GRASPIE™

Graspie™ is a mobile-first onboarding, training, upskilling and engagement platform helping employers improve the delivery and increase the retention of job-specific and compliance content. Graspie™ aims to reduce turnover for employers with temp/seasonal employees by using high-quality and engaging training. This workforce is seen in the retail, hospitality and restaurant industries, with large minority and millennial/gen-z demographics who often are given little to no opportunity for advancement due to digital divide, and lack of access to content that enables proficiency while on the job. Employers are also seeing reduced time in formal training, rising cost to individually train, and also suffer from lack of engaging content for training. Graspie™ aims to give employees the power to learn necessary information, any time and anywhere. Graspie™ provides a mobile-first platform for employees to consume dynamic out-of-the-box compliance trainings, similar to snapchat discover and instagram feeds, giving them an experience they are use.

Within the digital workforce challenge Graspie™ is tackling two problems, increase opportunities for people to have access to learning new skills and upskill, reskill or retrain workers. $11B dollars is lost annually due to employee turnover. This is in part due to poor training and lack of engagement. With 75% of the workforce set to be millennials by 2030 and more employees using their mobile devices at work, businesses are trying to find ways to actively onboard, train and engage this new connected workforce, and those like them, in less time and at a lower cost. GRASPIE™ is that way. Currently, 71% of employees spend over two hours accessing company info on mobile, while 60% of employees already use apps for work-related activities. Almost 9 out of 10 app users say that apps for work have changed their behaviors as a business professional, yet, 59% of employees think that their organizations have been too slow at delivering apps for the workforce. With these statistics, 34% of companies are aggressively implementing mobile learning with compliance and technical skills leading the way. GRASPIE™ is committed to being the platform of choice improving the delivery method and increasing the retention rate of employees.

We determined our product market fit by following the six step Lean Product Process framework. First we identified  our target customer by seeing who truly had the “hair on fire” problem for which Graspie was the “extinguishing” solution. From there we first targeted business that had an increased minority and millennial/gen-z count. We created our customer profile and set up multiple personas. We found that the hospitality market fit best, specifically retail and hotels. We then began interviewing managers, vp’s of learning, hr executive to understand their needs and pain points as employers. We didn't stop there, we spoke to employees to find out what issues they had. Next we piloted our prototype and had a focus groups telling us if our platform solved current issues for both. Both sides agreed that having access to the information immediately greatly increased efficiency and understanding while cutting overall cost. 

Without giving up too much secrets, Graspie™ has two different systems, an internal and consuming facing system. Employers are able to purchase the mobile platform and begin provisioning their employees via emails. They can set teams, departments and groups. Employers have the option of uploading their own content or purchasing out-of-the-box content from the premium Graspie™ section. From there, they can assign trainings to a multiple employees or just a single one, add assessments to content and track data around usage. Employees use is simple, once the employer has "pushed" content to their devices, they just open the app, login with registered email and they will immediately see what onboarding, trainings and assessments are available for them to consume. The beauty of the platform, it allows for the employee to have constant access to materials needed to be a success at work! 

We are excited to be using a stack that combine cognitive learning with technology, allowing us to continuously build on the platform not only from a development stand point but also from a content design standpoint.

Most of our competitors are focusing on reinventing the traditional learning management systems, GRASPIE is saying goodbye to the traditional LMS and hello to a dynamic, mobile, platform that allows for quick onboarding, continuous training and engagement with the new connected workforce in mind. Companies with continuously engaged employees outperform other without by 202%. Currently part of our advantage lies in undergoing the IP process under a Business Method Patent which revolves around the use of ML and AI.  Finally, developing our product around cognitive science allows for increased engagement with curated content not seen by our competitors. 

Our distribution method is currently B2B. We have done a lot of market research on our customer, talking to 100’s of mangers, VP’s, and employees.  Our customer profile looks like this: spends anywhere from 2-4 weeks training a single or group of employees, has frontline employees that needed continuous trainings, need to get information to employees in real-time, need employees proficient on product/area knowledge, are frustrated with current learn management system and lack of engagement, have mobile employees that are hard to train, have difficult time tracking training success on web, need targeted learning approaches for a variety of employment levels and have seen high employee turnover due to poor training and lack of engagement.

1) Piloting with 4 companies with roughly 50 ppl in total

2) We plan to increase our numbers to 15 companies with roughly 250 ppl

3) 1,000,000

Giving people the power to learn on the job and in an engaging way is one of the single most important thing an employer can do. It not only helps each employee reach their highest potential but it contributes to a dynamic culture and loyalty. 

Our goal over the next five years is to be the foremost leader in upskilling, onboarding, training, and engagement for any employer with a high millennial employee count. We want to have partnerships with the leading retail brands training their employees to way unimaginable. 

