Creating an app like Kinfolk was sparked out of personal necessity. There have been numerous times it seemed impossible to fill a role for a team I was working on. In fact, finding a mobile app developer to work with on Kinfolk proved to be a much harder task than I anticipated. Also, whenever I went on social media I was seeing posts searching for creatives with certain skill sets, whether it was 2D animation or voice actors. Disconnect in the creative freelance marketplace was becoming a very apparent issue to me. Conversations with friends, who also work as creative freelancers, confirmed for an app like Kinfolk would be useful for this demographic.

Our path toward funding is incredibly important to me and the Kinfolk brand. Did you know that, according to Project Diane, since 2018 only .64% of venture capital dollars have gone towards Black and Latinx women? As the team began to strategize launching the app and securing funding these daunting realities set in. With Kinfolk we want to change the narrative of what projects receive equity funding and who those investors can be. Systems constantly fail a team like ours, consisting of Black women, so we’re making our own system. Paired with the fact that apps are receiving billion-dollar evaluations based on value generated by creatives, by pursuing this crowdfunding equity raise we’re allowing the creatives who generate value to have an equity stake in our app. Effectively putting the power in the hands of the collective versus the hands of the few. As an app built to serve creative freelancers it means so much more to us to receive their backing and input into how Kinfolk App can best serve them. You are our consumers, you are our investors. We work for you!

- Leah Hill, Founder & CEO