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The Kenneth A. Freirich Entrepreneurship Competition was founded by Ken Freirich, ‘90, in 2010 to encourage interest in business and entrepreneurship at Skidmore. To date, more than 350 students have participated, starting 250 businesses. Last year’s winners were Emily Egan, ‘20, and Maya Ling, ‘21, with their bakery business, Coven.
Students create and develop real-world business plans with the help of mentors who have experience in varying business endeavors. Accomplished alumni and community members who work as entrepreneurs, executives, investors, and marketers are invited to share advice. Students must then present their pitches to a panel of judges, who decide the winner.
This year’s second place was awarded to Haja Bah, ‘21, for her enterprise Uman4Uman, which focuses on addressing period poverty among young girls and women in Sierra Leone. Third place was taken by Arlene Silva, ‘21, for HidroVerde, which specialized in hydroponic techniques to provide sustainable agricultural solutions to droughts in Cape Verde. Maddy Colantonio, ‘21, won fourth place for CaraCara, a gourmet frozen custard company.
Dylan Telano, ‘23, received the first-place prize of $20,000 for his online writing platform, VoyceMe. I interviewed him over Zoom for a Q&A session about himself and his project. Following are edited excerpts from that conversation.
What is your major?
I’m a Business and Management Major and a History Minor.
What is VoyceMe?
I built on my initial idea: creating an interactive publishing platform to make it easy for authors of all levels to post their stories and engage with their audience.
We cover WebComics and other writing mediums. It’s a whole array of writing and art that are rarely represented within the writing industry. Most of the time, these English creators will need to go to Asia to gain traction on their work. What VoyceMe does is give a home to English language content with a background in Asian media. You can post content, and people can read it. Authors can generate revenue, and readers can expect serialized episodes in comic series.
Just like Netflix, you can expect a finished show when released. Before VoyceMe, readers would read a comic and would have no idea if the next episode would ever be released. It depended on the author’s schedule. VoyceMe serializes this content for English language media.
VoyceMe original stories are our big-name stories. They’re guaranteed to be high-quality stories, and I interact with those authors personally, whether it be about the platform or feedback.
VoyceMe is entirely free to sign-up for. You can sign up here.
How did you come up with your idea?
I’m an author myself, and about three or four years ago, I was trying to write my own story. I wrote it, put countless hours into it, and then tried to find a site to post it. The places available didn’t accurately represent what I was doing. For example, I was trying to write a web novel with serialized chapters, and there was no right site that supported that. My only option was to post on the writing site Wattpad.
I also invested so much time into this project, but there was no monetary gain or incentive. I asked my friends, who were writers, how they made money. Their response was: “You don’t.” I thought this was ridiculous. I know artists who work fifty-plus hours to make one chapter, and they see two dollars maximum, if anything, for that work.
So, I decided to solve this problem, and eventually, that small idea grew into the concept for VoyceMe.
What genres does VoyceMe cover?
It’s really for any genre of writing within novels and comics. We specialized more recently for this competition, so now more genres within these categories are included. We also have people posting poems and blogs. It just depends. VoyceMe’s motto is “the home of creativity” because we have artists, authors, editors, voice actors, translators, and an active audience of anyone who engages in creative arts.
Were there parts of the competition that were significant to developing your idea?
There were a few pivotal points.
I was in last year’s competition. It was mostly an idea at that point. I knew millions were suffering from the issues I mentioned before, so I figured I had a good idea. I looked into writing a business plan, and I wrote this bulky plan with thirty pages in a tiny font. I walked into Professor Roy’s office - he’s retired now, but he was the coordinator of the last competition. I handed him the idea, and his first suggestion was: “Don’t be bound by paper.”
This advice made me step back, narrow down my focus. What was I doing, why did I create it, and what were we solving? The 2020 competition helped me to narrow down what I wanted to make. Last year, we centered on Western English e-books, blogs, and poems - which is a pretty big industry. Recently, within the previous five months, we changed back to the original genre I thought of: webcomics, web novels, and manga. So we’re changing a lot.
In this year’s competition, from the semi-finals to the finals, I worked every day with my mentor, Gregory Rutchick. He was a fantastic mentor; from the beginning, he said, “Dylan, I’m going to bring you to first place, and we’re going to do whatever we need to do to get to that point.” He wasn’t lying, and we worked every day on dry runs and pitches. He would ask his wife for advice, including what VoyceMe’s catchphrase for the competition would be. That’s where the ‘Netflix of comics’ arose.
Where will the award money go?
We’re splitting it between a variety of features. Some will go towards acquiring content. I believe that where the authors go, the readers follow. I want to obtain high-quality content for the site so that more readers will sign up.
The next thing is marketing. We’re focusing on how to get our name out there and build a brand reputation. The other thing is development. Right now, VoyceMe fully works on PC and mobile devices. We want an application on the Apple and GooglePlay stores.
The last portion will go towards funding employees. Right now, I work around seventy-five to eighty hours a week, and that’s a lot, in addition to schoolwork. For the last seven months, I’ve worked full-time at a marketing company to generate funds. I need capital to acquire authors and build a reputation.
But to acquire high-quality authors and creators, I originally went to high-profile authors, offered them an amount of money, and asked them to be brand ambassadors for VoyceMe. They promote our content, post their content, get a portion of the revenue, and are paid monthly. Eventually, creators started approaching us, and that builds a network effect.
We’re hitting about 30,000 to 90,000 new impressions per day. We have about 16,000 people with accounts, 25,000 posts from creators, and around 13,000 authors.
Out of all aspects, my strength is marketing. Apps like TikTok are the best marketing strategies right now, and VoyceMe’s TikTok has 76.1K followers and almost a million views.
Do you have any plans in the future to expand?
Ultimately, I want to scale VoyceMe as the next big English language entertainment platform, specifically for anime and manga.
The closest goal is looking for private equity investments and using this competition to leverage a better position in venture capitalist firms. We might do crowdfunding as well. We’re just trying to scale the platform right now to keep growing.
Many large companies make anime within Asia, and companies are starting to get into this. Crunchyroll and Netflix, for example, are making anime. I want to reach the point where VoyceMe is animating its stories on the platform.
Eventually, we want to open overseas and to translate our works to English from other languages. Most of our audience is in the states, but 40% of our audience is global, so there’s significant demand.
The next feature we’re pushing is an interactive portion. Authors and creators can interact with fans. We’re also adding music that can play at certain points in a specific story, depending on what tone the author wants to strike.
If a Skidmore student wants to publish on VoyceMe, how can they contact you?
They can contact me through my Skidmore email. Our business email is also open, which is listed on all our social media.
I keep an open-door policy, so I respond to around 75 to 100 people a day who want to publish. We officially partnered with Discord recently, so there’s a working server for artists and creators to connect and plan the next steps.
For more information, check out VoyceMe’s :