After founding EurekaVision, a communications consulting company, in 2022, Rick Bowers began thinking about starting a few magazines and blogs to take advantage of his more than 30 years’ experience as mainly a magazine writer, editor and proofreader.
He’d also started a magazine more than a decade earlier, before abandoning it to take on a long-term contract as an editor for a related magazine.
Then, after leaving that magazine in 2020—you guessed it—he helped start another magazine.
If the advice to start a business related to your interests and experience is correct, Bowers might just be in the right business.
“Unfortunately, I didn’t have a lot of extra money just lying around to start a new business, and I certainly wasn’t able to pay a team of writers, editors, proofreaders, advertising salespeople, graphic designers, photographers and marketing folks,” Bowers says. “So, if I wanted to get these publications off the ground, it was up to me to do it all.”
Fortunately, as mentioned, Bowers had a background in writing, editing and proofreading multiple magazines and could do most of that part of the work himself. If he could do the graphic design, photography and illustration as well, he might be able to get a few magazines going on his own.
Fortunately, he also had some experience in each of those areas.
“I’d done some photography at conferences in a previous position,” Bowers says. “I’d also done layout and design for newspapers as a copy editor decades ago. And I had originally been an art major my first year in college before changing my career path to journalism. On top of that, I’d been a communications & public relations manager and had headed an advertising department for a magazine. So, I was pretty well set to start magazines and blogs.”
Bowers began brainstorming magazine ideas, and one of them turned out to be Founders 411X. He’d read and learned a lot about business in the past 30 years and was interested in publicizing information on the topic to help founders like himself.
Some of his confidence to start various publications came from the experience of one of his friends who had started a magazine over a year earlier. When he lost his graphic designer after about a year, he considered stopping his magazine as a result. Then, after a lot of consideration, he decided to try to design it himself using Canva.
Canva is a free online template-based graphic design tool. It can be used to create magazines, logos, social media posts, posters, annual reports, presentations, videos and much more. For those who want to get more features, it offers a Pro version for a small monthly fee.
Bowers’ friend was able to design his entire first issue using Canva, and it came out surprisingly good. He then designed another issue, also with success.
Bowers saw this as an opportunity to start his own magazines too using Canva.
He started coming up with the ideas for his articles and began writing them. At the same time, he began playing with some ideas for the design of Founders 411X on Canva using Canva Pro, a low-cost, higher-level version of the tool. It was $12.99 a month.
As he wrote more articles, he also began using artificial intelligence (AI) to help in various ways. Using ChatGPT, which also has free and inexpensive paid versions, he could quickly come up with first or early drafts of articles that he could revise extensively, adding information to make the articles his own. He never simply used a ChatGPT-written article as it was. He knew the articles needed more.
“AI is great for researching and writing information as a quick early draft, but AI-written articles don’t have the personality and ‘life’ of human-written articles,” Bowers says. “That could change in the future, but for now, I try to inject that feeling into the articles myself. In addition, AI-generated writing needs to be fact-checked and edited.”
Next, he began playing with an inexpensive image-producing AI platform called Midjourney, which he believed could help him produce images. It worked well, and he used it to make the cover image for this article.
Ultimately, by using technology such as Canva, ChatGPT and Midjourney, Bowers was able to produce several publications at a professional level cost-effectively.
And there’s more to come.
“I love Canva, ChatGPT and Midjourney,” Bowers says. “This technology is making it possible for me to start the businesses I’ve wanted to start for years. Everything just seemed to converge at once, and I knew that I should take advantage of it all. Now.”
A Note to Readers
I had tried to start publications in the past, but it was much more difficult because of the expenses and team needed to start and maintain them. Using this technology made it possible for me to do it now.
Have you tried a business in the past that didn’t work out because it was too expensive, you needed too many employees, or it was too time-consuming?
If so, is now the time for you to revive that idea? Would such a business have a greater chance of success now?
If you decide to start a business or have already done so, be sure to subscribe to Founders 411X and Founders 411X News for FREE information, tips, advice and encouragement.
