When Leia Ruseva and Richard Mensah founded EllisX in 2019, they were inspired by the need for "visibility as a service." Although it is open to all entrepreneurs, EllisX stemmed from Ruseva and Mensah's desire to increase visibility for immigrant entrepreneurs in the U.S. As they saw it, that lack of visibility is a symptom of a larger problem: The primary reasons founders find it difficult to get exposure is due to limited funding and access.
In a year's time, EllisX made major strides. The startup pitched itself to a sold-out virtual crowd at Roxbury Innovation Center's Pitch Night in June. The following month, the Massachusetts Innovation Network named EllisX as a finalist for its annual New England Innovation Awards. EllisX now serves more than 80 businesses and is currently completely bootstrapped, leading BostInno to name the startup one of our 2020 Inno on Fire.
And in the midst of all this, EllisX is pivoting. The startup's platform is still basically the same — it matches early-stage companies with independent media and event organizers — but Ruseva and Mensah are diving headfirst into a new category they're calling "authentic marketing."
"Increasingly, people don't want to just buy a product," Ruseva explained. "They want to buy into a company and its mission and its values. There's no way to understand those until you actually understand what the company's about and what it stands for. The way to do that is tell your story repeatedly, over and over again, as the founder or leader of the company."
EllisX is trying to streamline that process. The platform aims to get founding stories into the hands of media makers, particularly independent writers and broadcasters who are actively looking to expand their networks. The exchange, Mensah said, is as follows: Startups and their founders get much-needed exposure, and media and event planners get more diverse sources and speakers.
Ruseva and Mensah also point to the need for evergreen media as a way for startups to get exposure. If a founder appears on a podcast, for example, that podcast could generate leads for them for years to come.
"Ultimately what we’re doing is not just focusing on getting these companies out there but focusing on making the value chain more valuable and predictable for all parties involved," Mensah said.
Part of creating the predictable aspect is automating a process that has traditionally fallen to organizations like PR firms. Those firms, Ruseva and Mensah said, are human-reliant and based on direct relationships with publications. EllisX is disrupting that with an eye toward new media, especially independent platforms like Substack and podcasts.
In the next 18 months, EllisX is mainly focused on scaling up customer acquisition. Mensah said he'd like to acquire as many customers as possible without significantly increasing headcount, although EllisX does plan to build out its team as well. Currently, the only full-time staff at EllisX are Ruseva and Mensah, with one part-time engineer and a marketing intern assisting.
The startup will also likely raise outside funding in that time frame, although Ruseva declined to name specifics about how much EllisX is targeting or the timeline of the raise.
"This is our starting point, connecting companies with folks who are looking to tell their stories. Ultimately, we expect that we could be a platform that is much bigger than that, beyond this use case: helping people connect, helping people build targeted relationships," Ruseva said. "Who you meet at a given time could be extremely serendipitous for you and your company. We want to engineer that serendipity."
