Hello Career Guru

Our world has a serious economic problem that women can not get ahead in their careers or make their way to the C-suite. Even though women are 60% of the workforce world wide, they are less than 5% of upper management in corporations and government.

Hello Career Guru (Guru) is the first career advancement platform powered by proprietary insights from C-suite executives to create a customized game plan identifying needed leadership skills and behaviors to help women achieve their ambitions.  This game plan identifies needed skills development, behaviors to cultivate and other innovations.   Imagine tapping into the knowledge of many mentors, not just 1-2, to help you attain your goals with a clear action plan?  Our dataset includes geographically diverse C-Suite women, aged 35-55, who have provided key insights in regards to their paths to leadership.   

Beyond women’s ambitions, companies stand to benefit too with research by McKinsey proving that corporations with women in their C-Suite are 20% more profitable.  The problem is that while women are 61% of the workforce, only 5% make it to the C-suite.  Working women aged 25-55 find that corporate mentors are limited, professional coaches are expensive, and geographic barriers of access exist. Acknowledging the devastating impact of the COVID-19 pandemic we are seeing now and expecting for the foreseeable future, the need for a solution, accessible anywhere, anytime, is even more critical.   

CAREER MANAGEMENT TODAY: 

WHERE DO I BEGIN?  HOW DO I GET GREAT GUIDANCE?

Existing career resources provide only a portion of the solution, ranging from coaching, online and in-person networking events and communities, job boards, and e-learning programs, and are often one-size-fits-all, time consuming and a game of chance to uncover. 

What if technology could solve this problem?  

Our mission is to democratize career advancement for all women no matter what age, income, race or geography. 

Guru is the first career advancement platform powered by proprietary insights from C-suite executives to create a customized game plan identifying needed leadership skills and behaviors to help women achieve their ambitions.  This game plan identifies needed skills development, behaviors to cultivate and other innovations.   Imagine tapping into the knowledge of many mentors, not just 1-2, to help you attain your goals with a clear action plan?  Our dataset includes geographically diverse C-Suite women, aged 35-55, who have provided key insights in regards to their paths to leadership.  Guru offers an affordable ‘one-stop-shop’ for career development resources with a personalized learning community of content, training, and events around 3 pillars - skills, behaviors and innovations - identified in conjunction with executives and talent experts. 

CAREER MANAGEMENT TODAY: GURU FUTURE:

Rewards gamification will fulfill a woman’s intrinsic motivators, such as “a sense of accomplishment”, to help form a habit of visiting Guru. No one else in the category offers rewards.

Our audience reflects the professional women in your life --- friends, colleagues, significant others, family, or even yourself - 18MM women strong.  Working women aged 25-55, representing 61% of the workforce, are a key driver for our economy. From 2014 to 2024, the growth in the women's labor force is projected to be 5.8% (Dept. of Labor, pre-COVID).  These motivated women are:

• Educated, with at least a college degree

• Earning more than $50k  

• Usually married: 1-3 children

• Pursue hobbies for daily stress relief

• Digital natives, who use apps and online brands to solve problems, socialize, shop, bank and even work out.  

THE GURU USER

Since Hello Career Guru can democratize career advancement for all women no matter what age, income, geography or race, we are giving access to key tools anywhere and anytime. This is not just a project but a movemenet. Given Covid-19, we have a moral obligation to get our project to as many women as possible give the 22million unemployed to date in the US alone.

C. Go to Market Strategy: Positioning

Guru is the first career advancement platform powered by proprietary insights from C-suite executives to create a customized game plan identifying needed leadership skills and behaviors to help women achieve their ambitions.  

Our well-priced subscription model, $39.99 for the first six months, is consumer validated and is portable with access anywhere, anytime. 

There are many career-related, competitive resources for women but until now, no one provides a unifying, personalized roadmap to use them effectively, plus the gamification feature to sustain ongoing enthusiasm.  Guru’s affordable platform curates and organizes information to make it actionable, sequencing recommendations depending on a woman’s short and long-term goals. 

Guru Differentiators

Insights from C-suite executives drives development of personalized gameplan

Unique Superstar Rewards reinforces behavior, drawing upon other popular apps in other categories like MyFitnessPal

‘One stop shop’ solution saves time and money

[1] International Coaching Federation [2] Crunchbase [3] Forbes

Guru’s initial build will be strictly data science using algorithms and pattern matching. Guru will gradually move to a more advanced machine learning platform as our datasets expand. Guru assumes that each user is not a static entity, but rather a dynamic entity seeking personal growth. A career journey is a moving target so as the user gains proficiency, the quality of the content consumed will also mature to a higher quality, or more intellectual, content source. The user can change her goals, gain experience and Guru expects her content preferences to factor in intellectual and psychological growth.

The problem we are trying to solve is that of classification and prediction -- whereas we would need a team of analysts before, AI can do the work for us.  We will train a classifier to build multiple customer models.  Initial content delivered to customers will be human supervised while the classifiers are initially trained. Passive and active feedback from customers will be used to label training vectors for training the model.  As user data grows, our technology will incorporate the additional data to further refine the recommendations and evaluations of success versus the proprietary C-Suite data set that is unique.

1. Product Concept Test (Pre-Beta Usage) and Beta

Goal: to determine interest in the concept prior and post Beta usage

Target: Working Women age 25-55. Over 70 women completed. These testers were recruited from our iFundWomen crowd funders, the 500 women in WIN, Y Combinator startup colleagues. Bryn Mawr College, NYU MBA alums, UCLA MBA alumni and Columbia MBA alumni.  

