If you’re going to follow along while we build this thing in public, you should probably know who “we” are. There are three of us. Here’s each one, and why we’re doing this at all.
Niki
Niki Burawski is the creative engine. She’s a fine artist with a deep, almost unfair range of craft skills, a designer, an event planner who can run a whole event start to finish, and a Montessori teacher who spends her summers running camps and the rest of the year offering solo and small group art classes and workshops out of her home studio. If Start Small Farms makes something by hand, odds are Niki either made it or worked out how.
Niki holds a BFA from the University of Pennsylvania and is Montessori Certified. She and I have been best friends for years. In that time I have learned that there is no limit to Niki’s creativity and capability: traditional 2D art (acrylic, oil, pencil, and watercolor), uber-realistic felted wool animals, hand sculpted clay creations, custom book nooks with supplies all found in nature, live plant and cut flower arrangements for events or gifting, furniture refinishing and restyling. The list. goes. on. and. on.
We’re both in our forties, both feeling the pull toward something new: more making, more in-person connection, more real things in the real world. Niki is the one on the ground driving the day-to-day, generating ideas, teaching, and actually building. Her one rule for me, which I love: full honesty, always. Tell her if something isn’t working.
Jason
Jason Coleman is my husband, the tech and finance brain, while also a deeply creative person himself. He holds a BS from Haverford College in Computer Science with a Creative Writing Minor from Bryn Mawr. You read that right: tech and creative writing.
He’s also my business partner. We started Stranger Studios together in 2006 and launched Paid Memberships Pro in 2011, so if “working with your husband” sounds like a red flag, I get it. For us it isn’t a leap of faith. It’s a nearly twenty-year track record of building things together and still liking each other at the end of the day.
His one goal right now is to facilitate a space where creatives can connect. We don’t know yet if that is through single-day events, multi-day workshops, or multi-month artist residencies (we use the term artist loosely here - hello tech startups, writers, musicians, painters, and more).
The thesis goes something like this: almost nobody gets to be creative day to day. He wants creativity to be a real, sustainable path, not the thing you squeeze in after the real work is done. But most artists he knows can’t figure out how to make a living from their art.
As a successful entrepreneur himself, Jason knows the money side and is ready to teach it.
He also thinks a lot about the future through the “Human > AI > Human” lens. We use AI in everything we can (at work and not at work). But, we don’t use AI in places where it sacrifices our own creativity. We use it as an extension of ourselves.
How will people keep making and creating in a world tilting hard toward AI? We don’t have the answer for that one, but it’s something Start Small Farms is helping us figure out.
Kim (hi)
That’s me. I’m the glue. I’m endlessly full of ideas and want to learn how to do everything, which is either a superpower or a curse depending on the day. I run the website and the socials, and I’ve got a pile of skills I’m excited to teach. Mostly I want to work with my hands, make things, and (this is the whole thing for me) make small moments a tiny bit better for the people around me. I’m a human scaffold. I’m the sprinkles on an ice cream cone: I can make a really great thing even better.
Jason (not so jokingly) says that I am capable of solving anything/doing anything. He’s probably right, because I do not stop when it gets hard or messy. And I have gigantic dreams.
I hold a BS in Business Administration from Villanova University, with a concentration in Entrepreneurship, which I’ve been putting to work ever since. Start Small Farms is the creative, human, offline counterweight to two decades spent behind a screen. Same person, very different muscles.
How we fit
Niki makes and runs. Jason keeps us honest with the numbers and the tech. He reminds us this isn’t about monetary profits. It’s about the intangibles. I glue it together and chip in everywhere they’ll have me.
None of us has the whole thing figured out, which is sort of the point. We’re not launching a finished company. We’re taking one small, real first step, then the next one, and writing it all down as we go.
That’s who we are. We’re glad you’re here.
— Kim