Look, starting your own company is grueling. Starting your own tech company as a woman—gruelinger.

Now imagine you're a woman and an artist with no business background, and your app wants to be safer for women and more generally humane than any other online dating platform. You intend to transform online dating from an exercise in swiping and dick pics to a place where people actually make an effort to connect with each other using their personalities and their looks.

I do not know how Susie Lee has done it, but she started Siren (with collaborator Katrina Hess) in 2014, won GeekWire's App of the Year in 2015, and announced a round of $500,000 in funding this year.

Now the dating app that in itself is a little broadcast system for creative flirting has earned a place on the PBS show Start Up, which according to producer Jenny Feterovich has about 18 million viewers per season.

Siren's achievements have happened without advertising or promotion by a bigger company or funder. Originally focused entirely on female safety in a heterosexual dating pool, Siren has redesigned and relaunched its platform to support queer folks and people who aren't gender-binary.

Start Up, which is going into its fourth season, had six or seven dating apps nominated for the show this year.

"In this dating-app world, nobody has the female rhetoric that they do," she said of Siren. "We had one that was almost the opposite. It was Seeking Arrangement, about finding Sugar Daddies and Sugar Babies. And there's millions of users of it. I was really floored. For me, [Siren] is an important story to tell. I think it would be a great way of helping them change the landscape of those dating apps."

Start Up will tape in Seattle this week. Two other Seattle businesses will be featured, too: the restaurant Salare (Start Up producers discovered chef Edouardo Jordan by reading this Stranger profile by Angela Garbes), and Nikki Closser, the formal social worker who became a wedding photographer.

No air date is set yet.

Is Siren an art project anymore, or just a business?

I'm reminded of what Lee told me when I profiled her after she won the 2010 Stranger Genius Award in Art. She'd gone to volunteer at a nursing home, where an events coordinator had signed up to bring in an artist through a public-art program. For a few months she took care of the patients alongside nurses and family members a few times a week.

Getting to know them was the most important part of what she ended up making: 30-minute-long video portraits in which the residents chose a pose and costume based on an Old Master painting, and tried to sit as still as possible in front of the camera as it rolled. No second takes, no edits. Family members sometimes posed with them.

As the portraits hung in the walls of the nursing home, people wondered whether they were live feeds from the rooms. Were they documentaries or art? Theater on tape or video portraiture? Still or moving?

"I kept asking myself again and again, 'What is this?'" Lee said about Still Lives. I imagine the question continues to come up for this artist.