( ENSPIRE Business ) Preneur Allows Entrepreneurs to Take Their Business to the Next Level
ENSPIRE Contributor: Iris Michelsen
Brian White and Rico Love are launching a brand-new app that helps existing and aspiring entrepreneurs grow their businesses. The app helps users connect with their network directly, rather than going through several social media apps. Brian White is even offering his own personal phone number, so that entrepreneurs can connect with him directly. These two creatives have teamed up with several others, including Claudia Jordan, to democratize entrepreneurship by providing Fortune 500-level software and community to individuals and small businesses. Preneur is an all-in-one solution to help entrepreneurs run and grow their businesses.
Known for his roles in Stomp The Yard, Cabin in the Woods, and other movies and TV shows, as well as being an entrepreneur himself, Brian White launched this app to help others who are just getting started. White was born and raised near Boston, Massachusetts, and graduated from Dartmouth University. He appeared in films such as The Family Stone (2005), The Game Plan (2007), and 12 Rounds (2009). He was also a regular on multiple TV shows, and in 2019 and 2020, he received Daytime Emmy Award nomination for Outstanding Lead Actor in a Digital Daytime Drama Series for Bronx SIU.
Rico Love, White’s business partner in this endeavor, is a songwriter and producer who has worked with Usher, Kelly Rowland, and Mary J. Blige. He grew up in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, and the Harlem neighborhood of New York City. He attended Florida A&M University and worked his way into the music industry through connections with Usher and Jagged Edge. From 2005 through 2012, Rico was behind seven songs that peaked within the Top Ten of Billboard’s Hot R&B/Hip-Hop Songs chart, including Usher’s “There Goes My Baby,” Mary J. Blige’s “Mr. Wrong.” He has also released solo work, including an EP titled Discrete Luxury, featuring the song “They Don’t Know,” which reached the Top 15 of Billboard’s R&B chart.
Preneur offers many useful features, including a beautiful landing page that aggregates all of their websites and social media pages, which can be used as a “link in bio,” a business text number, and scheduling and payments function so customers can schedule services and pay through the app. Besides all this, the app’s most important feature is a community of other entrepreneurs to interact with, ask questions, and gain insights from.
ENSPIRE spoke with Brian White over zoom about the new app, hustle culture, and self-promotion.
The following interview has been edited for clarity and style.
Would you consider yourself to be an entrepreneur?
“Absolutely. I’m a team-first person, but I was definitely taught to meet the goal in life which is to work for yourself, and then you’ll never have to work a day in your life and it won’t ever feel like work to you. So, as a little kid, I set out to try to figure out how to do that, and one of the big limiting steps to breaking in is the costs of entrepreneurship… Technology is leveling the playing field very, very quickly, and so that’s why I’ve become a tech-preneur. I’m basically trying to help myself use technology to level the playing field, and empower other people to give out this technology so that they can level the playing field.
Preneur really brings Fortune 500 tools to the individual, and it allows you to run your entire business via text. So what I’m going to do today is just give out my cell phone number a lot, hopefully, engage with people, and anybody that engages with the app will receive a free app for themselves to use and to create their own business to run through it. My phone number is 424-352-8505. So if you text me from your cell phone any name, my name, “Hello”, the number 10 which is my dad’s number from the Celtics, anything that you text me my phone will recognize that our cell phones aren’t connected. It will send you a text back inviting you to connect with me, and then we can share anything thereafter through Preneur, connecting my business to your business. We can promote each other, we can share with each other, we can buy from each other, we can help each other…
Social media is an intermediary that is only really built for us to broadcast. When you post something on social media, only about 2% of your followers see it… If you open your phone right now, and you look at your text files, there’s a 98% open rate, so only about 2% of your text are left unread. Now if you look at email, there’s a 20% open rate, which means eight out of every 10 emails aren’t opened. So if you send somebody a DM or tweet them to their private messenger, or if you send a Facebook message like a lot of my friends from high school or college do, I see that six months, maybe even a year after you sent it. It’s not an effective tool. But if you text, at the end of the day, the person will have seen it. So we’re giving you a free digital text line you can put on your landing page on all of your social media. My link, Preneur.ai/BrianWhite, goes on all my social media. So as I post stuff, I can aggregate all that content and all the information back into my cell phone. Now you and I are connected directly–the way that we like to connect with each other.
People can download this Preneur app for free, check it out, see how it works, and own those connections to start engaging, growing, and monetizing their business. It’s fun, it’s simple, it’s how we do things. Text is the way. You probably talk with many people online all day. But as soon as you end up stepping outside of work, you switch over to text, to talk to the people you’re actually going to see. Catch up with many people on LinkedIn or Facebook and you exchange text numbers so you can get off social media and actually connect. That seems like a waste of steps to me. So we created this all in one tool so that you can live how you actually live, by text.”
So what made you want to create an app for entrepreneurs?
“Everything is becoming tech, everything is an app. I’ve been in the entertainment industry for 21 years and promoted for every studio and network in the land, from Fox and Sony, the big tentpole movie networks, to Netflix and Amazon. Every single company in the world now has an app, because this is where we shop. Stores are coming down and turning into apps. You know they’re projecting the death of the mall, because you can put a mall on your phone now.
The solution was very clear to me as movie theaters closed down. As it became easier to connect with people, I wanted to get ahead of the curve and create something that was inexpensive, if not free, easy to use, that worked over text and let everybody own the business and not have to go to a third party like Facebook or Instagram to find each other. So I wanted to empower people to own what’s important to them. That’s the connection.
Everybody is renting us connections to other people. Like right now we’re paying for this server, we’re on Zoom. I don’t own the number that’s connected to this. You sent me a link. It’s a whole bunch of numbers, but you don’t own it. I don’t own it. And we’re connecting in this cyberspace that’s owned by a third party. And this third party does very, very well connecting us but there is a way that we can connect directly and eliminate that third party. And if we were selling stuff right now, we wouldn’t have to pay the commission. That’s what snap call provides.
