Persto powered by LaunchCLT

Persto is a Venture Mentoring Software Solution that helps entrepreneur mentorship communities succeed. Our platform automates scheduling, tracks data, measures outcomes, and provides a robust community page for founders and mentors to connect.

Persto's intelligent engagement features send founders timed reminders to schedule their next meeting with mentors. This helps to ensure that mentor relationships are maintained and that founders are making progress on their goals.

In addition to data tracking, Persto also provides a variety of reports that can be used to measure the success of mentorship communities. These reports can help to identify areas for improvement and to track the overall impact of the program.

The Persto community page is a valuable resource for both founders and mentors. It provides a space for members to connect with each other, share resources, and ask questions. This helps to create a supportive environment where founders can thrive.

Persto is the perfect solution for mentorship communities that want to improve their efficiency, track their progress, and create a strong entrepreneurial community.

Persto is a software platform that combines a front-end website with the power of a rich database. On the front end, we offer founders and mentors the ability to easily apply to the mentoring program, schedule meetings, connect with others in the community, and much more. 

On the database front, we can keep track of the active founders and mentors, send automated email reminders, and collect regular updates on the companies. Through Persto’s data management system, venture communities can improve engagement and understand what their founders need most in order to increase their odds of success. The data also provide insights into key program demographics to ensure diversity throughout the community.

Persto is a platform that helps early-stage founders connect and maintain valuable relationships with mentors so that they can grow their businesses. 

Our target customers are typically venture mentoring communities that connect early-stage founders with a network of business mentors.

We serve a diverse range of users, including founders and mentors of all ages, genders, races, and ethnicities. We believe that everyone deserves access to the resources they need to succeed, and we are committed to making Persto accessible to all entrepreneur ecosystem support providers.

Persto helps our various users in a number of ways:

• We provide founders with access to a network of experienced mentors who can provide guidance and support along the entire startup journey. 

• We help streamline the mentoring process and create accountability by automating scheduling and tracking progress toward important milestones. 

• We track critical data and generate impact reports for venture mentoring communities that help attract additional funding and identify needs or gaps in program offerings. 

• We create opportunities for users to connect with other entrepreneurs and mentors and to identify the best resources in the community for a given need.

• Our platform is easy to use, flexible, and affordable so it can adapt to the varying needs and processes of mentor programs.

Small businesses that receive mentoring early in the development of the business achieve higher revenues and increased business growth. A survey by the UPS Store found that 70% of small businesses that received mentoring survived more than five years – double the survival rate of non-mentored businesses.

Persto equips mentoring communities with important data and metrics, while also streamlining the mentoring process so that small business owners can benefit from shared expertise, talent, and social capital. Persto is aligned with the Challenge in the following ways:

• Problem: Starting a business is hard; growing it is harder.

• Solution: Persto provides a platform to optimize the venture mentoring experience and create accountability throughout the process to develop stronger entrepreneurs.

• Population: Persto serves a diverse range of early-stage founders, including those from all ages, genders, races, and ethnicities. It supports mentors who want to give back in their communities and aid entrepreneurs to evaluate new opportunities, develop strategic plans, and make informed decisions. Persto helps mentor program administrators scale mentor-founder relationships and use data to focus their efforts on the areas of greatest need for founders. 

The Persto solution sends and tracks quarterly reports to see how mentorship communities and their companies are performing. These reports include data on the number of customers, revenue generated, new funding, and total full-time employees. This data can be used to measure the impact of mentorship on the success of startups and understand where to invest resources.

Successful mentor engagements can lead to numerous outcomes for entrepreneurs, including, but not limited to:

• Improved business validation leading to quicker go/no-go decisions on new business ideas

• Effective and efficient decision making

• Business growth and sustainability

• Improved financial intelligence, strategic thinking, and leadership skills

• Enhanced social capital and networking opportunities

We’ve seen many of these outcomes from running the LaunchCLT Mentor Program over the last four years. As the program has scaled across the growing greater Charlotte area, it is becoming very difficult to track the progress, milestones, and long-term success of every venture in our program without a streamlined technology solution. Persto will enable us to easily track each mentor engagement and use the data to better understand the needs of our founders and the skillsets of our vast mentor network. Persto will create improved accountability across the mentor engagements so we can see how our activities (mentor meetings, founder programming, community engagement) impact the success of our founders. Persto will also allow us to be high-touch in areas where it will be most impactful, instead of using valuable time and resources on things that quality technology could solve. 

LaunchCLT’s mission is to create stronger entrepreneurs. We connect founders and mentors to catalyze a viable, sustainable entrepreneurial ecosystem in the greater Charlotte region. Persto will help us achieve these goals in our city so we can scale to other areas in our state.

We are currently piloting Persto with the LaunchCLT community, home to 70 active ventures. The goal is to serve 5 programs in year 1 and scale that to 100+ programs by year 5. Venture Mentoring Programs vary largely in size, sometimes because there is such a huge administrative burden without good software to support the programs. We estimate each program will have between 35-85 active ventures, so we will aim to serve over 550 ventures by year 5.

Persto will first be implemented with LaunchCLT, a 501(c)3 organization in Charlotte, NC. The strategic direction for LaunchCLT is created by its Board of Directors and Chief Engagement Officer. Other stakeholders include organizational partners, Davidson College and Innovate Charlotte, but key decisions are ultimately made by the board. LaunchCLT was born in 2017 as LaunchLKN, originally targeting the Lake Norman area located just north of Charlotte. Over time, the organization grew and capitalized on the strength of mentors and founders from the greater Charlotte area.

We have relied heavily on mentor and founder referrals from our early community members and partner organizations to grow. We are not looking for growth just for growth’s sake. We are intentional about the type of community we are trying to build. We want mentors in our community who are driven to give back and not looking for business and/or investment opportunities. We want founders in our program who want to grow a business, not practice a hobby. We want lifelong learners who see challenges as opportunities to solve new problems. We do use LinkedIn to advertise events and programs, and we use a regular newsletter that has an open rate of 50-60%. We use Slack for internal engagement with the current and former founders and mentors in our program. We lean into our partner organizations as appropriate to advertise any community-wide opportunities.

Implementing Persto is critical to creating more accurate and impactful growth goals for LaunchCLT. Our lack of data and ability to track engagements makes it difficult to determine the appropriate length of mentor engagements or additional programming we should offer before or during mentoring. We currently know how many ventures are in our program, but it is more difficult to know how active all of them are. We want to grow with impact. That said, we are in initial discussions to create a sister program in the Raleigh/Durham area. The only way we can do that is with useful technology that tracks success and frees up human capital to build the community in the other main city in North Carolina. 

We would like to grow our impact in the following areas:

• Founders actively receiving mentor support, grow run rate by 70% over the next five years

• Mentors in the program, grow by 50% over the next five years

• Ventures that have successfully launched and are sustainable, grow by 250% over the next five years - this is the category that will be most impacted by the capabilities of this new platform.

We are applying to the Truist Foundation Inspire Awards so we can improve the Persto mentor program management solution beyond a prototype/MVP for the LaunchCLT Mentor Program. We’ve done a lot of customer discovery with mentor programs across the country, many of which are also licensed through the MIT VMS Model. No one has found an ideal technology solution that helps them run their program. We are all using a combination of spreadsheets and other tools and we have a heavy administrative burden. With the support of this award, we can iterate and add to our MVP and scale it across organizations worldwide.