Tech Startup of the Week: Financial Management Service Turns Millennials Into ‘Smarteys’

Technology startups are changing the way consumers are living life, solving everyday issues and altering the way we interact with our daily technology. These rising tech companies are disrupting the innovation economy, one app, hardware item and software service at a time. The innovators behind these tech tools, products or organizations have followed through with their concepts and established noteworthy startups. BlackEnterprise.com is recognizing these pioneering startups in its Tech Startup of the Week series.

Founder(s): Charisse Conanan, CEO and CFA; Adrissha Wimberly, COO

Website: Smarteys.com

Social Media: @Smarteys; Facebook.com/Smarteys

While many of the MBA students in Charisse Conanan and Adrissha Wimberly‘s cohort at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business were gearing up to enter the business world, the founders of Smarteys prepared for entrepreneurship. Geared toward millennials, the online software at Smarteys.com provides money management and personal finance assistance that allows its users to estimate their future living expenses such as income, debt, bills, and savings.

“There’s a lot of asset management companies out there and there are a lot of big banks, but we just did not see a place where young people could go for trusted [money] advice, so that was the inspiration, seeing a problem and trying to solve it in a way that spoke to millennials,” says Conanan on getting started in the tech business. “The Smartey’s experience is about the transition that you’re having from college to career,” adds Wimberly.

Business school brought the financially savvy duo together, and gave them time to brand their new business and seek funding for the venture, which they received from the Invest Illinois Venture Fund, and several angel groups and investors from Chicago, New York and Philadelphia. In addition to serving as financial experts on Smarteys.com, Conanan and Wimberly have shared their expertise with Fox News in Chicago, Huffington Post and Talk Credit Radio with consumer credit expert Gerri Detweiler, as well as sites like BlackMBAWomen.com and TheBudgetFashionista.com. The Chicago-based founders sat down with BlackEnterprise.com

to talk about entering a new industry, how they make it work and the tech scene in the Windy City.

More Than a Money Tracker: Founded in 2011, Smarteys offers advice in the form of written and video content, a lifestyle estimator, which factors your current or potential salary and generates a forecast of what your lifestyle looks (or will look) like, and product or service recommendations from the Smarteys team.

Money Machine: Smarteys generates revenue mostly through affiliate marketing. “Our partners who we recommend our users to use their services, they pay us for one of our users signing up for their service,” says Conanan. The company’s partners include E*Trade, Discover, Power2Switch and Akimbo, and the current arrangement brings Smarteys between $7 to $100 per transaction. They also generate revenue through speaking engagements and the team has spoken at universities like University of Chicago, DePaul University and Northwestern University.

Tech in the Windy City: “The Chicago tech scene

has changed so much over the last three years,” says the chief executive. The many initiatives around investing in startup companies with Accelerate [77], now TechStars coming to the city; 1871 here and the Illinois Venture Fund. I think there is a lot of desire to create a strong tech community.”

Tips to Starting a Tech Venture:

Be honest and know your strengths (and you weaknesses) – “Ask for people with skills that are greater than yours to do the things you don’t know,” advises Wimberly. “Money constraints will often have an entrepreneur choose to take on tasks and do things in order to keep costs low, or sometimes even just to move faster, but that can be detrimental to you within technology because technology is constantly changing.  You need to surround yourself with people who are going to be within the conversation of that change because you’ll be too busy running other parts of the business to always know that that’s the case. ”

Entrepreneurship isn’t cheap–Initially, you may have friends and family that will invest in your business, but most will come from personal savings.  “A tech entrepreneur needs to be prepared because, again, if you don’t have the skill set to do it yourself, you’re going to be paying someone,” warns Wimberly.  “Excellent folks come with an excellent price tag–unless you find a way to barter.”

Trust in yourself– “You need to be able to be your own cheerleader, your own motivator to keep going. There’s no one that will know the business quite as well as you.”

The Future: “We see Smarteys growing,” says Conanan. “We want to grow our revenue, we want to grow our user base and we really want to be the No. 1 trusted source for college grads entering into the workforce.”

Check back next week to see what rising company becomes Tech Startup of the Week.