My name is Teresa Joseph. I'm the chief operating officer here at status here. And uh what today's session is going to be about is what creating a start up really looks like.I think a lot of people, you know, read about start ups and try to figure out what it's about and think of it as this really dramatic size thing that's so glamorous all the time. And I'm kind of here to shed some light on what that looks like a little bit uh behind the scenes for status here. So a little bit about myself. I went over this just now, but I am the chief operating officer from the founding team member. It was just myself and the Ceo Kristen Wiley um A team of two for a few years before we successfully raised funding, which allowed us to invest in our team, our technology, our sales um Prior to working at STE, I used to work at the Kennedy Space Center in Finance and then from finance and the government, I went and switched gears entirely and went into entrepreneurship, working at a place called Starter Studio which helps provide workshops and programming for early stage entrepreneurs.

Um we had an accelerator program which I helped assist in running and it was just a really great experience to get connected with that space and understand, you know, how do you go about creating your own business account and getting your first paying customer and minimum viable product, all of that.

So it's kind of how uh you know, I got introduced to entrepreneurship and, and Kristen our CEO here and Chris and I, we helped create status sphere as a way for brands to scale their creative marketing. So, you know, to get into the session, I would love to kind of give you guys a foundation of what status spe is and the problem that we're trying to solve, which I think is mission critical for any start up. If you're looking to create one, you have to make sure that there is a problem that you're trying to solve otherwise who is going to be out there, you know, buying your product. So to summarize a little bit about the problem, um 92% of people say they trust recommendations from individuals over brands, even if they don't know them. So think about, you know, the last time maybe that you're in the bread aisle at the grocery store, there's so many different kinds of bread, right? And you're just wondering like, what the hell I just, I'm looking for my bread. I'm looking to get out of here. You're looking at all the aisles trying to figure out which one to get. There's gonna be some guy next to you maybe. And he just points out, hey, I had this one last week and it was pretty good. Like I'd recommend it.

More likely you are going to trust that stranger who you have no idea what his, you know, credentials are. Is he an expert in bread? You probably not, but you're going to trust him over maybe some faceless ad that was served to you because at the end of the day, people trust other people more than they do um brands and advertising. So the the thing with this though is activating this true word of mouth marketing, which has been present since forever since the dawn of time. Really, it's super difficult for brands to do that at scale. So that's kind of where status here comes in. So the problem to kind of summarize this, if you guys can see this little chart that shows all the the ways to even get like 30 influencers posting sometimes um you have to do the work of identifying your target audience um probably extrapolating to at least 100 and 25 people.

Um because at the end of the day, but not everyone's gonna be interested in your product, you have to create the offer and pitch creators that takes about 5 to 1010 hours, at least you have to communicate and negotiate with them one by 12 3rd of them are just not going to respond or reject your offer.

Then you have to do the work of shipping the product to each creator. And then after the influencers actually receive their product, you have to send reminders and make sure they did their part. 25% of the creators are still going to ghost you. And then let's say, finally, you do get a short list of people that post it. If you did decide to go the financial route where you're compensating them, you're gonna have to individually compensate each of those influencers. So all in all that is a lot of time that brands are using to do a lot of monotonous tedious type work when their time could be better spent doing a lot more strategic work. So it takes about 70 hours in our experience for brands to be doing this in house. So, so to summarize the problem that we're trying to solve here, it's not scalable. Um Brands are not guaranteed these influencer posts, they're doing all this work that you guys can see in the flow chart here. They're shipping the products to the influencers, but there's no guarantee that the creators will actually post about the product and it's not authentic.

So creators are getting paid to post about products that they don't want to use sometimes. Um only because these brands that are just starting off with their influencer marketing services, they they ultimately, they don't have a lot of leverage, you know, they might do all this work.

But ultimately, what's going to get that influencer that has no idea what your product is or brand is interested in posting up the product oftentimes you have to use financial compensation as leverage. So what is the solution status here was created as a solution for a lot of these problems that we ourselves experience firsthand as well as for our clients. So our solution is scalable. We can activate anywhere from 10 to 500 creators posting per month with little legwork for our clients. Um creator posts are guaranteed and then it's authentic status. Here is matching brands with creators based on their interests. So our creators in our network are only posting about products they genuinely like and use. They don't love a product, they actually return it and fill out a product feedback form. So as you guys can see here from that last slide, there's a lot of different steps in that process. But where we come in for our clients is they come to us, tell us their target audience of people that they're looking to reach out to, they ship status for all the products.