Methodology: Survey Monkey Questionnaire with 28 questions

Beta Background

The Hello Career Guru Beta was funded through the proceeds of our successful iFundWomen crowdfunding campaign. We developed a set of high-level functional requirements.  The Beta launched in January 2019 and after 6 weeks of QA testing, we onboarded 75 users.  

We have served our beta testers a weekly email newsletter on topics such as journaling, career pathing and goal setting, to name a few. We have included an inspirational graphic and a large call to action button that takes them directly to their Hello Career Guru login screen either on a phone or computer.

Hello Career Guru (Guru) represents a journey reflecting the founders’ career experiences, realities of working women, and use of technology across all aspects of life.  The ever-evasive ‘aha’ moment came in 2016 when Suzanna Keith, Guru’s Founder, co-founded the Women In Innovation Network (WIN).  WIN sponsored a series of six C-suite panel events in the tri-state area for women in technology. Within just two months, over 500 women joined the community attracted by the chance to gain insight from high-achieving panels of women and learn from their professional journeys.  Research showed that 50% of the group not only were frustrated with their own career advancement, but also needed a tool, a roadmap, to find a way to advance --- 100% were interested in the insights.  

We pre-sold our product via ifundwomen to 207 users + our 584 women in innovation users + our email community of 2500

With our launch, Guru will offer free memberships to the over 60 Million user base of these organizations allowing us to successfully target 100k working women with a 5% conversion to our year 1 forecast of 4590 paying users.

Our confidence that Hello Career Guru will quickly scale is:

• Our graduated and segmented sales approach: based on our market analysis, the need/demand for our product is most pronounced in the Tri-State and East Coast large cities in the financial, marketing and technology sectors. This is our product roll-out target in Year 1.

• We have designed a marketing strategy for user acquisition, engagement and retention based on ‘user personas’ behavior and trends from our 75 Beta testers.

• We have identified the B2B need for effective and affordable career pathing resources for women in corporate America, we will partner with corporations and nonprofits through a B2B tailored content product.

• Considering that Guru is a unifying solution and does not directly compete with the various players in the marketplace, Guru is well-positioned for partnerships and advertising from practically all the players in the various market segments: 1-to-1 coaching, recruiting, women’s communities and events and learning resources. 

Year 2-5 We will build to a $70MM business with 70% margin serving 20MM women. We will expand to men and college age students in addition to expanding across the whole globe.

Critical Risks

The first key technology hurdle and milestone that we will need to achieve to bring our product/service to market is to build product V1 which requires $70-95k. The next milestone does not include any legal or regulatory issues since we have already secured our trademark. However, we will need to continue to build strategic alliances with women’s organizations such as Women in Tech, the Financial Women’s Organization etc.. to grow Guru.

Strategic Alliances will be critical to bringing Hello Career Guru to scale while mitigating risks.    Since Guru is a unifying solution and does not directly compete with the various players in the marketplace, Guru is well-positioned for partnerships and advertising from practically all the players in the various market segments: 1-to-1 coaching, recruiting, women’s communities and events and learning resources.  In fact, we are already in discussion with Gender Fair, Nice Girl Ambassadors, 4 A’s and SheKnows Media/Rolling Stone. 

4 employed fulltime but no salary and one unpaid intern (college credit)

Guru has a management team with 100+ years of experience combining all the necessary skills – AI Technology, market research, data analysis, and modeling, product branding and roll-out, content marketing and financial and management experience. Suzanna has known all for over  20 years.

Suzanna Sullivan Keith: Founder & CEO: responsible for overall management, and fundraising Suzanna has over 25 yrs as a senior marketing, sales and innovation executive in the Fortune 500 and not for profits. A community advocate, Suzanna was elected to Rye City Council as Deputy Mayor and founder of: 1)Twig Inc, raising over $1MM for the local emergency services 2) Techandtravelmom.com & 3) Women In Innovation.  NYU Stern MBA 

Tom Beauchamp: Co-Founder & CTO: responsible for technology strategy, product design, and management and interface with developers on key elements of product. His background includes CIO roles at numerous multi-channel retail organizations including David Yurman, Hot Topic, Foot Locker, and Limited Stores.  In addition, Tom has been an  investor in two successful exits.  CA State MBA

Sonal Rinello: Co-Founder & CMO: responsible for marketing, social media management and thought leadership. Sonal is a C-suite executive with 20+ years of experience having served as CMO for L’Occitane and VP of Marketing for P&G. Sonal is also the author of jobagenda, a job search planner for women. Northwestern MBA

Karen Keane: Co-Founder, CFO :responsible for financial operations, and legal operations. Karen is a senior finance professional with over 15 years of banking, non-profit, and public accounting experience. NYU Stern MBA

Fran Hauser's Myth of the Nice Girl Team

Haley Hoffman Smith's Big Idea Team

Sheknows Media

Deb Bolanger Coaching

Sonal Rinello Jobgenda

These groups will help us build our user base.

The business model is a e-commerce strategy. Our well-priced subscription model, $39.99 for the first six months,with the first month free is consumer validated and is portable with access anywhere, anytime. 

Selling our product for $39.99 will bring us to profitability in year 2. 

Solve will help us democratize career advancement for all women no matter what age, income, race or geography. As mentioned earlier, we are starting a movement not just a product. We would be honored if Solve could help us reach our mission. Given your incredible mission and resources, Solve could be the ideal partner for us. Thanks for the consideration!

Need help with our next fundraising round which would be a seed round of $350-500k

MIT Faculty and Women's Organizations could all help us advance our solution with their business plan skills, financial modeling and key consumer behavior insights 

Hello Career Guru is democratizing career advancement for all women no matter what age, income, race or geography. We can truly make a difference in the lives of the 22 million unemployed in America by helping them find new careers and opportunities.