If you're looking for compelling stories that combine entrepreneurial success with the challenges that come with diversity, there are few better resources than Founders Unfound. The site was started by Dan Kihanya, himself a serial entrepreneur, and it focuses on telling the stories of founding startup entrepreneurs from underrepresented backgrounds. Right now, the site is focusing on companies and organizations started by African Americans. Kihanya showcases each company and its founder in an hour-long podcast format. One of the more outspoken founders Kihanya has interviewed is Khalil Ashanti, who founded his startup back in 2016. Weshowup ensures that performers are better paid for their work while simultaneously making sure audiences got more value for their entertainment dollar.
What brought about Weshowup was Ashanti's rather unique career before turning entrepreneur. After joining the Air Force as an information management specialist straight out of high school, he discovered an organization that few people know about outside the military. Started in 1953, Tops in Blue was a fully funded program comprised entirely of active-duty Air Force personnel that traveled to all the most dangerous places where the US had a military presence and performed for the soldiers stationed there. Ashanti was onstage doing a variety of acts with Tops in Blue and says this was when the entertainment bug first bit.
After being discharged from the Air Force, he became a full-time entertainer performing in all kinds of venues. One of the most significant for him was an engagement with Caesar's Palace in Las Vegas where he auditioned to perform magic but with an added twist: he was going to do it in two languages, English and Japanese. The latter was actually his first language because he was from a military family that was stationed in Japan for most of his early childhood. At the time, Caesar's had seen a significant uptick in Japanese guests and was so intrigued by Khalil's idea, they not only gave him the job, but to his surprise, they licensed the format, too.
Khalil made two significant observations from that experience. First, to be an entertainer you need to be an entrepreneur. In show business, he believes no one is responsible for your success other than yourself, so entertainers need to learn the same kind of hustle as straight business entrepreneurs. And second, entertainers have a difficult time understanding what their content is really worth. These two realizations eventually led to Ashanti founding Weshowup.
The startup has a simple, though unconventional value proposition. Performers set up a show and a venue and then form a relationship with Weshowup. Audience members are charged a very low ticket fee at the outset. Then, once they've attended the event, they receive an email asking them what they thought that experience was worth along with the ability to pay that amount.
Ashanti tried this approach himself with his own performances. He compared the money he made during a high profile job on Broadway (where he was paid in the standard fashion) to a much smaller engagement well outside of New York. There, he used the Weshowup "pass the hat" model. Initially skeptical, he was surprised when this approach netted him 82% more than he'd made on Broadway.
Using the technology expertise he'd learned in the military, he set about coding this realization into an online service. A little while later, Weshowup was born, and now the company is working to bring its new model to entertainers, venues, and audiences. It currently has more than 40 partnerships in 15 countries worldwide and it completed a $500,000 round of investor funding shortly after Ashanti's interview with Kihanya. Ashanti has even branched out from Weshowup to build a new virtual event platform, called Mantis XR.
This new venture leverages Weshowup's performer base and combines it with new audience trends Ashanti has observed in the entertainment vertical. He sees the web fostering a new kind of audience, one that has actually been bolstered by COVID-19. These people want neither the travel nor the added expense of attending a traditional physical venue. They want their entertainment in their homes and on the web, but they're always looking for more innovative experiences. To that end, Mantis XR has built a fully immersive, 3D virtual event platform that its clients are using to perform, market and connect with audience members via Weshowup, and even provide customers with a new and engaging online shopping experience.
For more on the challenges Ashanti had to overcome to get his ventures off the ground as well as his take on the new ways audiences want to consume content, take a listen to Kihanya's interview on Founders Unfound. It's an interesting conversation.