So we actually have a wonderful warehouse and we do the individual shipment to each of our individual influencers because we found that that was a pain point during our early discovery days of finding out what problems our clients were experiencing and then we guarantee those influencer posts on behalf of our clients.

So you're probably wondering like who our status for influencers are. Um you know, our network includes thousands of diverse micro influencers. Our age range is 18 to 64. Um but something more specifically that I want to point out here is that in the influencer marketing world, it, it kind of gets a bad rep. Um you know, people think when they, when you say influencer marketing, you think of celebrities like Kim Kardashian, for example, but what we really specialize in is the micro influencer space. So anywhere from 3000 to 25,000 Instagram followers is our bread and butter. And that's because based on again, you know, when we built our company, we did a lot of discovery and being in the space ourselves, we realized that there's a lot of value in terms of getting a lot of micro influencers posting at one time instead of putting all your eggs in one basket with a larger macro influencer.

So, you know, we look for things like a minimum engagement rate of 3.5% people being based in the United States as we continue to grow, we hope to expand this and become global. And then on instances like Instagram and tiktok, for example, tiktok is a growing platform. We have about 2000 average loops in general. So uh you know, this was all based on again, surveying our clients and figuring out what is it that could get them the best possible results for the marketing campaigns that they were looking to accomplish with us. So how it works. Um Brands actually come to us and create a campaign. Um They can craft uh you know, use like 250 data points in a variety of industries and uh topics that we asked them to survey them about. So things like shopping habits, product usage, content, aesthetic, et cetera. I kind of describe this as influencer marketing needs to match dot com. Um There, there's a lot of need for influencer marketing right now, but it's very difficult to be doing this at scale. Brands are looking to connect with these influencers. Influencers are looking to get collaborations with brands. But how can we go about doing that in a very efficient scalable manner? That's where status your steps in. So step two, moving on to that. Um We provide a smart matchmaking and fulfillment um for all of our clients. So like I said, influencer marketing needs match.com, our brands get matched with influencers that fit the criteria they're looking for.

And on the influencer side of things they are matched with products that fit them and their lifestyles, they can opt in or out out of collaborations that fit them and where they're at in life. And we also ask for a lot of data points on them too, like where are they at in their life? Are they, are they looking to get pregnant? What does their closet look like? Do they have certain skin concerns? For example, that allows us to match them with products that really fit them in their interests? Um So, you know, on top of all this, once the matchmaking happens and our influencers actually opt in to receive these products in exchange for posting we as status here actually ship all the products to the individual influencers. So we're providing, we're taking on that pain point that our brand we're experiencing before, which was very monotonous, very time consuming. Um fulfillment is a full time job in and of itself sometimes for for our clients. Um And then lastly after our influencers actually received the products that they opted into to get, um you can see insights about the campaign. So um anywhere from, you know, how many people that they were able to reach on social media, what engagements do they get?

Comments, likes, et cetera, that's how it works on the brand side of things. Now, how does it work on the influencer side of things? Influencers actually apply to join our network. So there's only we're very selective with who we work with. I think I talked about this in a prior slide that we look for engagement rate first and foremost to make sure that we're getting the most quality people possible for our clients. And then after that, we ask them to fill out a detailed survey about themselves that tells things like, you know, are they a dog mom? Are they a foodie? Do they have certain curly hair? So what type, how many kids do they have? Do they travel, et cetera? They tell us all this information about themselves again to get match with products that fit best, fit them and their lifestyle. Then their box arrives with the products that they have a uh picked out for their month to do collaborations along with um a checklist of Prepared Act that we've collaborated with the brand for to, to create to our influencers. And then step four, the influencers have about 3 to 4 weeks to try out these products and then post their honest opinions and we provide, you know, analytics and dashboard uh reports to our clients that allows them to see exactly, you know, what kind of results are they getting from doing campaigns with status here.

