Young Black entrepreneurs in tech: A dream in the making
Two ambitious African-American entrepreneurs hope to enter Silicon Valley with new startup, CorQuests
.Nationwide (BlackNews.com) — After the airing of CNN’s “Black in America: The New Promised Land – Silicon Valley,” a new dream was realized for many hopeful black entrepreneurs. Each year there are many new successful Silicon Valley startups, but black-owned tech companies are still not reaching the same potential. Silicon Valley continues to be dominated by mostly young, white male entrepreneurs.
Two ambitious African-American entrepreneurs hope to change this with their business, CorQuests. Nolan Ford and Adenike Sonaike, like many young entrepreneurs, have courageously focused on building their startup from the ground up and are hoping that their company’s services will provide a mechanism to help other entrepreneurs and business-minded people to reach their goals.
“We are passionate in seeing other businesses and entrepreneurs succeed with their corporate goals,” Nolan stated. “We hope that our business services can help them manage and conduct business activities simply and effectively.”
CorQuests stands for “CORporate QUESTS” and describes the vision of the company. The Cofounders believe that all business professionals are on a journey to complete certain goals pertaining to their careers or their businesses. They call this person’s journey a “corporate quest.” CorQuests plans to offer their users services such as cloud storage and sharing, online meeting and collaboration, financial and budgeting software, corporate task management software and other useful services along with a social network that allows users to connect with other professionals, while managing business activities. The advantage of CorQuests is that it combines all of these services at one affordable and competitive price. CQ offers all these services for the cost of one, allowing users to save hundreds of dollars.
The Cofounders launched their crowdfunding campaign on Indiegogo (www.indiegogo.com/CorQuests) in hopes to raise the required capital needed to complete the site development and to interact with future CQ users. The campaign goal? $150,000, which will be used to cover development cost such as domain hosting and transfer, server space, web and mobile graphic designers, web and mobile software architects, and other website and software programmers.
“We were nervous about starting this campaign but we are hoping to receive as much help and support as possible form the black community to complete our site development,” Adenike explained. Nolan went on to add that, “…we only need at least 1000 people to pledge to give $150 and our goal will be met.” The two hope with the support of the black and female entrepreneurial communities, as well as their hometown communities, their goal will be met.
The company is even offering interesting perks to get future users involved in their campaign. For a donation of $50 or more you will have the opportunity to join the development team! “We wanted our users to have power over what they see on our site, so we want them to vote on site layout, homepage, logo design, page templates and other visual aspects of the site,” Nolan said.
Other perks offered include an additional year of free services and involvement in the website software acceptance testing. Users who donate $150 or more will also be invited to be the first to test the official website in the CorQuests private beta testing round. The company has also given the maximum of 100 people the opportunity to receive a lifetime of services, where they never have to pay again, after their contribution of $1500 or more, to use all current and any future services, calling these people, “CQ Most Valued Members.” The cofounders say that this will be the best deal for businesses and business owners, which will save them thousands of dollars.
The cofounders hope the future users will contribute to the site and will get involved in the development process. “We are doing this for our users and we hope they find their involvement valuable. We appreciate all contributions, even if it’s only $1” said Nolan. Even if you cannot donate, the founders said sharing their campaign will be very helpful to their business and they are willing to do interviews and answer any questions.
“This has been a very enjoyable process so far and we look forward to working with our users and anyone else who wants to help make CorQuests an international success.”
If you would like more information about this topic, to contribute, to show support or to schedule an interview with one of the cofounders, please visit www.indiegogo.com/CorQuests or email info@corquests.com
Photo Caption: CorQuests co-founders Adenike Sonaike and Nolan Ford seated together during a birthday dinner celebration
