Rialto

We're after two problems: Venture Capital Firms & Accelerators say "we can't find Black founders" which subsequently leads to Black Founders receiving less than 1% of VC funding. MINWO Inc. connects VC Firms and Incubators to the communities of Black Founders we know exist, helping them move from one-time diversity outreach efforts to sustainable long term engagements. 

Ultimately, I want MINWO to be the one-stop-shop for Black and minority business development. No matter where they are in their journey as a business owner, or what industry they're in, or what their needs may be, MINWO can help them get where they want to go.

I always say that MINWO was my passion before it ever became my business. Since my days in college I've been obsessed with learning about how the 1% operates and brining that knowledge back to my community.

A lot of the problems that plague the Black community can be traced back to our lack of generational wealth due to our nation's history. Through MINWO, I'm helping Black founders and business owners build stronger businesses which in turn adds to their family's wealth and legacy. That wealth provides better opportunities for them and creates opportunities for them to in turn improve their communities. The ripple effect of my work is the most rewarding aspect of my company.

VCs & Accelerators say "we can't find Black founders" which subsequently leads to Black Founders receiving less than 1% of VC funding. Additionally, Black business owners are twice as likely to be denied for small business loans than White business owners. The lack of effort from these institutions to providing funding, recruit creatively, or create truly inclusive cultures creates distrust and demotivation among Black founders and business owners.

Rialto is a two-sided, community based platform that gives VCs, accelerators, CDFIs, supplier diversity programs, and other organizations an opportunity to meet, develop, and invest in Black and founders of color. Community spaces are either owned by Black business organizations or organizations looking to support and develop Black and founders of color.

Rialto's algorithm works to understand both the founders and the organizations and their resources to make recommendations that benefit both sides. We learn about each entrepreneur through our Chatbot that asks the user about their company and their current pain points. The Chatbot then recommends community spaces, resources, tools, experts, and events that match that user's needs.

Additionally, MINWO provides services to both organizations and business owners to ensure they're successful in achieving their goals. For organizations, we help them with creating inclusive curation and investment practices. For entrepreneurs, we provide readiness services to prepare them for the opportunities they want to take advantage of on Rialto.

Before we began building Rialto, we created a community of Black business owners and Black consultants that reached nearly 60 in total. Through a Slack team and a Weebly website, we worked with them to understand their needs as business owners. Our goal through this year long prototype was to see how we could improve networking between the business owners and consultants so that they can support each other in building stronger businesses. We quickly learned there were a number of technical and psychological barriers that hindered the network from connecting optimally.

In designing and building Rialto, every decision has been based on what we've learned about Black business owners during that initial MVP. Our design is simple and clean so that information can easily be found, we're leveraging AI so that busy founders are saved time by having information recommended to them instead of having to search for it, and we are incorporating features like hosting office hours and consulting services catalogs so that our users feel empowered to get the support they need without hesitation. We've seen the power of collective success and Rialto facilitates and optimizes the outcomes of community oriented business development.

Rialto has been specifically designed for Black and founders of color to get access to the resources, tools, experts, communities, and funding sources  available to them to aid in the growing and scaling of their businesses. In speaking with a number of incubator program managers, CDFIs, and software companies, their first comment usually is "we've tried, but we can't find Black founders" and use this as justification as to why they have not seen improvement in their diversity outreach efforts. We are creating a one-stop-shop for these organizations to the direct benefit of Black and founders of color.

Full Time: 1

Part Time: 8
Contractors: 2

Before I left Corporate America, I never knew if the political battle I was fighting was because I was young (and in a leadership role), Black, or female. It was exhausting showing up everyday having to justify my worth and my thoughts when it was very clear that it had nothing to do with my actual performance. I know what it feels like to be a high performer that doesn't fit the mold. 

