2023-09-30 01:00:00

Can a credit card teach entrepreneurs how to run a business?

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American Banker
By Kate Fitzgerald

Working for the Peace Corps in Bolivia many years ago, Elizabeth Gore saw how groups who lacked access to capital and business skills remained trapped in poverty.

When Gore had become a successful entrepreneur and investor years later, she and her friend Carolyn Rodz realized a dream by launching the website Hello Alice to help marginalized groups in the U.S. start their own businesses.

From day one we focused on helping women, people of color, veterans groups with no credit and narrow access to capital start their own micro-businesses, Gore said.

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Since launching in 2017 the site, named for the curiosity and confusion of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, has amassed 1 million users. Hello Alice provides small-business owners with free resources, recommendations and the opportunity to win grants of around $5,000 to $25,000 to improve their enterprises. Last year, Hello Alice gave out more than 2,100 grants totaling more than $16 million.

Elizabeth Gore, Hello Alice CEO, left, and Kelsey Ruger, vice president of product, right. Data insights we use to shape offers change constantly, Gore said.

More than half of the site's users are Black, and a majority are also women, in part because the NAACP has had an advisory role from the outset, according to Gore.

Our data shows 80% of small-business owners have no business credit score. Only 25% have ever applied for a business credit card and of those, most were denied, she said.

Hello Alice so far has earned most of its revenue via affiliate marketing and commissions, by matching users with resources including customized mentoring, networking, educational modules and links to business service providers and lenders that include Kabbage, Kiva, Credibly and various Community Development Financial Institutions and nonprofit micro-lenders.

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