We would have released our AR onboarding and training content, which is already in POC stage, bring a new look to how employees begin their first day on the job. 

The greatest barriers are large LMS companies with an endless influx of cash. However, we know that being a small and nimble team, with the ability to pivot on. drop of a dime is what we have in our favor. We are building a product with our customers in mind and can immediately see the impact.

Another barrier is funding, we know that lack of cash can cripple any startup which is why our founder Derrick is meticulous at how he spend dollars. We do know that funding is needed to bring the right people in to expand on the product and the content offerrings. This is why we are opening a seed round of $1.5M, it is our hope that we will be able to claim part of the prize amount to extend our raise deadline. In the meantime we continue to focus on customer acquisition and sales. 

Understanding how a learner learns and building a platform around that is how we truly are able to get buy-in from stakeholder and our initial customers. Our competitors are solely focusing on developing a new age learn management system with doesn’t account for before and after training happens. Graspie focus is on the employee how they learn and the knowledge and skills needed to better interact and serve the customer. This directly impacts businesses bottom-line. This is how we will beat our customers. We focus giving employees what they need to be truly successful at work, so they can focus on providing real-time ROI for the companies they work for.

We are currently piloting in the Buffalo, NY area which has a huge hospitality market. 

With Buffalo sharing Niagara Falls and Canada being a neighbor, ands also sharing a hug retail and hotel market, this means Graspie™ has a prime opportunity to be be an international company faster. 

n/a

Full-Time: 1

Partime: 2

Contractors: 5

Out-sourced firms: 1 (4 FTE's)

Derrick our founder leads the team, executing the vision and mission of GRASPIE™. He has his Ed.M. in educational technology with a focus on developing innovative solutions for learning and an Advanced Certificate in Entrepreneurship from Georgetown University’s McDonough School of Business. He has logged over 50,000 development hours of learning content and has designed content for nationally recognized Study.com. Derrick has also led GRASPIE™ to complete the fall 2018 cohort of Google for Startups™, winter 2018 cohort of YCombinator’s Startup School™, and Spring 2019 1863 Ventures Pipeline Accelerator. 

Nigel Brown, interim CTO, has worked in the startup industry moving from android developer to systems architect and eventually CTO where he helped develop a consumer social sharing site that raised over $10M in funding and was named Intercon’s 2019 Top 50 Tech Visionaries at the age of 27

Ekua Mends-Aidoo has over 15 years of employee engagement, diversity and inclusion, and operations experience. She is tasked with developing GRASPIE™ culture and structure. 

Taylor Davidson leads the team in designing the curated content for learning on the platform. Armed with her master’s in instructional design and work experience from Clemson University she is tasked with designing and sourcing content for the new connected worker.

Ope Bukola, serves not only as our advisor but is the former product lead at Google Classrooms. She comes with years of experience in product design and learning based solutions. She leads product design team. 

Currently we are working with 1863 Ventures and Google for Startups™. They are providing resources to help assist with sales and revenue generations

Our revenue model consists of SaaS Subscription for businesses  For retail/hotels we use a location based model. Pricing begins at $129 per month (1-20 stores), $99 per month (21-100 stores), $69 per month (101-200 stores) and specializing pricing for over 200 locations. Billing is in tiers of semi-annually and annually. GRASPIE understands that some business will need pre-packed content developed. We offer in-platform premium design content starting at $10 per employee as well as additional admin accounts (an admin account includes 1 hour/month phone support, 1 GB storage, 5 push notifications/day): $299 per month. Graspie also has a per employee model charging $50 per/employee per month for organization not in the hospitality space.

Grapsie™ has been looking at many options to continue its growth. On the VC front, we plan to open our seed round raise of $1.5M beginning July 2020. 

We have been approached by local colleges for partnerships to help train student workers and PEO's to be the more innovative platform for onboarding and training of more tech-driven businesses that they serve. 

We also have been prepping for Workforce Development grants that are being offered in NYS for businesses that operate in and serve the community around opportunity zones. 

Graspie™ is applying to the digital workforce challenge because we truly feel that we are the #FutureOfWork! Our founder has worked in the Learning and Development field for over 10 years and sees why a solution like ours is important. While growing, it is important for us to align ourselves with other organizations who also believe in bridging the gap between "readiness" for work. Graspie™ wants to make sure that no one can be ever be deemed unemployable again. While winning $100,000 would mean a lot for our growing startup the value to be associated with MIT and Service Now is priceless. 

n/a

We would love to partner with retail organizations such as Target and Walmart to release Graspie™ as a tool for learning and engagement and to see how effective we can be in a large enterprise.