I have built a work culture that supports team members and their unique contributions. We're a fully remote team because productivity can happen anywhere. Outside of a few team meetings and working sessions throughout the week, team members are free to work when is optimal for them. I also promote a female health and mental health positive culture so that team members feel free to openly talk about what they are going through or how they're feeling.

There is a lot of psychology behind the work we are doing. The DEI Tech/Services space is filled with non-Black people trying to create solutions for the betterment of Black people, which is great, but hasn't been working. Founders come to us because they trust us. We look like them, understand their fears and hesitations, and are creating a safe space for them to be able to fail and make mistakes without the harsh criticism they get elsewhere.

The data that we're collecting about Black founders, their pain points, and how they operate are insights that have long been overlooked. We're able to leverage this data to inform VCs, Incubators, and enterprise SaaS companies like Salesforces how to better engage with and invest in Black and founders of color.

From a technology standpoint, as a Black founder, it becomes extremely overwhelming attempting to apply to every pitch competition and trudge through Google for answers to business problems I'm facing. Our primary competitive advantage is that we're leveraging AI to actively bring information to founders vs creating a passive database. We're recommending organizations, Office Hours, events, resources, and forum topics that make sense to them based on their stage of business and pain points.

Competitors in this space include Alice, Ureeka, and Valance who all have similar missions, but aren't pushing the envelop when it comes to technology. Community space substitutes in the market include Facebook Groups, Slack teams, and MightyNetwork.

Chatbot Driven by Artificial Intelligence: the primary engine behind our platform is our algorithm, Ice Cream Man. We leverage a chatbot to collect meta data from each founder regarding their business like company size, stage of growth, and paint points. Our underlying algorithm then uses that data to make smart recommendations to each founder throughout their experience on Rialto. If they're in a specific community space, the events, posts, and members they see will be tailored to the meta data we know about them? If digital marketing is a pain point they've recently mentioned, any events or resources related to digital marketing will appear.

Productivity Focused Community Spaces: what we found missing from the market was ways to make online communities more productive. We've built features that make a network more powerful by encouraging interaction. For example, our office hours feature make it easy to find and meet with experts directly in the community space. No longer do you need a separate follow-up email, a scheduling tool, and a video conferencing tool. It's all done on Rialto.

Recommendation engines have been used to great success by companies such as Amazon, Instagram, and Google. Our application is specifically to business users looking for custom tailored search results.

Activities: we're creating a platform for Black business owners to easily discover resources, tools, communities, experts, and funding that will help them grow their businesses. This was built on the premise we discovered during our market research phase. We found that the top 3 reasons people didn't support Black-owned businesses at the time were because 1) they were hard to find 2) prices tended to be higher and 3) the quality usually wasn't as good.

Outputs: Black-owned business begin to restructure, scale, and thrive due to the support of community members and resources made available on Rialto.

Short Term Outcomes: through access to these resources and our additional coaching services, we're supporting these founders to build more competitive businesses to address points 2 and 3 above. Through these optimized communities, they gain the knowledge and tools to source and price products more competitively and provide better services. Through the platform itself, we're making it easier to find and support these businesses.

Long Term Outcomes: Black business part of the Rialto network can take advantage of supplier diversity contracts and operate at larger scale.

12-month goals: we'll be onboarding Black Female Founders (BFF), approximately 2,500 users, to Rialto starting Q1. My goal throughout 2021 is to finish building out the remaining features of Rialto while conducting this Beta pilot. We're in talks with Salesforce, Opportunity Fund, the Prospairty Project to provide resources on Rialto and would like to see that come to frution offer those opportunities to BFF to prove out our high-impact networking model.

5-year goals: once we have the business development support aspect of Rialto validated and running smoothly, I'd like to move into other aspects of business support. First would be a simple job board that founders on Rialto can use to hire new talent. Next would be a marketplace that they can opt into to sell their products and services. Additonally, we'd like to facilitate supplier diversity RFP generation and contract closing through Rialto as well.

