Alright – so today we’ve got the honor of introducing you to Willow Li. We think you’ll enjoy our conversation, we’ve shared it below.

Willow, appreciate you joining us today. One of the most important things small businesses can do, in our view, is to serve underserved communities that are ignored by giant corporations who often are just creating mass-market, one-size-fits-all solutions. Talk to us about how you serve an underserved community.

While building our platform, we discovered a community of non-medical caregivers who were underserved and often overlooked, but eager for more job opportunities to share their cultures and languages with American families. These caregivers are mainly immigrants and non-native English speakers, and their job opportunities were previously limited to their local community. To address this, we created training courses that cover topics such as caregiving knowledge, cultural awareness, English lessons, and interview skills to help them upskill themselves. Furthermore, we constantly partner with culturally competent professionals to help caregivers better understand their circumstances, such as tax, insurance, and legal issues. We always welcome those who are willing to contribute their time to support our caregivers.

We take pride in having created a platform that not only connects families with quality caregivers but also creates job opportunities for these underserved caregivers. Our platform supports more than non-native English speakers but anyone who needs a job. We’d like to think that we are transforming the industry to be more inclusive and diverse while incorporating innovative ways to help more people find the help and jobs they need.

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 am the founder of AyiConnect, a platform set out to connect multicultural families to individual child and senior caregivers in the language they prefer.

My background is in strategy, operations, product and project management across various business functions and technical implementations. I have worked in consulting, corporate finance, software deployment and growth, product management in a range of industries such as staffing, consumer products and healthcare.

Our journey started from a personal experience. As an immigrant mom raising two children in the US, I wanted to immerse and share with them my Chinese language and culture with the help of a caregiver. When my dad got cancer, I struggled to find a companion caregiver who could communicate with him in his native language. It was a frustrating and overwhelming process. I scoured online and offline for close to a year before finding someone suitable.

This experience made me realize that there had to be a better way. I researched the market with a side hustle as a searching agency and found that the demand for caregiving services was high, not just for child care, but for senior care too, and other languages beyond Chinese. I saw an opportunity to create a platform that could serve the needs of people who seek caregivers with other language skills than English. That’s when the idea for our platform was born.

As we built the platform, we discovered a community of underserved non-medical caregivers who were eager for more job opportunities and ways to share their cultures and languages with American families. Most of them are immigrants and not native English speakers, and their job opportunities were previously limited to the local community they knew. We created training courses, so they could upskill themselves.

We are proud to have created a platform that not only connects families with quality caregivers, but also creates job opportunities for these caregivers.

Seeing these underserved caregivers getting hired by good families is very fulfilling for us. It’s the heart behind our mission, which helped us push through the tough times of the pandemic when we lost a dear team member to Covid in Q1 2023. It took an emotional toll on our team. We took some time to reorganize and came out stronger than ever to support our users.

Our platform is constantly being enhanced based on user feedback, and adding exciting and innovative new features, such as Live Connect for real-time communication with our helpers. We want to transform the industry to be more inclusive so that more underserved caregivers can get the jobs and families can find the help they need.

We are offering a 7-day free trial to anyone interested in trying out our app.

Can you talk to us about how your funded your business?

We initially funded the project through market research conducted as a side hustle to gauge customer interest. To my surprise, we were able to generate $5k within a few months with minimal investment, which helped with our initial pre-seed setup.

How do you keep your team’s morale high?

In my earlier career, I honed my skills in building high-performing teams. This experience proved to be invaluable when our remote team lost our tech leader in a tragic event. It was a difficult time, with the team feeling uncertain and down, especially since we had just spoken to the team lead two days before. To help overcome this, we prioritized trust and provided space for team members to talk if they needed. We understood that everyone grieves differently, and allowed them the time and support to do so. At the end of the day, we held ourselves accountable to each other and worked collaboratively through this process. We had to let go of those who were not contributing and did not share our values. After reorganizing roles and responsibilities, our team emerged stronger now and better equipped to support our users.

Contact Info:

• Website: www.ayiconnection.com
• Linkedin: linkedin.com/in/willowli

Image Credits
Credits go to AyiConnect. All rights reserved.