Here's An Easy Solution To One Of The Biggest Problems Entrepreneurs Face

There’s something about nostalgia. Millennials in particular seem drawn to it — they wear vintage clothes, play shuffleboard and craft; they listen to vinyl records and love artisan everything. Maybe the simplicity of another era is comforting amid the fast-paced, over-exposed age of the internet in which they grew up.

When you meet 34-year-old Sam Utne, Managing Director of co-working space Impact Hub NYC, he himself has an air of the old-school. So it’s not surprising that when he had a very modern problem to solve — how to give entrepreneurs, founders and side hustlers at Impact Hub the support they need to succeed on a path that can be fulfilling, but also lonely and frustrating — he looked to the past.

“People join co-working spaces for two reasons – seemingly diametrically opposed: to have a quiet place to focus and work, and to learn from other people and share resources, to bring them out of the isolating journey of entrepreneurism,” says Utne. But “those two things are impossible in same moment,” continued Utne. “So how do we form community that gives access to each other and also structure for focused work and learning, support?”

Utne found inspiration for the solution in the famous writing and academic groups throughout history, like The Bloomsbury Group, with early 20th Century writers (like Virginia Wolf and E.M. Forster), artists and intellectuals (like John Maynard Keynes) in London; Stratford-on-Odeon, famous for members like Gertrude Stein, Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald in Paris in the 1920s; and The Socrates School, thinkers from about 400 BC, including Socrates and his famous students Plato and Xenophon. (The inspiration is also fitting because Utne is the son of Eric Utne and Nina Rothschild Utne, founders of the Utne Reader, which spawned reader salons in the 1980s and 90s.)

These historical groups shared friendships and ideas; they relied on each other for debate, inspiration and support — all things today's entrepreneurs, often alone with their computers or communicating via Slack with teams states or countries away, need.

For Utne, the idea for Impact Hub's Founder Cohorts was born.

The cohorts were an experiment in collaboration, in crowdsourcing knowledge and in accountability, according to Utne. The goal was to provide a workspace where women founders could come together to share challenges and needs, give advice and feedback, and set goals with each other. “We were trying to bring community to what is traditionally a siloed experience,” he says.

Utne and his team enlisted like-minded businesses to sponsor* cohorts of five women entrepreneurs each. The first cohorts, which began in the fall and winter of 2016, were chosen by Women@Forbes, fashion brand Eileen Fisher and women's entrepreneur community Dreamers // Doers.

Beginning in October through the end of December, the women, who were strangers before this cohorts trial run, met at the Impact Hub on Broadway in Manhattan to check in, chat, ask questions, get support. They came armed with questions around founding and fundraising, but mostly with a thirst for connection and support from other women entrepreneurs.

It's a real need: The isolation entrepreneurs face can not only cause psychological problems due to a dearth of emotional support, but also functional ones — going it alone can lead to a less diverse skill set and a diminished capacity for innovation, according to a study published by the American Sociological Association. And the issue is especially pronounced for women: 90% of female-owned businesses are a one-woman show, and women entrepreneurs often cite a lack of support as a barrier to success.

The experiment certainly tapped into something.

“You have to have a community around you. It’s really critical because it’s so hard,” says Ashwini Anburajan, founder of data company OpenUp and part of the Women@Forbes cohort. “People talk about mastermind groups, and I feel like that’s what the cohort was — we would talk and they would provide a deeply constructive space to talk and be heard.”

With the Women@Forbes cohort, the members – including Anburajan; Amy Rothstein, founder of chai concentrate company Dona Chai; Allison Esposito, founder of tech community and job board Tech Ladies; Nicole Giordano, founder of indy fashion designer community and website StartUp Fashion; and Jeanne Pinder, founder of Clear Health Costs, a healthcare cost transparency website —  asked each other questions, bounced ideas off each other and commiserated.

"It was great to have other women to talk to about launching my company," says Esposito. "Sometimes it was just helpful to talk to other people who understand how hard it is to be an entrepreneur, especially in the early stages where you are doing every single job from growth to web development to packing boxes and handling your own customer service."

And when someone had expertise that another needed, they shared. Pinder, for example, was journalist for the New York Times for 23 years. So when some of the other women had questions about garnering press, Pinder (and Women@Forbes staff members) gave mini-seminars on the topic.

“There was also an element of accountability that I liked," says Giordano. "The idea that every Thursday, I was going to go talk to these women made me pumped to work on my business,” says Giordano. “It was accountability and inspiration to keep going.”

And there was measurable ROI, too. Anburajan walked away with five-figure fundraising check based on advice from the cohort.

“I had just gone through this massive process with an angel group and then they decided not to invest So I had asked the woman taking [me] through [the process] to invest. I didn’t hear back from her, so I assumed she decided not to,” explains Aburajan. “But I talked to the group about it, and they said, ‘No — talk to her. She believed in you.’ I followed through and she invested and has become one of our best advisors.” It turns out she was a little taken aback that the angel group said no, too, and she didn’t know what I expected from her as investor and that’s why she hadn’t answered.”

And Giordano helped Esposito solve a nagging problem she had been facing.

"Nicole was able to really guide me," says Esposito. "She's been running a company that is also a community for years and gave me some great advice on how to open up our paid membership tier. She suggested we open it for just one week which was great advice. That way, we can grow slowly and focus on delivering really great value to our members. If we had opened it on a rolling basis, I think we'd be struggling to keep up with demand. This simple tip helped us a lot."

Other cohort members from Dreamers // Doers and Eileen Fisher also reported takeaways like being introduced important business connections through their fellow members, getting help on their website and also with marketing ideas. And women from each cohort said they will be collaborating on future projects with other cohort members.

By Utne's estimation, all this made the experiment a success. So much so that, not only is he continuing the Founder Cohort program for other businesses interested in sponsoring cohorts, but he is thinking of automatically putting new Impact Hub NYC members into some sort of cohort when they join, so that they come in as a "family."

It's a sentiment that resonated with the Women@Forbes cohort. Perhaps Rothstein captured it best: "The cohort made me feel a part of something."

*Disclosure: There is typically a fee paid to Impact Hub by companies sponsoring a cohort, however the fee was waived for Women@Forbes.