Primarily funding. There's a saying that Black founders are "over mentored and under funded" and that applies to me. I've been coached and mentored, but not yet funded significantly. I have been extremely resilient to get us this far through bootstrapping and I've found amazing people that have been willing to give me all of their free time while working full time to bring this dream to fruition. I personally have about $250,000 in student loan debt and have maxed out most of my credit cards and without a significant influx of funding, I don't know that I'll be able to continue this venture much longer.

I started fundraising back in August and have been applying to every pitch competition and accelerator I can get my hands on for the last two years. I believe we're close, but there are a lot of outside factors beyond my control.

On Rialto, we're able to measure the number of resources used, office hours attended, services purchased, and connections made. We will start tracking these once we onboard users as these will be key metrics for us to gain insight on how the businesses on the platform are growing.

Additionally, we plan to quantify the downstream impact. From funding received to access to perks through accelerator and incubator programs, we'll track conversion rates to show that we're working with organizations that are standing by their goals to become more equitable.

We're an all-Black executive team with almost 40 years of work experience in data science, cyber security, product management, and marketing and have had great success in predominately White and Non-Black POC spaces. We understand the inherent biases and pattern matching that occurs within Incubators and VCs currently and can help translate the work of Black founders to these organizations. Our advisor, Lisha Bell, has formidable experience in this space and was pivotal to the creation of the $10 million dollar fund for Black Founders recently launched by PayPal.

As for myself, I spent 5.5 years working for GE, most recently as a Sr. Technical Product Manager creating data science based software; one of which was patented. I am the spoke in the founding team wheel and have known each team member since at least 2015. Kimberly's worked on MINWO part-time since our prototype in 2017 and joined in a more permanent capacity this January. Adriane I've known since college and helped us get our first set of users in our early days. In July of 2019, she decided to focus more of her time and energy on MINWO and joined the team at the same time Tyrome joined the team. I've known him since 2014 and is our lead technical architect.

Black Female Founders, Black Women Talk Tech, ODOS Synergy Services, and Proxie Detroit are all organizations that are black business focused and interested in hosting their community spaces on Rialto.

Salesforce, Opportunity Fund, Working Solutions, Skydeck, Open Grants, and The Prosparity Project are all resource providers that are interested in finding and supporting Black founders. We're talking about partnerships and how they can leverage Rialto to meet their goals.

We've worked with organizations such as REDF, MoveUpward, and SkyDeck to support them in their diversity outreach efforts and have generated over $18K in Q3 this year. We plan to leverage our platform, Rialto, to scale these efforts. We'll start with our custom Pipeline Diversity engagements that range from $3,000 - $7,000 and then transition them to their own community space on Rialto where they can continue to curate and cultivate their pipeline for $1,200 per year.

Additionally, since the onset of the resurgence of the Black Lives Matter movement in June, we've included Activating Your Allyship Journey workshops to support White and non-Black People of Color in their self discovery and activation as allies. Open to the public workshops are $25 per person and private/corporate sessions are $4,500.

Our revenue model is embedded to our impact. The community spaces owned by Black business centric communities are heavily subsidized by the community spaces owned by resource provides like Salesforce, etc. On the services side, we charge the resource providers for our Pipeline Diversity consulting engagements and use that to subsidize the Entrepreneur Support services we provide Black founders.

$15,500 Raised Total:

• $5,500 Grants

• $4,000 PPP Loan

• $3,000 Pitch Competition

• $2,000 Angel Investment (Donation)

• $1,000 Angel Investment (Debt)

Our goal is to raise a $1.8 M seed round by end of Q1 2021. This will be a combination of grant/pitch competition winnings and equity.

Primary Expenses Include:

• Product Development (60% of budget)
• Marketing & Customer Support (20% of budget)
• SG&A (20% of budget)

This challenged seemed right in line with what we're doing and why we're doing it. The dimension of "Driving resources and support to Black, Indigenous, and Latinx entrepreneurs and innovators" is 100% directly in line with our company and its mission.