“I knew I was going to hit a wall,” says a smiling Elise Guerin, remembering the early days--just last year--of becoming an entrepreneur.

The wall she’s talking about was an abrupt change in working style: after five years at Amazon, Guerin decided to go solo on a project she wanted to launch by herself. Her instinct was to start by doing a lot of training, from website-building to marketing, which she mostly did alone behind her computer. “When you work at Amazon, you have so many departments that can do these things for you,” she says, laughing.

Although the 32-year-old from Lyon says that toiling alone for so long might have been a mistake, it was only a matter of months before she connected with Luxembourg’s community of entrepreneurs. Specifically, she joined Co-Créateurs, an asbl made up of other business hopefuls who meet up to exchange feedback. This accelerated and matured how she thought about her own project in a deeply affirmational way: when asked what she might have done differently that first year, she mentions surrounding herself more quickly with entrepreneurs.

“When you try to talk to your family, for them to understand--or even to your ex-colleagues, who are really clever, obviously…” she begins to say, not finishing the sentence. Instead, she jumps to her point of comparison: “When I started to meet entrepreneurs, I was surprised at how quickly they”--she snaps her fingers--“get what you’re thinking about, how you want to implement your project.”

Speaking to Guerin now, only months after she joined this community, you nevertheless get the impression of a natural entrepreneur (though, mercifully, without the universe-conquering bravado of some of her ilk): she is fast-witted, considerate and enthusiastic. , the product of her yearlong effort, went live on 2 May.

Share & Create

“The project was really born when I was looking for workshops to do, personally, in Luxembourg,” says Guerin, asked about the origin story of the platform. During her search she encountered some untoward user experiences, such as websites that required email exchanges and/or bank transfers as part of their registration process.

“I was thinking: oh my god, no one wants to do that!”

Besides payment, there were other issues. Even for her--a French person, she reminds us—just getting the core information about the workshop was sometimes a chore. “How can [non-francophone] expats find this information?” she reports wondering, being tuned into this community via her former English-speaking workplace and also her partner, with whom she speaks English.

Hence, the idea to gather workshops in Luxembourg onto one English-friendly spot and to make the whole process easier. Indeed, Guerin may have left Amazon behind, but the retail giant’s tenet of easy-usage survives: she advertises that you can book your workshop in just three clicks.

Share & Create, despite being absurdly young at the time of writing, already has a creative and head-turningly specific offering: there are workshops on baking cookies and painting, but also on sewing accessories with upcycled material, making detox juice and essential oils, thermographic printing, and more.

The dream, says Guerin, is to eventually have five different workshops every week on the site. She’s not there yet, but the plane wheels have left the tarmac. Another feature in the works is teambuilding for companies. (Guerin’s pitch: “Laser tag and bowling are just not enough anymore!”)

Win/win/win

For users, the draw of the platform is, obviously, its array of unique and easily bookable offerings via which you can improve a core skill, stave off boredom or simply luxuriate in a bit of horizon-widening. (Some 95% of the workshops themselves are given in English.)

But for those who want to give workshops, Share & Create is also designed as a welcoming partner: it offers a payment solution and marketing amplification, of course, but Guerin also encourages first-time workshop-givers and helps find them a location, for instance via partnerships she has made with cafés in Luxembourg City. “I’m really trying to empower them,” she says of the first-timers. It would also seem that some credibility is associated with the platform, since the workshops are vetted by Guerin herself.

For her part, Guerin makes her money by taking a margin on workshops booked on the platform.

Visit Share & Create .