Another part of what the app provides is a community space for entrepreneurs to network and give each other advice; why do you think that aspect was so important?
“It’s the number one thing. We’ve been split into-I don’t know how many platforms you’re on, but I’m on all of them. So I’ve been split into pieces like a pie. On Facebook I have one audience, on Twitter, I have another audience, on LinkedIn I have my professional audience, and then there’s my TikTok. All these pages segment my followers. But on all of those sites, I have Preneur slash, Brian White. So I’m re-aggregating all of my different followers that for the past 10-15 years have been segmented. I want them all in one place. If I’m selling a movie, it might be for a whole family. Why do I have to go make four different posts? I’m gonna post one that goes everywhere.
That’s the core of what Preneur is all about. It’s about empowering you to connect directly with your entire audience about everything all at once, rather than having to segment and fragment yourself and work hard. You want to work smarter and less hard, with a bigger win, because of technology. Once I saw that technology was creating those opportunities for me, I got in the game and started trying to pass it out for free to everybody that I could…
I have a lot of followers on Instagram, but only 2% of those followers see each one of my posts. That’s how the algorithm works. So let’s say I have a million followers, but I’m only speaking to 20,000 of them? I would do better walking through the mall if I wanted to meet 20,000 people in person than I would sitting on Instagram all day, even though I have a million followers. Because I’m only going to speak to 20,000. I see more than 20,000 people leaving my house. The technology levels the playing field, and there’s better ways to do it. Text me 424-352-8505 and my phone recognized we’re not connected and we’ll send you a free download of the Preneur app today. I’d like to get into your phone, so text me.”
What do you see in your vision for the future of Preneur?
“Well, I’m doing a lot of stuff with Preneur, basically it allows me to operate and promote everything that I’m doing. I have my own TV Network, World One, that’s run through Preneur. I’m doing a play tour with Claudia Jordan. I’m going to be coming to about 20 different cities, selling tickets. I don’t need to put up a website, I don’t need to tell people to go to the box office, I just give them my Preneur. So no matter what state you’re in, text me at 424-352-8505. My phone will start interacting with you by itself and if you’re interested in the play, my phone will have an option for you. You can tap the button and we’ll send you the tickets for the play. If you’d like one of my movies, same thing, same number 424-352-8505. It’ll show you all the different movies I have coming out in the next year. When you can see them, where you can see them, it’ll recognize where your area code is and tell you where the theaters are nearest to you.
My daughter has hair care products. She’s only eight. She can’t even have a social media site. We’re aggregating traffic from my site and my wife’s sites into her phone. She has a phone, it’s not hooked up to anything. All it is is customer information. So when she’s 13 and she can have social media, I’ll give her a phone with a million contacts of people that have already bought her hair products and she has all of their texts, information, first and last names. “Here’s your client’s baby.” At 13.
What you get when you sign up for Preneur is a digital number. So you’ve got mine, mine’s 424-352-8505. You get to pick your number, you set it up, and that line then belongs to you. That line connects to a landing page, which again aggregates all your traffic so you can add your social media handles, every single one of your socials will be displayed there, any website you have will be displayed there, any content, any products you have can be sold and merchandised there. If you are a service provider, people will be able to click in and access your calendar. They can see when you’re free, schedule you, pay you for your services, and book you. You just have to show up and perform your services.
You also get tools. You get business cards that operate through your number. You have QR codes, which you can scan, and they open up your page automatically. We have NFC cards and bracelets that you attach to a phone and it automatically opens up. So if I’m in a location and I’m walking through the crowd, people can scan QR codes that are on my hat or my T-shirt, they can touch me and my business card will be digitally transmitted to their phone, and I can just walk away. Now they’ve got everything I’m promoting, every movie, every project, every piece of merchandise, all the people that I’m promoting, and everything else that I’m selling, gets right to your phone instantly in a digital handshake.”
If you could give one piece of advice to someone who wants to get started as an entrepreneur, what would you say?
“The aggregation of your contacts is everything. You have to touch somebody 100 times to sell them something once. Let’s look at how social media works. We’re only getting 2% of our traffic, so you’re living in front of people to sell them something every once in a while. And with Preneur, it increases your efficiency because it’s all about making sure you own that contact. If you text me, you and I will actually be connected as friends just like you are with a sister or brother or your mom. I know who you are. I know what you’re about. You need to tell me what you like and what you don’t like, and hopefully, I’ll send you stuff you’re interested in.
If I could start all over again, if I could go back to the first time I was online like I’m doing for my 8-year-old girl, I would download Preneur, put up all those links, and start owning my connections. The internet is set up to be the middleman for us. This is the first tool that removes the middleman between you and your money. And that’s it. The smartest thing you can possibly do is work smart, not hard, and Preneur is the smartest business tool that I’ve seen out there.
Online is for one thing: making you some money. So think of yourself as an entrepreneur. If you’re going to be online, there’s nothing else to do online. You’re either making somebody else money and giving up your own, or you’re making it for yourself. So let’s all make some money for ourselves. Take the free help, 424-352-8505. Get yourself Preneur, and play with it. See how you can make some money for yourself.”
This new app will be a game-changer for those looking to start or grow their own business. Communication is the most important part of running your own business, and Preneur makes it easy for business owners to connect with their audience and network. Download the app today to help you on your journey towards success.
Follow Preneur on Instagram to hear more from this company. Be sure to add Brian White and Rico Love on Preneur after you download the app. Alternatively, you can follow Brian White on Instagram and Twitter to hear more from him. To hear more from Rico Love, follow him on Instagram and Twitter.
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