with every partnership we take. So question number one, do we want to go into business with those folks? Can they grow the company from two women and a dog to 500 people? 10,000? Would we take their calls at midnight? Would they take ours? Are they the type of leaders who, in the face of challenge and change maintain poise and relentlessness? Who they are is what we will all become. Do we want that?
Second, we look at the market. Everyone wants product market fit. We look for product customer fit. Startups need to explore what single individual will drop everything else and add them to their lives. We will pick up other customers along the way, everyone does. But can we identify the person who, if we were taken away, would be absolutely miserable without us? How many of them are there?
Finally, timing. Almost every idea is either too early or too late. Is there anything happening right now that allows what we are doing to be both disruptive and essential? The world doesn’t need a better typewriter repair shop, nor does it need a jetpack refurbishing plant. Or if it does, it doesn’t need a multinational outfit of them. Not at the moment.
So who is a perfect fit? Lots of folks, actually. Our goal is to take founders from the idea stage into a friends and family raise (people who believe in them), through the part where they think it’s time to hire a VP of Marketing (it probably isn’t yet), all the way to a Series A investment when institutional money says, yes, it’s time to share this thing with the world. Through that moment, we’re a fit. And probably after that moment, too. Our goal is to grow partners into companies that need us even more as they go to market. How long is that journey? Different every time. We target 18 months or less.
Are we good at it? We think so. We have a dusty shelf with more than 20 years of international advertising awards that represent other people thinking so, too. We’ve launched global products, sports teams, footwear lines. A lot of that work can be seen here. The most important people to ask? Our partners. We’d be happy to connect you to any one of them.
There isn’t a lot of spare time, but if we find some we work on our own products in our incubator, aptly named Creativity Solves Everything. There’s constantly something cooking. It’s a big reason we’re doing this.
So, are you a good fit? We love hearing what ideas are inspiring people’s passion. Please reach out, we’ll make time for you. Also, send us an email at contact@papercranefactory.com and we’ll add you to our quarterly-ish newsletter where we’ll show some work and brag about our partners.