We worked with over 400 plus brands in a variety of industries like grocery, fashion, beauty, publishing, consumer packaged goods, tech, home, nonprofit health, you name it. We've probably worked with them because at the end of the day as consumers, um we probably use any variety of these things in our day to day lives. So this is like exactly kind of our bread and butter, what we work with. So that's a little bit about status here and how we work. Um As a company but the journey to get here was not always the smoothest, it definitely was a lot of different milestones that we hit in order to achieve the company that we've had today. Um Just to give you some stats of where we're at right now. Um Our company was uh originated in like 2016 and now it's 2022. We, we went through the pandemic. Um Now we are at about 55 employees and counting, we successfully raised funding. Um And we have an in house uh marketing tech platform that allows us to do all these things that we've gone over like the matchmaking and all that uh really uh in house and intelligently because of our own in-house product team. So now I'm going to be going over some milestones as far as far as how we got to this point. Um August 2016, this was the very first status for your box. So I think I, I just saw a question here.

Can you tell us more about how you got started? Yes, this exactly is gonna kind of tell you the status of your story and how we got started here. So back in August 2016, um our Ceo Kristen, she was actually working at an advertising agency in, in the Orlando Florida community uh called Greenhouse. And at that time, she had a food and baking blog on the side where she was just getting um she started getting approached by brands like Hershey's, for example, for gifted collaborations to, to collaborate on her brand or on her blog, I should say. And at this time, influencer marketing was just starting to take off. So there was a lot of um you know, need from clients that were looking to get this started for their own campaigns. So at the time, her boss approached her and said, hey, you know, you're basically an influencer, right? How about you? Just like head up our whole influencer marketing for our agency here. So she got access to all the platforms and tools out there that were doing influencer marketing.

And what she found is that there was just not a lot of easy ways to get connected to micro influencers. It's a, you know, you might get access to all these tools, but essentially the the buckets in which they operate in our Cr MS, which if you have an in house influencer marketing team, if you're lucky to have one, then that might make your life a little bit easier. But you're still having to do a lot of manual work like communi communication and outreach. Each of these individual influencers next up include databases. So databases are basically like yellow pages for influencers where you are having to, you know, sift through all these people to find the most important people or people that fit what you're looking for as far as engagement and criteria for the brands that you're working with.

And then last, but not least you've got traditional agencies. So this looks like, you know, just your regular advertising agency that might be uh like looking to work with you on an hourly basis in order to get these influencer posts going. But if you guys remember at the earlier pre presentation where I went over all those steps involved in terms of getting 30 influencers posting, you were essentially paying an agency to do all that manual work. And sometimes if they reach their hourly allotment, for example, you might not even get your end result of what you were looking for, which is those 30 influencers posting. So again, this status was founded on this firsthand experience of testing out all these influencer platforms on the brand advertising side of things. And then on the influencer side of things, as I mentioned, she had a food and baking blog. So she was getting matched with products like Hershey's. But on the other hand, she would sometimes get outreach from uh mattress companies that were like, hey, we would love to collaborate with you. Can we can we work together? And she was thinking to herself. Well, did you even look at my content? I have a food and baking blog like, how does this make sense? So this is kind of how status here was born and how we got started.

Um And then, you know, we just figured that there had to be a better solution on both ends of the spectrum. So once we realized there had to be a better solution, we started doing some discovery. So this is the very first status your box that we actually put together. Um Talk about Scrappy. We actually went to Marshall's and purchased these products. Um You see here on the right here, we've got sun BM um sunscreen lotion sunglasses, a watch lipstick. Um We essentially pretended like these are our clients and collaborated and reached out to our influencer friends to see if they would even be interested in the concept of receiving these products in a box in exchange for posting online. So this photo is, you know, from our very first box that we put together in our apartments and lo and behold, we ended up getting those first status, your posts. So we got the influencers on board at this point. Um Color and grace is the woman to the left here. She's gone on. It's become very large now on Instagram, I believe she's at 100 and 50,000 followers. And then this petty review um she just puts together a lot of amazing um product review posts. So, you know, all in all we knew that we had the influencers at least on board from an early standpoint. But now it's just a matter of switching gears and getting the the brands or our paying customers on board.

