myme Youth the digital mentor

Today most youths are struggling with life challenges and don't have a safe space to share and get support. This is especially true for youths in families where their parents are working multiple jobs, travel frequently for work and don't spend lots of time with them. Typically this challenge would be filled by mentors, however, today there are more than 19 million youths who reach adulthood without a mentor because there's not sufficient human mentors.

We decided to create a digital mentor that interacts as a human and helps address this gap of mentorship. The digital mentor interacts with the users using motivational interviewing techniques and imagery. The digital mentor is trained on the 9 elements of mindfulness and the 12 pillars of leadership development which helps build the users' self-love and self-worth. A teen with a greater self-love and self-worth are more willing to learn, try new things, grow and have higher emotional intelligence. Emotional intelligence has been proven to be the key driver in success in adulthood.

Because we are using technology, we can scale very quickly. Our product is in English, however, it has Spanish, French and German capacity.

Our solution is a mentor that happens to use artificial intelligence and is available 24/7 to provide a safe space for the user to share. It has two main modes - one is a share mode where the user can chat with the digital mentor and the other is a learning mode where the user learns about mindfulness, leadership development, black history, and financial literacy. 

The user has an app on her smart device and uses that app to talk and share about her day, what's concerning her, her wins, and any other topic she has interest in. The digital mentor responses and provides encouragement by using motivational interviewing techniques and imagery. The learning mode shows various videos and then asks questions to help the user understand the content she just watched. After the video finishes, a series of questions are presented to the user to re-enforce her learning. These questions also use motivational interviewing techniques and imagery.

The master brain has been trained by prompts created by black school psychologists who are trained in Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion. This is to ensure that our solution doesn't have unintended bias in it.

Our master brain is running on top of Open AI's GPT-3 engine.

Our solution is designed to re-enforce the social emotional learnings of youths who attend afterschool and mentoring programs. Most youths either don't have a mentor or are unsure how to best leverage their existing mentoring relationship. The youths will now have access to their social emotional content whenever they need it; meaning they can develop their emotional intelligence at their pace which leads to a more lasting impact. 

There's a number of studies that show that one's emotional intelligence determines one's success more than one's intelligence. Our digital mentor helps increase one's emotional intelligence. 

Youths with high emotional intelligence are better positioned to have successful lives that are fulfilling from a wealth, emotional and spiritual standpoint. Our goal is to help low income youths take an asset based approach to wealth creation. Even youths who come from high resourced homes can benefit from having a digital mentor because it provides a safe personal space to share about their day without judgment. 

We are a team of executives who have a combined 50+ years of experiencing transforming low performing teams into high performing teams, bringing critical IT solutions to market on-time and within budget. We have successfully turned around a few organizations, the most recent is a $150 million government entity. We have over 20+ years of experience understanding market and political pressures to provide appropriate business solutions. Our combined expertise includes over 25 years of software delivery, more than 15 years of executive leadership, launching mentoring programs, and helping to turn around companies while building credibility in the community.

Our solution has been developed in tandem with low, middle, and upper class youths from afterschool programs. These youths were part of the requirements gathering and design sessions which has resulted in about 3 years of features and functionalities. In summer 2021, we had 22 youths test the Alpha version of the solution. And our plan for 2022 is for 150 youths from a number of afterschool and mentoring programs to participate in a research project to test the effectiveness of our solution. We currently have 3 youths testing our solution as we refine our configuration.

We are following the agile methodology where the user's voice is central to the project. 

We have a a solid technology, operational and community focused skills. We are challenged in the fiscal and marketing space. We are still trying to figure out what the numbers are and how best to market our product to youths not in afterschool and mentoring programs. Of course, we need funds to build out the content of our digital mentor so that engagement can increase. We refer to videos and prompts by the psychologists as content.

Our solution is innovative because we are using AI to help improve emotional intelligence without human intervention. 

Imagine a world where everyone thinks positively about themselves and strives to reach their full potential. That world can exist if each person has a digital mentor which supports, coaches, encourages and provides a safe place to share and is accessible 24/7!

