dARTbase

The Boosting Female Founders Initiative is a grant to help female founders of start-up businesses to launch and scale their businesses into domestic and global markets.

We spoke to Gemma Colbran from dARTbase to chat about her journey and how the Initiative helped expand her start up.

How did you find out about the Female Founders Initiative?

I have signed up to a few different grant portals in the past (I believe I found this through Waverley Council grant portal). These portals are super helpful in seeing everything that is available to a founder.

What motivated you to start your own business?

I had an intense desire to solve the problem space of artists struggling with their businesses. At the time I didn’t know what the word entrepreneur or founder were, only that I wanted to help artists.

What is the most valuable information you learned in the Female Founders Initiative?

That it’s not only okay, it’s crucial, to take time out and look after yourself. As a founder you can feel like you need to do everything all at once, but if you are not strong yourself and building an even stronger support network and sustainable habits, ultimately the business will suffer.

Setting achievable goals and outlining the pathway to get there is also another key thing that I learned, and it formed the basis of my business management and organisational skills.

What services and/or products do you provide?

dARTbase is a platform which connects artists and the people they work with. We allow artists to take centre stage in selling their skills and controlling their career by showcasing their skills to prospective clients to access a wealth of job opportunities. We empower clients to find artists which match their niche artistic desires as well as tailored to their price, locality and experience requirements.

Once connected, our platform standardises the project management workflow right through to payment. Our platform helps find artistic collaborators from, costume, makeup, props, set design and musicians for anything including marketing, film and tv, film clip, event or festival.

What challenges have you had to face since starting your business? How have you overcome these challenges?

I am the primary carer for my grandmother and as such my daily workflow is often disrupted when I need to do tasks for her. However, we have worked really hard during COVID on her mental and physical health and moved back home to QLD to be closer to family for extra support. This has allowed me more time to focus on my business – which she is extremely supportive of.

As a benefactor of Centrelink bootstrapping my start-up is harder than most, my overall income is already below the poverty line in Australia. As a result of this I raised funds through a crowd fundraise on Pozible.com which gave me the funding to apply for a MVP grant while I was living in NSW. This enabled me to build my service.

What have been some of the highlights of operating your own business?

Having operational and creative control over the direction of and branding of the business. Being able to show our service to artists and to have them respond with “I’ve been waiting for a service like this,” or “this is so good it makes me want to cry knowing it’s going to help me with my business.”

But more importantly, I like to appreciate every little win because being a start up is tumultuous and you never know how far your journey will go. I remind myself that I’ve gained so many skills and made so much progress every day because the journey ahead of me is a long one.

What is one piece of advice you can give to others thinking about starting their own business?

If you had all the money in the world and guaranteed success, what would you do? For me it is always to start my business. So whether I win or lose, I’ll know at the end of my life that I gave it a shot. I’d rather have tried and failed than not tried at all.

You can learn more about dARTbase through their Website, Facebook and Instagram.