The History of Lumigrate's Funding

Depending upon when you read this, you'll maybe be able to see things the way we put things together for the launch of Lumigrate 18 months ago.  I'd taken a business planning/entrepreneurship class through our local Business Incubator Center, done the base work to look into the possibilities of doing a business to basically 'do with people online what I was doing with them in person' as their occupational therapist.  This generally translated into teaching them the 'occupation' of being a health care consumer in the 21st century, which is pretty complicated.  

A huge piece of that is education, but there weren't any websites I could find in those years (2005-7 or so) to direct people to.  I'd tell them 'something's not right with your body, you need to go to the doctor' and they'd come back mostly times saying 'they can't figure it out' or with a Rx for some sort of pill they really didn't want to take and which honestly didn't make sense to me compared to what I thought was going on.  I thought they were having undiagnosed food allergies or having other things causing inflammation in their bodies, for instance.  But since insurance didn't pay for that kind of testing the doctors don't do it or know about it, or both, typically. 

So Dr Young and I had our live "Fibromyalgia Forum" weekly in the medical building we worked in, and I was inviting the providers who the group had been helped by to come and speak.  SOME of those providers you will see in the videos on Lumigrate -- there are others!  We're really quite lucky in here, how many wonderful people there are.  Some of the providers came together to form an integrative medicine center eventually in 2008, and I believe I was the first person to sign a lease there.  The plan was that I'd see patients just like I did in my old building but since the IMC wasn't going to take insurance, I'd charge about half of what I did and not have the overhead of insurance reimbursement personnel, and I'd be in a dual marketing/provider role there, doing their marketing for no cost because what was good for their business was good for mine. 

I had received a 'surprise' inheritance from a cousin of my father who was an inspirational woman who was ahead of HER TIME in the women's athletics field, and who we can partly credit our 'Title IX' protection to.  I thought it was appropriate to take some of the money from her and put it to my savings which was depleted due to my medical issues and some to starting Lumigrate.  The numbers worked based on my reality at the time.  And an interesting detail: that check arrived by surprise the very week someone really good was coming to Forum and so very few people were there to hear it compared to who I know WANTED to come and I thought "I should record this and make a few copies for them"... and then "I wonder how hard it would be to put that on a website".  Um.. HARD .. and expensive -- video is expensive to produce.  And it's not that useful a medium for ALL people because many won't take the time to watch.  Even the providers you see on Lumigrate haven't watched each others seminars generally!  So I/ we learned from that.  (We = me and the advisors along the way.)  

Well, everything went awry that could go awry -- and I don't feel the need to explain the details of that here.  BUT, I do want to explain that I intially launched Lumigrate with a 'new concept' just in case people were up to it ... to have the information be 'pay as you go' so nobody had to wonder if the information on Lumigrate was influenced by the advertisors, as was what occurs with most websites.  The Internet was and still IS changing on a daily basis -- it's moving more to a 'pay as you go' thing, and I found it interesting today when I paid $25 for a paper version of the Shriver Report about women, caregiving, and Alzheimers (the electronic version is about $10 less). 

As a 'thank you' to the providers who recorded their seminar for no fee, prospecting that in the future if Lumigrate recovered the production cost on their video they would receive the % we agreed to in contracts, we went to a lot of expense to get free coupon codes for each video.  And something interesting came from that:  We ascertained that people weren't affected much by the COST of the video in money, it was the TIME FACTOR of watching a one hour, complete training.  See, until people learn to download then jump things to their televisions, they're not going to be 'educatable' through video, but the recession had come along about the time we were recording and a year or two AFTER I was planning to do Lumigrate.  If only I had a crystal ball, eh?

But the plan... yes that 'plan' from when I looked at starting Lumigrate, was that if the website couldn't become self-sustaining through enough people finding it and then paying for content to make it profitable, we'd just go to the usual model of advertising and affiliations and etc.  There's a 'typical time schedule' of when things happen with new websites.  And I am happy to say on EVERY ONE OF THEM, we've been on the early side!  I had my first request for a collaborative linking agreement within four months!  I had my first clinic randomly come in with an email and ask to do an affiliate agreement within six! (and they didn't meet my criteria so I didn't accept their offer).  All the while I honest was struggling finanically.  Badly.  

But I knew that it was good it was happening like that as I certainly must have been learning something I needed to know that would help me with my wisdom in 'what to do with Lumigrate'.  Because Lumigrate is 'organic'.. not as in 'without chemicals', though we do subscribe to that theory, but in 'changing in it's own way that's due to lots of natural reasons'. 

Which leads us to the fall of 2010, and having had for a couple of months now, interest by potential sponsors.  I know when I go to a website, I want to know who they are and how they make their money, and I intend to keep Lumigrate as 'obvious' about that as it always has been!  So I've let the sponsors know that I don't think it's appropriate to disclose amounts, but I will be very up for posting a piece in this Forum about why I approached them to be a sponsor (or they can say why they asked me if 'they started it' -- grins). 

The 'business plan' currently is being 'revised AGAIN' (it's like in perpetual revision -- we were really morphing very fast for a while and now very much 'settling into our groove'), and we're looking at keeping a LOT of the information no cost, as I now understand fully how scarce financial resources but lots of time translates into wasted opportunities to learn.  But some of the information we'll likely charge for BUT have a way for people to donate so that others can have opportunities for 'scholarships' if they meet criteria.  And ask anyone who knows me -- I'll make sure the person does SOMETHING for Lumigrate!  But that feels fair to me.  So for now, that's what we're doing!  We've added podcasts and will continue to build our readable content and get back to video again -- I still have the equipment to record and edit.  And I'm even being talked into doing affiliate agreements but I want to, like this area demonstrates, be 'visible' or 'transparent', whichever term you prefer.  I'll do whatever I have to do for people to be comfortable using Lumigrate.  

I hope this answers your questions and makes you comfortable being on Lumigrate if you weren't aware of how we work already.  I know when Lumigrate launched people were suspicious of everything to if I was 'real' or a fabrication of the pharmaceutical industry, and if we were selling snake oil or good oil!  I'll be happy to answer questions if you leave them.  And it will be nice to see comments here as well!  ~~ Mardy