Alright – so today we’ve got the honor of introducing you to Michelle Maryns. We think you’ll enjoy our conversation, we’ve shared it below.
Hi Michelle, thanks for joining us today. Alright, so you had your idea and then what happened? Can you walk us through the story of how you went from just an idea to executing on the idea
When I first started We Sparkle, I knew the problem that I wanted to focus on. From my experience helping thousands of entrepreneurs at a community development financial institution (CDFI) named by the U.S. Department of Commerce as the best minority business development agency in the country for 4 years in a row, I knew that women (especially women of color) are the fastest growing segment of entrepreneurs–but our revenues are not on par with our peers, and that gap is widening. However, I was open-minded about what the exact solution might be. As a human-centered designer, I started by researching businesses owned by women (especially women of color) to understand the barriers they faced in earning more revenues. I interviewed, observed, and worked at businesses owned by women of color during this process. What I discovered in my research is that the majority of women are in 3 main industries: Other Services (e.g. hair salons, nail salons, pet care), Healthcare & Social Assistance (e.g. child day care and home healthcare service), and Professional & Technical Services (e.g. lawyers, bookkeepers, architects, public relations firms, and consultants). I also learned that the majority of small business owners were wasting about 68% of their time on repetitive administrative tasks. I witnessed this when I worked at a hair salon owned by a woman of color–much of her time was consumed by going back and forth with customers over email or phone to schedule or reschedule appointments or answering the same questions over and over again. Based on my previous tech experience in SMS/text messaging as well as natural language processing, machine learning, and artificial intelligence (AI), I decided to prototype an AI assistant that could handle these types of scheduling and customer questions. In my time as a salon coordinator, I also noticed that there were missed opportunities for earning more revenue because there was a lack of upselling/cross-selling or asking for customer reviews at the right moment in the customer journey. That is why I decided to use the AI Assistant to automate those tasks. In a beta test of our minimum viable product, our AI Assistant helped 3 hair salons owned by women of color in Minneapolis earn an extra $1,000 of revenues over the course of 2 weeks in January 2020 (which is typically the slowest time of year for salons due to the post-holiday lull and cold weather in Minnesota). We wanted to improve the prototype based on the feedback from the pilot and launch in March 2020. Unfortunately, the pandemic hit in March 2020 and many of our beta customers had to close their salons. We Sparkle pivoted by quickly integrating Zoom into our platform and became an official app in the Zoom Marketplace. We found that consultants and coaches were still able to operate over Zoom during the pandemic and they now make up our largest customer segment.
Great, appreciate you sharing that with us. Before we ask you to share more of your insights, can you take a moment to introduce yourself and how you got to where you are today to our readers.
I have always been interested in helping small business owners because my own mom was the first entrepreneur I ever knew. She owned a fabric business back in Vietnam, but when my parents immigrated to the United States as part of the first wave of refugees in 1975, she didn’t have the confidence to continue her business because of all the language, cultural, and systemic barriers. I always wonder what she could have accomplished if she had. That is why I have dedicated my own career to issues of economic empowerment. In particular, I am focused on providing easy-to-use software tools for underestimated entrepreneurs like my mom. I first fell in love with tech in my first job as a Foreign Service Officer at the U.S. Department of State. In that job, I managed Travel.State.Gov–a huge website with thousands of pages about passport, visa, and international travel information. During my time there, there was a huge earthquake that happened in Haiti back in 2010. We ended up partnering with the American Red Cross on one of the first big mobile giving campaigns in which you could text the word “HAITI” to automatically donate $10 toward earthquake relief efforts. We ended up raising $43 million from that campaign and that’s when I realized the wide-scale positive impact that tech could have toward the social issues that I cared about most. Every job I’ve had since then has been in tech and I have helped design, develop, and deploy hundreds of different websites, mobile apps, learning management systems, customer relationship management systems, and other digital tools for various organizations across the public, private, and nonprofit sectors.
How’d you think through whether to sell directly on your own site or through a platform like Amazon, Etsy, Cratejoy, etc.
We Sparkle offers a free and easy-to-use Ecommerce platform at www.wesparkle.co. Users can display images and descriptions of their products or services for sale on their very own customizable Sparkle Sites or landing pages. Many of our Sparklers use their Sparkle Site as the link in their bio on Instagram or other social media outlets because their followers can easily see all of their links, content, products, or services–as well as schedule times to meet with them. Our E-commerce platform is all-in-one with the ability to easily collect payments, keep track of customers in our lightweight CRM, and mass communicate with contacts via our text messaging capabilities. Some of our Sparklers have described the platform as if Linktree, Calendly, Shopify, and Mailchimp had a baby.
Can you tell us about a time you’ve had to pivot?
When the pandemic hit, many of our pilot customers were hair salons who had to close their businesses. We quickly pivoted by integrating Zoom into our platform and becoming an official app in the Zoom Marketplace. We also started to engage other types of businesses that were still able to operate despite the COVID-19 restrictions, such as consultants and coaches who were able to schedule meetings via Zoom or phone. In some ways, this pivot made our platform even better. We now allow people to easily schedule Zoom, Google Meet, or other types of virtual meetings or events via our platform–as well as mass communicate with their customers, clients, or contacts via text message!
Contact Info:
- Website: https://www.wesparkle.co
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/wesparkleco
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/wesparkleco
- Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/we-sparkle-co
- Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/wesparkleco
- Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@wesparkleco