💢 The problem we're solving

Once retired, people lose access to a back-office IT support that used to be responsible for maintaining their digital up-keep. With nowhere to turn to, many rely on their younger family members for help, which often turns into frustrating conversations. Consequently, many retirees feel disempowered and fearful when using technology.

✅ The solution

It isn't about tech support -- it's about people support.

👩🏻‍💻 Click here to read more about what keeps us going from Ferrona, our Co-Founder/CEO.

Our business model is a B2C subscription, where people pay $20/month to get personalized coaching and support.

🌎 With 30M+ Americans entering the retirement age every year, the problem is not only real, but big.

The numbers above are conservative estimates. Geek Squad's annual revenue (not BestBuy, but just Geek Squad), is $4B, with NPS (Net Promoter Score, commonly used to measure customer's satisfaction) is 25 out of 100. 

👍🏻 Our early adopters have loved us, giving us NPS score of 91.6. 

🧑🏻‍🏫 What have set us apart is our people: the near Neighbors.

The near Neighbors are social work students and teachers from local schools, passionate about making technology more enjoyable! Our energetic, tech-savvy crew is here, so you and your family don't have to worry about tech support and focus on things that matter.

📈 Within 10 months in operation, our scrappy team has gotten so far with so little.

By going door to door to various retirement communities, calling 149 senior apartments, collaborating with Northwestern's OLLI, and spreading the word via local Rotary Clubs, we have gained total revenue of $30,075.83 in 2022 alone.

Our team is tiny, but scrappy, and comes from diverse backgrounds united by shared missions and vision.

🛣️ So where do we go from here? 

This additional funding will get us to the following milestones:

👫🏻👫🏻👫🏻👫🏻👫🏻 Reach people living at home, and get our first 500 subscribers.

In addition to relying on our organic growth and continuing our partnerships with various channels, we will actively advertise and market our offering online to expand our reach. Getting to this point will bring our financials to breakeven (at $20,000 MRR -- monthly recurring revenue, with projected annual revenue of $500,000), which will be our first step towards profitability.

📱💻 Improve our customer experience by building the near App 1.0.

All of our current tech support sessions are on Zoom, which has been ok until it's not. It takes new members ~14 minutes to share their screen (4 minutes for returning customers), and built-in annotation tools are not visually accessible even for those without aging-related vision loss.

So in the next 6 months, we will build a custom web application with automated screen sharing and visually-comfortable annotation tools so everyone can get tech support on their phones, tablets, and computers.

🧑🏻‍🏫 Productize innovative, scalable coaching models

After spending 600 hours doing this tech coaching ourselves (Ferrona has racked up 200+ hours of coaching herself!), our leadership team has started identifying patterns in what people need. In addition to the general desire to stay connected with their loved ones using technology, our clients and many others who are going through/planning for retirement rely on our coaching to 1.) manage their personal "digital setup" after 9-5 jobs with back-end IT, 2.) retain the necessary tech skills to get into the next phase of their careers, and 3.) manage their health and finances.

The additional capital from this round will be utilized to productize our coaching by bundling them into classes. Think of it like the bootcamp for tech skills for adults 50+.