At only 23-years-old, while many recent college graduates are taking jobs they hate or struggling to find work, Danielle Harvey opened her own businesses because, really, how hard could it be?

Harvey, an action sports enthusiast who grew up in Spokane, graduated from the University of Washington with a degree in Comparitive History of Ideas (“How much more humanities can you get?”) and was having little luck finding work.

“I couldn’t even get a job I didn’t want,” she said.

In 2009, before a brief stint in California to pursue her love of surfing, Harvey became a certified yoga instructor – something that had always been on her list of things to do.

Back from California, she started teaching at the SeaTac YMCA and subbing at the Ballard Health Club.

A profession in yoga is meant to be a long, slow-growing process, and Harvey was just starting it. Less than a year later, Harvey is the owner Backside Bow on Ballard Avenue.

While teaching at the YMCA and Ballard Health Club, Harvey said her students would often ask her where else she taught and if she had a business card. “How hard could it be to make a business card,” she thought.

At about 10 a.m. on Nov. 16, Harvey set to work laying out a business card using an online template and hit her first snag fairly quickly – her email address was havartihamsandwhich, necessitating a change.

Harvey went with backsidebow@gmail.com. Backside Bow was a name she had been thinking about for a few years and had envisioned as a clothing company. It originated over time from a bit of childhood dyslexia, a habit of calling backwoods “backsides,” and a penchant for putting ribbons where they have no business being.

A second snag – the business card template had a space for a Web site – soon followed, which led to the second in what would soon become a string of rhetorical questions for Harvey: “I wonder if it’s difficult to make a Web site?”

By 4 a.m. on Nov. 17, Harvey had finished www.backsidebow.com, the Web site for a yoga studio with a focus on action sports.

“I made up my dream job,” she said. “I created my dream lifestyle.”

The full reality of what she had done sunk in about a week later when her 250 business cards arrived identifying Danielle Marie Harvey as the owner of Backside Bow with locations in Seattle, Newport Beach, Calif., and Mal Pais, Costa Rica.

Harvey said she had gone so far down the road toward making her business a reality, she would rather be known as the person who did it and bombed than the person who simply dropped it.

This led to questions about how hard it would be to obtain a business loan and find a space.

“Everybody starts stuff and doesn’t finish it,” Harvey said. “And, you can’t say if you liked it or not.”

Harvey was able to find a space, located above King’s Hardware and Rudy’s Barbershop on Ballard Avenue, to sublease for a year.

So, because one question snowballed into many others, Harvey finds herself facing the grand opening of her own business just in time for her 24th birthday, and that is taking some getting use to.

“I didn’t see this coming,” she said.

Owning a studio happens when someone is 35, not 23, she said. She said the business license hanging in her Queen Anne home, an old frat house, still freaks her out.

She has an unused ticket from a recent show by the band Wilco pinned to a bulletin board in her studio because not only did her new hectic life keep her from going, but it kept her too busy to remember to give the ticket away.

Luckily for Harvey, she has a team of friends volunteering their time and opinions to help her with the business side of Backside Bow, leaving her to focus on yoga for the first time in months.

To start off, Harvey has planned out climber’s yoga, snow yoga and surfer’s yoga to go with rest and relaxation and beginner’s yoga classes.

Harvey said yoga can target specific muscles for people involved in action sports to help them loosen up or wind down. She said breathing techniques in yoga could help a climber reach higher or a snowboarder fall safer.

She said her classes will be laid back because she is laid back, and she wants them to be less intimidating and serious than most yoga classes.

Backside Bow officially opens to the public Feb. 28. Harvey said she hopes that is just the beginning.

“I really want this to be more than a yoga studio,” she said. “But, you have to start small.”

Harvey said her hope is to create a community centered around Backside Bow where people involved in different action sports can meet each other and interact. She said she wants to fill the empty office space around her studio with businesses involved in sports, such snowboarding, surfing and mountain climbing.

Eventually, Backside Bow could facilitate weekend trips to expose people to new sports and experiences, she said.

At the end of her year sublease, Harvey said there will be obvious signs – a particular dollar amount, a functioning yoga studio – that her venture was a success.

But what she said what she really wants to accomplish in that year is to facilitate a fun lifestyle for herself and others by turning the opportunity for adventure into reality.

Besides, if Harvey keeps answering her own questions, the journey can be the most rewarding part.

“I’ve learned more in the last four months than in the last four years for sure,” she said.