Building in public: our startup and burnout recovery story.
I’ve been building things independently for most of my adult life. My partner Michael has too, whether it’s instruments, films, organizations, companies, or communities. After 11 years of living together but building apart, the Tiny Business Incubator is the place where I’m trying something new, and where I’m documenting his journey doing the same.
We are Chicago creators. We make things with our hands and our minds. Having both spent decades inside the grinding machinery of breakneck tech startups, rigid corporate digital marketing, and understaffed non-profits, we arrived at the exact same conclusion: the hour-for-dollar model is demoralizing, the venture capital model is exhausting, and burnout is real.
I wanted a better, human-centered business design, one we could both actually live inside. I am exceptionally good at starting things and setting them up to scale. But how to start a tiny business is a skill most people were never taught. That’s why I chose to focus my strengths here. I teach you how to start and sustain something small, and then we all grow our businesses together.
I built the first version of this alone. But the more I understood the shape of who actually needs this and why, the more I knew there was one person I wanted beside me: Aliza Sherman, who I’d already built something real with once before. She said yes.
About the Team
Melissa has been helping people navigate career and business transitions for over fifteen years. Long before entering the high-growth tech world, she was a life coach for solopreneurs from 2009 to 2012, helping individuals build their very first sustainable small businesses.
In 2010, she made the documentary Life in Perpetual Beta, exploring how technology was changing what it meant to live a less planned life. She crowdsourced the funding, crew, and interviews, distributing the film entirely herself while figuring things out publicly. She has been doing roughly that ever since.
Melissa went on to found Chicago Women Developers, growing it to 5,000 members. She has served as a COO, CMO, CTO, startup founder, and nonprofit executive director. She holds an MBA, which she pursued specifically to back-solve for what had worked in her community-building career. She began building the Tiny Business Incubator when her life partner hit a wall of exhaustion, sparking her own deep dive back into burnout recovery stories and alternative business models.
Aliza leads PR, content, and outreach at Tiny Business Incubator, alongside Melissa. She has been doing some version of this since before most people thought of the internet as a place to build a business: she founded Cybergrrl, Inc. in 1995, one of the first women-owned, full-service internet companies, and built Webgrrls International into a global networking organization for women that grew past 100 chapters and 30,000 members.
She is the author of 12 books, including Social Media Engagement for Dummies, The Happy Healthy Nonprofit, and Mom, Incorporated, and was named to Newsweek’s Top 50 People Who Matter Most on the Internet in 1995, one of only three women on the list, and Fast Company’s Most Powerful Women in Technology in 2009.
Aliza and Melissa aren’t new to working together. They previously built Ellementa side by side, where Aliza served as co-founder and Chief Content Officer. Tiny Business Incubator existed before Aliza joined, but once Melissa understood the shape of what she was building, she knew exactly who she wanted beside her again. At Tiny Business Incubator, Aliza films the video content, including course lesson introductions and short-form video, and is the point person for any future podcast or community partnerships.
Michael builds things. Synthesizers, mostly, what Melissa calls Automatic Joy Machines, a name that stuck so completely it became the tagline of his instrument shop, Unatronics. His machines make sounds that weren’t planned and couldn’t be predicted. He considers that a feature.
He also rides bikes, operates a CNC machine, a laser cutter, and a 3D printer. He spent the better part of two decades in digital marketing, work he was genuinely good at and eventually found genuinely corrosive. Social media, at scale, became something he couldn’t square with the things he actually believed. So he walked away. To be quite frank, he burned out, extra crispy.
Michael isn’t a co-founder of Tiny Business Incubator, he’s living the curriculum in real-time as a tiny business owner himself. He is currently navigating his own burnout recovery, figuring out which intersections of skill, demand, and margin make the math work for his synthesizer business without losing his peace. Melissa, of course, is documenting all of it.
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