Stereotheque - Creative Workforce

On average, small business owners spend almost $2,000 USD to hire someone new and up to 4 months searching for the right candidate, depending on the job level. When it comes to creative projects, the market is very fragmented and usually default to using stock footage, sounds, music, or hiring costly agencies. For creatives (the supply side of the market), the challenge is two-fold: platforms limited to traditional white-and-blue-collar professions, and no team-based solutions for creatives.

Through Stereotheque, the end-to-end collaboration tool for creative teams, we provide a more transparent and inclusive collaboration platform where creative individuals can access new work opportunities, matching their skills to the requirements of a creative team, while we provide everything including cross-border payouts, tax compliance and a project management platform.  

Stereotheque's mission is to end youth unemployment through upskilling in the creative industries. Youth are three times as likely as adults to be unemployed, an alarming situation as young people are entering the job market in record numbers, especially with the advent of the COVID-19 outbreak which has paralyzed entire economies. The global youth unemployment rate reached 13.1% in 2017 with 70.9m young unemployed. In the US, the unemployment rate amongst youth 16-24 was 9.2% in 2018, and 2.1% for young graduates ages 25 and older. 

As stated by the International Labour Organization (2019), the solution to this problem must be linked to improvements in the training of potential workers, since 1 in 3 employers say they can’t find the right personnel. 

Due in part to COVID-19, additional problems in the creative sector have surfaced including lack of formality, lack of banking options and lack of digital tools for no-collar creatives. Our solution brings a suite of tools that include the possibility of managing multiple projects at once, while generating direct cross-border payouts and tax compliance, so creatives can work in cross-border teams if clients require this. 

Stereotheque is the first end-to-end collaboration tool for creative teams. We help creatives find jobs through a machine learning, skill-quantification method, grouping them in on-demand teams. Businesses can find these creatives by posting projects and Gig Roles, in order to get their 'dream-team' at a fraction of the cost and time. 

• Users can onboard through a simple process and create a profile. This profile showcases 4 main data points including Education, Affiliations, Gear and Skills, as well as a Project Timeline where they publish projects and assign collaborators and roles.
• Employers and organizations can visualize all potential candidates and teams by a simple drag-n-drop tool, where they can literally build a creative team at a fraction of the cost and time.
• Stereotheque then provides a Team Success Index score which quantifies all skills and projects through a machine learning algorithm, helping the employer make the best informed decision when hiring or starting a new project.

As a collaboration tool and marketplace, we're serving two sides:

• Marketplace Supply: Young creatives, between 21-34 years of age, working in the creative industries or those who have had informal jobs in tangential industry verticals. They are actively seeking work, lack banking options due to their non-traditional ('no collar economy) profession, and rely solely on word-of-mouth recommendations.
• Marketplace Demand: Small and medium sized businesses looking for creative individuals or teams at a fraction of the cost and time. Not enough resources to hire full time CMO's or Marketing Directors, or Agencies to create digital audiovisual or marketing work. Also, other creatives looking to subcontract peers (i.e. a producer who wants to hire a group of musicians for a film scoring gig).

With over 12,000 creatives, we have done multiple interviews with our users and capture insightful data as we continue to grow our product. We validated the need of implementing an easy payout solution for creative workers (My Wallet), where clients can pay securely and creatives can make payouts in less than 5 days. The second important feature we've implemented was My Gigs, enabling users to act both as creatives and as clients, managing multiple projects directly from their dashboard, being part of teams. 

We've also identified that it is important for creatives to have peace of mind by accessing tax compliance documents, including W9s and W8-BENs (for non-US persons).

As creatives and Latinx individuals, we've had the struggles of depending on freelance work solely through word-of-mouth, not being able to access banking solutions or have a sound financial plan, relying on clients paying on time, which hardly ever happened, and finding ourselves competing in incumbent labor marketplaces, Americanizing our names in order to fight the implicit bias of these platforms. 

We believe that by re-imaginging the digital workforce and democratizing access to skill-based creative opportunities, young people will have better ways to plan ahead, have a robust financial plan, and gain new skills as jobs demand it.

We are at the growth stage, considering our product is already being used by thousands of creatives and growing on a week by week basis. 

We've also found multiple avenues of acquiring creatives, and need additional resources and network to expand our pool of clients and customers using Stereotheque as their end-to-end collaboration tool. 

As we position ourselves in the creative temp staff market, we are also expanding to St Louis, MO, in order to establish ourselves in the Midwest, a region often overlooked by the more prominent marketplaces in the East and West coasts of the US.

As Latinx and immigrant entrepreneurs, we value the perspective of multicultural and diverse people in our organization. Our users, clients and team members are strongly committed to making sure that our product lives up to these values and prioritizes diversity, equality and inclusion. 

As a remote-first organization, we also respect the differences in work-life balance, communication, and work. In this process, we've documented best practices which can allow us to have a strong culture and thus grow our organization. Our product is used primarily by Spanish-speaking individuals, although it's open to all, we value the diverse perspective of multicultural creatives and businesses.

The common dynamics of a marketplace are based on unidirectional transactions (i.e. client hires individual as happens in Fiverr, Workana or Soundbetter, a few of our competitors.). This is also based on the paradigm that years of experience are a indicator of quality work. While this may be true in white and blue collar economy jobs, it is very different in the creative sector. Where a young individual might be extremely virtuous at a particular skill, their creative persona would not fit into the traditional marketplace profile. 