So fast forward to January through August 2017, um Kristen and myself, we were doing a lot of outreach to clients and prospective leads to understand their pain points. Like we ourselves experience these pain points. However, we wanted to make sure are other people across the advertising agency world and brands, are they experiencing these pain points too? So what we found is that there definitely were a lot of people that were experiencing these similar pain points and it just become, it became a lot more referral basis uh from like a sales generation standpoint at that point. So, you know, these photos are from again, um I believe our apartment here, we this is our very first status for your office, you can call it. And uh you know, it's pretty, pretty miraculous to kind of look at some of this stuff because now we have a full on warehouse that houses all of the inventory that we receive from our clients. But yeah, very early stage, we only had clients. Um that would probably just have 11 table only. So just it's pretty insane to kind of think about this. Then I joined the team in August 2017. I'm just looking at the time, I'm realizing that I probably need to screw this along a little bit.

And I think I got a chat from our moderator here too. Um April 2018, we moved into our first stratosphere headquarters, which was amazing because previously we were working out of an apartment. September 2019. We had our very first ste retreat, which was amazing. We were continuing to grow the team and we worked together to uh just bring everybody together in a uh in Orlando Florida. Given that, that, that is where we're from. Cassie joined as our CTO. So we were able to develop our technology team thereafter and have a full in-house product team. April 2021. We were able to move into our first status for your warehouse which houses all of our amazing inventory now and then traction. I went over this a little bit, but we have grown a lot as a company. So I think to go over a little bit of fundraising, um We made the decision to go and fundraise for our company because it would obviously allow us to grow faster than we could organically in a super fast growing industry, influencer marketing, unlike, you know, uh social or search engines, for example, there isn't a household name that's taking over.

And so we made the choice in order to compete to others with others that are in the industry that we would have to do uh go about raising funding. Um Let's see, let's move on here. What are we personally using the funding for? Um We wanted to use it to invest in our scalable platform, our technology, first and foremost, all our, our all star team. So we wanted to invest in providing a lot of really great uh competitive benefits. So we actually provide a percent health care coverage. We provide a 4% 401k match. We knew early on that we wanted to create a top place to work to retain talent, but also to make sure that we were staying competitive with other tech uh companies that were out there. So when we were raising the funding, we knew that we wanted to kind of allocate some of that back towards our team. And then last but not least best in class service, we wanted to make sure that we had top tier customer service to all of our clients, investing in the latest tools and data analytic reports to make sure that our clients are getting the best return. I'm gonna skip through some of these snapshots. Let's see and get to some final takeaways because I think we're almost at time here during the team.

This is a very early stage team back in the office, but now we've obviously gone remote just like the rest of the world. Um Some things that we've helped kind of uh help with morale as we've done a few happy hours and lunch and learns and things like that. We also use a slack plug in called donut which allows us to match team members across the team um allowing them to create connections with people, maybe that they do not work with so directly, we rolled out our core values um believe it or not just a few months ago, because at the end of the day, um while we've always had core values at status here, we wanted to make sure that as we continue to grow and scale up from here, that we had something that we could point back to when it comes to uh you know, performance evaluations and you know, other difficult conversations that we might have as a company, biggest challenges and lessons learned.

So for any entrepreneurs that are looking to start a company, um consistency and execution over perfection, we believe that the fastest way to learn is by doing so you can get stuck sometimes in analysis paralysis. But what I feel like as a company and as entrepreneurs, there's a million and one way is to do and solve a problem. But as long as you just get started and iterate over time, most likely you will be able to figure it out along the way failure should be celebrated. So at status here, this is one of our core values. We believe in coachability over talent. You can be the most intelligent, competent person in the world. But if you are not afraid, if you are afraid to make mistakes and just are constantly trying to be a perfectionist, you probably are not going to get better over time. So we encourage mistakes, we celebrate them together as a team and what we try to take away what we can learn from them. And then last but not least, um don't take advice from people who haven't done it. There are tons of people that will give you advice on your business.

Um But at the end of the day, if you are a founder or in the entrepreneurship journey, um you have to be careful with what kind of advice you accept because at the end of the day, nobody knows your business better than you do. So, yes. Um This went by really quickly. I am so sorry about me having to run through some of these slides very quickly. But if you do have any questions, I'm always available to chat. I love connecting with other women entrepreneurs and people that are looking to to start out um just being female entrepreneurship. Just very difficult, I think and it's also very difficult to get connected with other female entrepreneurs. So if you would like to chat or looking for advice or maybe even looking to start out an influencer campaign, please connect with me on linkedin and you can also see our social handles here. So thank you all so much.