Annual Reports will be posted here starting after the end of 2018. (In case you are curious, ConsideredThoughtfully, Inc. was an S corporation from incorporation in January 2015 through June 30, 2018. Starting July 1, 2018, we are registered with the IRS as a C corporation, so our first published annual report will cover the period from July 1, 2018 through December 31, 2018.
Presentation to Potential Investors
Charts and text of remarks made to potential investors on August 31, 2018 on StartEngine's Demo Day:
Hello, my name is Dorothy McKinney. I am the Founder and CEO of ConsideredThoughtfully. Let me share with you my vision for the future of mentoring at work: chatbot avatars will provide 80 - 90% of the mentoring employees need, and human-to-human mentoring will handle the remaining mentoring needs.
After several years of research and feasibility analysis, in late 2014 I concluded that the needed technologies have matured to the point where automated mentoring is fully feasible. I then founded this company, together with a small number of co-founders, to bring this vision to life.
Chatbot avatar mentors WILL come to provide the bulk of workplace mentoring soon. If my company does not do it, someone else will! My company has the combination of the mentoring insights and technology expertise to do this successfully, but we need more funding to make this happen. I believe in this so strongly that I have put over four hundred thousand dollars of my own money, and the last four years of my own time, into the company to get us to this point.
We have developed working prototype products, including a chatbot avatar which interviews prospective users, and an automated mentor called MyCareerMentor which currently uses text and graphics to provide mentoring, and which we plan to upgrade to use chatbot technology with the money we are raising. We have also developed supporting mini-courses and assessments to cover key topics not available elsewhere online.
The problem we are solving is a very real one. Employees today are part of the “Access Generation” -- they expect to be able to readily access any information they need. But with all of the information out there, searching for information to get the help employees need to make career progress often results in Information Overload – too much information to absorb, let alone act on. This is why the best advice aspiring employees get is to find a mentor. Unfortunately, even within companies with active mentoring programs, there are far more employees who need mentoring than there are experienced employees with the time and willingness to be mentors.
Companies are spending huge amounts of money to train and develop their employees. Automated virtual mentoring offers a very cost-effective way for them to provide mentoring to all of their employees. For the largest corporations, we expect they will find it cost-effective to tailor the mentoring advice and links we offer to match their own company environment.
The working prototypes we have developed are mature enough to start marketing to a few of the large companies we think can benefit most from using our products. Working in partnership with these initial customers, we can mature our products to the point where a broad marketing effort will attract many customers. We plan to reach break-even in the second quarter of 2020, and achieve the market penetration shown on the previous chart by 2023.
We think the delivery mechanism (chatbot avatars) and the quality of the mentoring content are equally important. Our approach is to offer users opportunities to learn by doing, and provide just as much supporting information as they want – in other words, rather than giving them a lot to read, or telling them what they should do, we offer them activities they can do quickly and easily in their work environments to learn what works well for them individually. This mentoring content is based on patterns I have observed in over 45 years of doing face-to-face, telephone and computer-mediated mentoring myself – these patterns have been proven to help employees in a wide variety of professional fields grow and develop very successfully. In addition to experienced mentors, our team also includes millennials with several years of hands-on experience in the latest technologies of chatbot avatars and online delivery of information.
In conclusion, I am convinced that the revolution in technology which enables us to use chatbot avatars to interact with employees to provide needed mentoring is here today. With your help, we can bring this technology to market, and achieve business success while providing a sorely needed service to the world. If you share our vision that chatbot avatars offer huge promise for employee mentoring, please invest in ConsideredThoughtfully. Thank you for your consideration!