The main difference with traditional marketplaces is that Stereotheque offers a unique peer-to-peer interaction platform, where individuals can be part of 'on-demand creative teams'. Through a skill-quantification method, teams are built by dragging and dropping them into a canvas, where Stereotheque shows the Team Success Index score. This score determines the success probability of this team, even if they haven't worked before. This is a massive shift in skill-based opportunities, democratizing access to those who have been under the radar for so long. 

Our machine learning algorithms can help a client predict an ideal team, bypassing the implicit bias that exists when putting a 'work team' together. Our system and matching methods will allow more creatives to work in what they love, and have a sustainable career.

Our system is content-based, where we drive recommendations based on user interactions; we'll move towards a hybrid approach, using collaborative filtering algorithms. 

The main entity types for which we compute content similarity are: 

- Teams (Gigs)

- Profile (User)

- Projects (also factors into the Profile score)

These entities have a mix of structured data like skills, tags, location, data, media, etc. And unstructured 'text' data. 

Text data is processed using key phrases and entity extraction and overall similarity is computed using Jaccard index for both structured and unstructured features. 

A subset of these features is used to map Gigs and Profiles into the same space to measure cross-entity similarity. 

Gigs are ranked for each Profile and Profiles are ranked for each Gig owner according to this metric and further filtering is done using user-driven options and simple business rules. 

The second algorithm which is still work in progress is our TSI (Team Success Index), which allows users to build on-demand teams based on project requirements. The TSI is a score which is computed by cross-referencing the structured data we mentioned above, and matching it with historical data of successful teams. 

Our technology and application is already being used by over 12,000 creatives. Additionally, companies in different sectors including Health and Wellness, Media and Entertainment, and Sustainability, are hiring creative teams through Stereotheque at a fraction of the cost and time.

Recommender systems are widely used in a number of different applications including but not limited to social networks (i.e. Instagram), streaming services (i.e. Spotify or Netflix) and marketplaces (i.e. Amazon, Ebay). The key element here is the data model being used and its application. In this case, it's using creative industry terms and phrases, connected to workforce dynamics, team relationships and more.

New risks might come into context when generating cross-border payouts, particularly because antiquated labor and immigration laws don't allow for seamless cross-border transactions. 

We are mitigating these risks by doing background checks real time, and using a global payout provider to identify fraud, potential payment risks, and be able to protect our users and clients.

Our solution has served over 7,500 until Dec 2020.

We expect to close 2021 with 15,000 and we expect to acquire more than 80,000 by year 5.

Our goal within the next year is to establish ourselves as the referenced market network for creative industries, as described by the Inter American Development Bank and the Orange Economy goals in the US and Americas. We want to provide meaningful jobs and income to 80,000 users. With the support of supporters like MassChallenge and external investors like Black Ambition (Pharrell William), Capital Innovators and Starta Ventures, we've been able to have an important footprint, learning from the interactions between the educational institutions, private companies and agencies, and the public sector.

Our goals within 5 years are to be the leading platform for creative industry jobs and networking. We were recently recognized as one of 10 Entrepreneurship Ambassadors by the Colombian Trade Agency Organization of ProColombia and Marca Pais Colombia. Here's a Forbes article that explains in detail. 

We are measuring our progress based on specific KPIs, including: 

• Number of gigs published
• Number of creatives
• Number of projects executed (GPV - Gross project volume) 
• Avg ticket size (per gig role)
• Avg payout per creative

4 full time team members.

3 part time team members.

We are a hard-working and very committed team, we've been through several challenges and believe we can grow this company, not only based on our experience and skills, but also on how the market is evolving (i.e. Portfolium just got acquired by Instructure, SoundBetter acquired by Spotify, etc). As internationals (mainly from Latin America, based in the US), we have a diverse and multicultural perspective, as well as connections, which we think can be of great value to other fellow entrepreneurs of our cohort. Thank you! 

Our collective experience includes having worked for Newsela, United Nations, Leica Camera, Microsoft, Qualcomm, Universal Music, and Royal Caribbean.

As Latinx and immigrant entrepreneurs, we value the perspective of multicultural and diverse people in our organization. Our users, clients and team members are strongly committed to making sure that our product lives up to these values and prioritizes diversity, equality and inclusion. 

As a remote-first organization, we also respect the differences in work-life balance, communication, and work. In this process, we've documented best practices which can allow us to have a strong culture and thus grow our organization.

We believe that through Solve, we can help countless individuals access new jobs, acquire skills and convert them into sustainable careers. Additionally, we can grow our brand positioning and compete in the future-of-work market with our solution, while also being able to bring more partners on board. 

The current circumstances with the COVID-19 outbreak has impacted the creative economies in an unprecedented way, leaving millions out of jobs, both from established and emerging economies. Therefore, we have a unique opportunity to bring new opportunities to solve this pressing situation for young people by offering jobs and sustainable careers in creative industries.

We can overcome certain challenges including speed of growth and expansion, with ServiceNow's network and markets.

As a New York, HQ'd company, although we are remote, we have expanded by reaching and acquiring more users throughout the US and the Americas. 

We have also acquired users in countries like the UK, Spain and Germany. 

Our clients include startups around the country, as well as big corporations like TikTok, CDbaby, NLU (Japan), and more.

We need faster avenues to achieve stronger connections with corporations and businesses looking to hire creative temp staff. 

We also need access to agencies who have large creative teams and need the tools to manage, pay, and grow their team. 

We'd like to partner with small and larger organizations that are looking to hire creatives and teams of creatives at a fraction of the cost and time while providing valuable insights to their hiring practices. 

This paradigm shift will change the way creatives are employed around the US, being able to have good work conditions, sustainable income, and democratized access to cross-border job opportunities.