(1) Describe your startup.
Chezie is an anonymous career insight platform for minorities.
We provide a platform where diverse employees can safely share their experiences and where diverse job-seekers can find those experiences and learn what it’s like to work at a company from people that identify similarly to them. We also provide employers an end-to-end solution so they can recruit diverse talent and identify areas for improvement within their diversity programs.
(2) What inspired the creation of the startup?
We are our own users. Both my sister/Co-Founder, Dumebi, and myself know the challenges that minorities face when trying to navigate the corporate world, and we believe that the best way to provide help is to openly share the stories that so many diverse employees share so others can learn from them.
Between our passion for helping other minorities and our individual work experiences, we are best positioned to solve the problems that each of our stakeholders face.
(3) What differentiates your startup from the competition?
For employees and job-seekers, other job review sites take a one-size-fits-all approach because the insight isn’t specific to people’s identities. With our Portraits, employees can share their individual experiences, and job-seekers can find Stories from people that identify similarly to them, ultimately helping them figure out which companies they can succeed with.
For employers, other HR or diversity software solutions are one-sided; they either help with internal diversity or with external diversity. We’re building an end-to-end solution where employers can not only work on externally building diversity through recruiting and branding, but also identify areas for improvement internally centered around fostering inclusion.
(4) Who is the target market?
Our target market is diverse job-seekers between the ages of 18-30. We let our users define diverse on a personal level. If you feel like a minority in your company, then consider yourself diverse, and use Chezie to share your experience and learn from the experiences of people that identify similarly to you.
(5) How did you grow your presence in your target market?
Our primary marketing strategy has been around content marketing. We have all of these Stories from diverse employees at companies like Google and Goldman Sachs, and that content is valuable right now because of how shareable it is. People read the Stories and other diversity-related content that we share and immediately connect with it and want to share it on their social media pages.
(6) What stage are you at?
We launched Dyversifi, now Chezie, in September, 2019. We spent the first 9 months in MVP stage, and then in June, we redesigned our site, restructured our Story process, and re-launched to allow users the ability to create accounts to gain access to Stories.
Since re-launching, we’ve gotten 450 signups, and gone from 150 to 1100 Stories captured.
(7) What are some of the biggest challenges that your startup have had to overcome?
We face the chicken-and-egg problem, where we don’t add value to job-seekers or to employers unless we have a significant amount of content, but we can’t get that content without already having traffic.
To combat this, we will launch a ‘Storytelling’ program with college students. We will hire students to interview alumni at major companies and gather their Stories. Our goal is to go from 1,000 Stories to 10,000 by the end of 2020.
(8) What is next for the startup?
Both myself and my sister/Co-Founder, Dumebi, are working on Chezie part-time right now. The next phase is for me to quit my job and shift to focusing on Dyversifi full-time.
Our top priority right now is getting more Stories submitted. We have about 1,100 right now, but we want to get to 10,000 by the end of the year.
(9) Where would you like to be in the next 5 years?
We also want to be the trusted brand for diversity. There are several media publications that publish yearly “Top Companies for Diversity” lists, but these lists are misguiding for a number of reasons. Chezie can be the official stamp for companies looking to boast about their diversity because we have data on actual employee sentiment. As our brand awareness and user base increases, and as we gather more submissions, we can create a ranking methodology that helps diverse talent objectively compare companies, but that also helps companies identify what they are doing well and what they need to improve upon.
More information about company diversity rankings here.
(10) If you had to give one piece of advice to an up and coming startup what would it be?
Try your best to build excitement around major moments in your company’s history. Looking back, we should have started collecting emails for our launch as soon as we had the idea. We spent 3 months interviewing people to figure out how to construct the platform, but we didn’t do a good job marketing it before we started. Create a simply landing page outlining your business and send it to friends and friends of friends to get their contact information. That way, when you do launch, hopefully you already have a few hundred people that you can spread the word to.
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