Today we’d like to introduce you to Ashlee Ammons.
Ashlee, let’s start with your story. We’d love to hear how you got started and how the journey has been so far.
I started my career in Cleveland, Ohio, landing a position as LeBron James’ first intern during undergrad. Post-grad I job hunted from afar and after several day trips back and forth, I landed a position in New York City, that was always the dream for me. I started out as an EA and I quickly hustled my way to Director of Events at a luxury hospitality company working for brands like Coca-Cola and Nike and producing events for everyone from Jay-Z to Leonardo Dicaprio to Oprah. In 2014, I was at a conference and saw a problem with the networking process; my Mom and I had a conversation about it and came up with a very primitive version of our software Mixtroz. It took us years in the discovery and market testing phase (2015-2017) to move from an idea to an actual business. Much of it had to do with us being considered “Quad Outsiders” (black, female, non-technical, tech founders) by our Southern peers and lack of access to capital. Nevertheless, we stayed the course and when an opportunity to grow was presented to us in Birmingham, AL, we rose to the occasion and have been on a wild ride since.
In January 2018, we moved part-time to Birmingham, shared a full-size bed for 14 weeks to complete an accelerator program and refined our business and gained a better understanding of what we’d built, why it was working, and how we could scale it. In May of the same year, we applied and were selected to pitch to the Co-Founder of AOL, Steve Case in Rise of the Rest and we won securing a $100K investment and kicking off a seed round. Over the next six months, we worked to raise another $900k+ making us the 37th and 38th Black, Female, Founders to raise $1M+ in history. In 2019, with capital, we finally went back and put the process behind the hustle and today, we are at the point where we are “rinsing and repeating” as our software company really begins to take off.
Has it been a smooth road?
Absolutely not. I was at a peak in my Event Production career, I knew the people that knew the people in NYC and I was living more than comfortable as a single, young professional making north of 6-figures. To do Mixtroz, I abruptly halted that life, giving up all the things I’d worked hard to build to chase a completely different dream than the one I was already living. This journey has taken me through a bout of depression and to the edge of my sanity but I am better for it. I love who I am today, I am more real and more humble and I now know that I am in the process of building my legacy and my lifes work; something I built with my own hands, my own blood, sweat and tears and i got to do that alongside the person I admire the most, my Mom. Life, most of the time, doesn’t turn out the way you picture or plan it and that is the beauty in it. After working hard in my early 20s, I never expected to have to move back to my family home to keep costs low as we built this business but I did it, I accepted that pivot for the greater vision and now I am back on course and rising.
Please tell us about Mixtroz.
Our purpose at Mixtroz is to create better connection wherever people gather live or virtually. We do this by seamlessly driving attendees/employees/students/anyone from our software to curated group networking experiences, increasing engagement and collecting data. I specialize in humans. I, as well as my Mom, have high emotional intelligence and domain expertise in the way that humans behave at work or play and we used this to our advantage in building an easy to use human-centric software to makes the world’s oldest art, face-to-face connection simpler, better and more satisfying.
I am known for my place in history surpassing the $1M funding mark and for my place in the community to help “colorful” founders get there faster, bypassing the potholes that we encountered on our journey. I am fierce when it comes to business and I am less sugar and more vinegar here in the south; I say what I mean and do not beat around the bush, I simply don’t have the time or care to make people feel comfortable just because. I am most proud that after hearing “good idea but you’re a Black Woman in the South, this will not happen for you” SO many times that I am not only surviving but thriving and also laughing at those close-minded naysayers.
How do you think the industry will change over the next decade?
We are currently living in the 3rd wave of the internet, this is called the “internet of everything.” In the first, AOL got us online, in the second Facebook and other new software got us using tech day-to-day, hour-to-hour even and in this third wave, tech touches almost every aspect of our lives.
We have Lyft to pick us up and Wag to walk our dog, so it makes sense that there is a software like Mixtroz to help us make meaningful connections when we gather live or virtually. The average person in the US has 60-90 apps on their smartphone, which tells me that they are savvy and welcome utility. In the wake of the current pandemic, those who did not deem themselves tech-literate had to figure it out to stay connected because of this, I see higher engagement with technology in the market. The use of tech across our verticals Events, Education and Enterprise, is no longer a ‘nice to have’ it is a ‘must-have’.
Pricing:
- $989 – single ‘mixes’, up to 500 attendees
Contact Info:
- Website: https://www.mixtroz.com/
- Phone: 1-888-MIXTROZ
- Email: hello@mixtroz.com
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/shemixalot87/
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/mixtroz/
- Twitter: https://twitter.com/Mixtroz
- Other: https://www.espeakers.com/marketplace/profile/34688/Ashlee-Ammons
Image Credit:
Pink Background – Darling Dear Studio
W/ Mom by Statue, in Office – Google
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