Stereotheque

Stereotheque comes to the market at a time of crisis in which creatives have lost income and jobs indefinitely. Out-of-home entertainment purchases in the US (think movies, theater, events, concerts) decreased by 23% (McKinsey, June 2020). As a consequence of the confinement, a new set of opportunities is consolidated in the digital economy.

The 'middle tier' of the creative industries was widely affected: session musicians, backup singers, classical performers, video editors, makeup artists, wardrobe experts, producers, audio technicians, etc.

Yet creative activities contribute significantly to youth employment. In the US, creatives and artists are 3.5 times more likely to be self-employed than US workers overall.

Stereotheque is a marketplace that connects 7,500 creatives with jobs in media, design and entertainment through a skill-quantification method, grouping them in on-demand teams. We help SMBs find these creatives at a fraction of the cost and time. 

Stereotheque's mission is to end youth unemployment through creativity. 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, so creatives can work in cross-border teams if clients require this. 

Stereotheque is a marketplace network that helps 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 marketplace, we're serving two sides:

• Marketplace Supply: Young creatives, between 21-34 years of age, working in the media and entertainment 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).

We have done multiple interviews with our users and continue to have them as we iterate on 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 14 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.

As creatives ourselves, we've had the struggles of depending on freelance work solely through word-of-mouth recommendations, not being able to access banking solutions or have a sound financial plan, relying on clients paying on time, which hardly ever happened.

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. The main difference with traditional marketplaces is that Stereotheque offers a unique peer-to-peer interaction platform, where individuals participate in 'on-demand creative teams'.

4 full time

4 part time

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.

The common dynamics of a job 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. 

In our initial phase, we're building a content-based recommender system and as we get more user interactions, we'll move towards a hybrid approach, using collaborative filtering algorithms. 

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

- Opportunity (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 7,500 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.

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 20,000 users. With the support of external investors like Starta Ventures in NY, we've been able to have an important footprint in NY, 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. 

Financial: Marketing and go-to-market strategies lead to a high investment to establish ourselves in the market. 

Legal/Market: Workforce legal implications will begin to change in order to accommodate the future-of-work employee. Empowered with new digital tools, there will be a need for new legal structures for 1099 workers, cross-border work, and health and financial options for digitally savvy creatives.

Technical: Even though there are existing solutions, we believe that there will continue to be additional tech solutions, so we'll continue to be as advanced as possible. 

Financial: We've been working closely with public entities that are looking for technology-based solutions that address their stakeholders' needs. This gives us a solid revenue stream while we continue to iterate on our flagship product.We are accessing small grants and regional opportunities as well. For instance, we recently delivered an app (CovidAid) for creatives where they can explore new incentives and financial resources

Legal/Market: We've entered a collaboration with a group of entertainment lawyers and workplace consultants to identify the adequate tools we need to implement.

Technical: Our technology stack is very robust, agile and up to date with most recent frameworks and APIs. We're continually testing with new machine learning (for recommendation algorithms) and blockchain approaches (for smart contracts between creatives and employers).

The outcomes data we'd like to collect is around creative employment data segmented by city and state, in order to cross-reference it with our own data sets. 

This will allow us to train data models to predict an increase of creative workers in specific regions, and thus increment our outreach to businesses and employers to increased demand in the marketplace.

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

We currently partner with public-private companies, universities and retailers including: 

• Ministry of Culture (Corporacion CoCrea)
• Berklee College of Music
• The New School
• Universidad De Los Andes 
• Universidad Javeriana
• ProColombia (Colombian Trade Agency)

Our marketplace business model obtains a 20% take rate per transaction on the platform. For enterprise, we charge custom pricing with a $500 per month licensing fee for our data model. 

• Additionally, creatives have freemium accounts. When they upgrade for a small fee, they access new resources and tools within their profile including StereoTokens (which they can exchange in a marketplace for discounts and services offered by our partners). We have a 3-tier incentive system for creatives who transact business with the same client.
• Clients pay per project or per team or white label solutions for their in-house teams (starting at $40,000 with a $500 per month license fee)

First year revenues will be $0.5 million USD, second year $2.3 million and third year $4.5mm based on financial projections.

Our main source of funding comes from two sources: 

• Revenue from existing clients 
• We have received investment from Starta Ventures, 3 angel investors

Previously, we received grants from:

• MIT Technology Review and IADB Intalent Award 
• NYU Entrepreneurship Lab Summer Launchpad
• IDARTES 2 awards 

Our path to sustainability is based on a mix of marketplace revenue, enterprise licensing fees, and investment from Angel investors and VCs which we're raising a round in the next quarter 2021.

Previously, we received grants from:

• MIT Technology Review and IADB Intalent Award ($10,000)
• NYU Entrepreneurship Lab Summer Launchpad ($10,000)
• IDARTES 2 awards ($5,000 USD in total)
• We have received investment from Starta Ventures ($120,000)
• 3 angel investors (in total $45,000 USD)

Revenue sources: 

• $39,000 from marketplace 
• $105,000 from enterprise solutions

We are raising $1,200,000 USD in convertible note or equity and hope to raise funds by end of Q1 2021. 

Additionally, we're applying to new opportunities and grants and corporate partnerships.

Our expenses for 2021 will be approximately $350,000 USD

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 in the US by offering jobs and sustainable careers in creative industries.

Recently, Tony Cohn from the Morgridge Family Foundation and New Profit published an article about joining forces to create a more 'equitable future of work'. Their purpose of reaching an anticipated wave of one million displaced workers resonates with our mission; building tech-based tools that empower creative youth across America and beyond. 

Our current marketing efforts are limited to organic and inbound marketing strategies. We believe that with the right institutional partnership we can work to grow exponentially with more users and build more opportunities in the platform. 

Additionally, our StereoTokens are a intra-currency which we provide to creatives once they do a particular action or use their skills. Once they have these Tokens, they can exchange them with offers or services. We'd like to partner with corporations who can give our users benefits and discounts.

Universities, chambers of commerce and arts focused entities that advocate for the wellbeing of creative individuals. 

We'd also like to partner with 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.