Youths from low resourced areas can advocate for better education and support. Youths from well resourced areas can better determine what's their purpose in life. Because the solution is being deployed and scaled, there's a cultural shift from asking for help is a sign of weakness to asking for help is a sign of strength! The digital mentor re-enforces this because it makes it normal and easy to ask for help.

Our impact in the next year is that 150 teens will confirm that using our product improves their self compassion and self esteem. We are conducting a research project this summer to prove this theory. This improvement will led to better school engagement. 

Our impact in the next 5 years is that over 1 million users report better self-love and self-worth and have translate these improvement into better academic attainment, better job performance, and more job promotions. These are key factors in helping people transcend poverty, and starting to address income inequality.

We will achieve these goals by working with afterschool and mentoring programs to sell the app to teens and their parents. 

We believe that in 5 years, there will be a transformation on how people view themselves, show up differently in the world, and a belief that they can truly make an impact in the world. We will essentially create over 1 million people who can encourage others to be their best selves.  

We have measurements to track users' self compassion which is correlation with feeling great about one's self. We are working on measures to track users' academic attainment, job performance, and promotions.  

Our solution will address the UN Sustainable Development Goals of 1, 3 and 8. Increased academic attainment leads  to improved job performance and promotions as adults, employees have a greater chance of escaping poverty, and improved job satisfaction. These address goals 1 and 8. When youths feel good about themselves, they have increased social emotional wellness which is aligned with goal 3.

Our digital mentor is a transformative solution because it provides support, encouragement, coaching and safe space to share. By using our digital mentor, youths start developing better self-love and self-worth. As their self-love and self-worth increase, so does their emotional intelligence. This theory will be proven out in summer 2022 with a research project with researchers from the University of Miami. 

The data from our 2021 interns indicates that the digital mentor helps youths feel better about themselves when they are down, believe they can do things they didn't believe they could do before, and exposes them to new information.

The short term gains are increased emotional intelligence and improved academic attainment. The long term gains are youths better prepared for life, youths who have the confidence to determine the outcome of their lives and youths who transform into highly productive and successful adults.

We have leveraged two different AI technology - Alexa developer package and Open AI GPT-3 Davinci engine. We use Coldfusion to create the user interface which has an animated figure and a simple text box for interacting with the digital mentor.

The co-founders of Avatar Buddy, LLC identify as Black Hispanic and one identifies as Asian in additional to Black Hispanic. On our legal team, three out of four people identifies as Black. Our developer identifies as black. Our video production team is made up of one Black person and 3 Hispanic people. Three out of four psychologists are Blacks who are trained DEI experts. During 2021, of the 22 interns, 17 identified as black. For the research project in summer 2022, of the 150 youths, 100% are identify as either Black, Hispanic, and/or multi-racial.

Our leadership development life coach is a white woman who is committed to share white middle class values in a manner that non-white middle class users' dignity and self-love is maintained. Her content is used to develop learning videos and help train the brain.

Our solution has both text and audio input and responses for the visual and hearing impaired.  

We are providing youths with an easy, safe and convenient way to build their emotional intelligence; a key influencer in determining their success as an adult.

Youths learn about and gain access to our product through their afterschool and mentoring programs. The afterschool and mentoring programs will be incentivized to promote the digital mentor to youths' parents/guardians. The digital mentor also meets most grant requirements for social emotional learning. 

As parents and programs notice positive behavioral changes in the youths, other parents will want to purchase the product for their youths.

We will charge $5/month subscription and based on our forecast, we should be profitable in year 4. The afterschool and mentoring programs will initially cover this cost, however, once parents/guardians notice the positive behavioral changes, they will be open to cover the subscription cost and encourage other parents to do the same.

Currently, our costs are being covered by one of the co-founders, a small grant and monies from one investor. Because our developer is not charging for any technical services, our costs are fairly low given the solution we are developing.

Once we go to market, we will charge for the use of the solution. We anticipate that by year 4, we will have 1.2 million users and revenues of $73 million and net profit of $36 million. These are very conservative numbers.

We are actively seeking investors and expect to bring onboard two additional investors after our summer research project is completed. We are asking each investor to invest at least $100,000 and we need to raise $2 million.