The Hustle
Years in Tampa Bay
I’ve lived in Florida all of my life, in Tampa Bay about 17 years.
Hustle (job)
Co-founder of BulliPatrol, a social media monitoring tool for families.
What do you do?
We allow parents to get access to their child’s social media accounts. BulliPatrol is AI driven and we actually look at the sentiment of the messages coming in versus individual words. So we’re looking for negative connotations, negative comments that kids are sending through social media.
Why do you do it?
What we’re trying to do is support the parent-child relationship and give the parents enough information about what’s going on with their child’s social media.
What was your Catalyst? (How did you get started?)
I was lucky enough to have a friendship with my co-founder and we were actually looking for a business we could build together because we got along well and our families traveled together. We were looking for something we could enjoy doing and have a good social impact with.
What’s a common misconception or unknown aspect of what you do?
I think the biggest misconception is that we’re creating spies in the parents and that’s really the opposite of what we’re doing. we saw an opportunity to still maintain the privacy of the child whose social media is being monitored because we don’t show their actual messages going out. Only 10 percent of the kids who are cyber bullied actually report it. The best way for us to combat that is to offer the parents information around the messages coming in so that they can build that conversation and lend a hand out to their child to start talking about it.
What’s the most challenging part of your Hustle?
We started off as a direct to consumer product and I think the acquisition cost and marketing has been the biggest struggle just to reach the individual parents so we recently did a pivot about 4 months ago. What we’re now doing is working directly with corporations to offer it as a wellness benefit to their employees.
What’s the most valuable piece of business advice/insight that’s helped you?
To not take myself too seriously. To have a good time doing it and enjoy the process.
