EdTech Startup Showcase

Be More Colorful
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[00:00:00] Hey, you're listening to the EdTech Startup Showcase, an original series produced by the Bee Podcast Network. Welcome everyone, and thanks for joining us. My name is Scott Schuette, and I'll be your host today, taking you through the stories of some of the wonderful emerging companies in EdTech. In today's episode, we're going to hear all about Be More Colorful and their flagship product, CareerView XR.

We'll find out how they got started, their vision for transforming teaching and learning, and the way they're currently supporting educators just like yourself. My guests today are Matt and Katie Shosey, co founders of Be More Colorful LLC. By blending Matt's technical expertise and passion for virtual learning with Katie's psychological insight and digital media skills to innovate, immersive virtual reality experiences for career and community engagement.

Their combined efforts are revolutionizing [00:01:00] how people explore and connect with the world. Matt and Katie, welcome to the show.

Hey, Scott,

thanks for having us.

Yes, thank you.

Hey, you're welcome. Hey, you know, I did a brief introduction about how, you guys got started, but I know it's like super brief. Would you mind Sharing with our audience, I mean, how you guys got to this point? Like, what, tell us about your journey. How you got started? How you got together? And, how you got to this space, with Be More Colorful LLC.

Well, if we want to go all the way back, that goes to, our sophomore year in freshman speech class. We'd both been avoiding it because we were terrified of public speaking. But, uh, I saw the cute girl sitting over by the window and decided that's where my seat should be. And, that's how we, uh, we originally

met.

Your high school sweethearts.

This would have

been college.

Oh, college sweethearts. Okay. All right. Close enough, right? That's awesome. Okay, cool. We'll continue. You met, you met in college and then, then what?

So yeah, we, we met in [00:02:00] college and we were, we were friends in college, but actually, we lost touch for, for about seven years and, we ended up reconnecting on Facebook seven years later and, and okay, do you want to take it from there? We kind of started hanging out and.

Yeah, we just, oh, that's, that's about it. The rest is history as they say.

That started hanging out and never really, never really stopped. ,

So talk to us a little bit about the, the getting involved in education. Like, so I get it. You two are together. You make a wonderful couple and you're doing some awesome stuff. We're going to talk about like that part of the journey from the, from the ed tech perspective.

well, so originally Be More Colorful was a residential real estate photography company. And that's that part of the story. That's a hundred percent. Katie started this, this entire thing. She brought me on a couple of months after the company was started, but Katie, why don't you should share about, uh, kind of your, your inspiration for getting off the ground with Immersive Media.

I was laid up for a while after a back surgery [00:03:00] and Matt and I were in the market for getting a new house so I was laying on the couch looking at listings and just not being very happy with the results I was getting with the pictures because it I had to decide which houses I wanted to go to see because it was so hard to get up and around.

So, I'm like, there's got to be a better way to narrow this down. It's hard to tell. And then I just started looking at 360 and what people are already doing with it. And yeah, it just kind of went from there.

And, , she researched multiple platforms and, and, , we were both working full time jobs at the time while she was, she was off work, but it came to me. It's his idea. Hey, Matt, let's, let's create this, this business. Um, we'd always talked about creating a business together, that we should, Uh, we can create these residential real estate virtual tours, using 360 degree media.

And I had no idea what this was at the time, but she was, you know, she, they're skilled in digital media and photography and art. Oh, well, digital media and art [00:04:00] photography, we'd never really touched a camera before, so that was, we had had to teach ourselves that, but we had, uh, had. About 7, 000 in savings, we took 5, 000 of, of that and bought a camera and bought a, a website and, decided we were going to start doing this.

And, we were not successful at the start. And that was the first of, of several pivot, pivots that ended up kind of moving us toward, toward education. The first of those was. When we weren't having success in real estate, we decided, well, we're going to go and create something fun. So we found, we'd reached out to, , the Buffalo River Pumpkin Patch.

It was, it was early October and we decided, you know, something fun, Halloween themed. We're going to reach out to this Pumpkin Patch and see if they'd be open to a virtual tour. And. I tried explaining over the phone what this thing was and the owner, I don't think he had any clue what I was talking about when he says, yeah, you can come out and take some pictures if you want.

But, we created that, that photo and, Katie, you remember we got paid for that one

I [00:05:00] think admission to the Pumpkin Patch.

and free pumpkins.

And free pumpkins! Yes! It's the best

that's that's awesome. I would totally take admission to the pumpkin patch for that. That's for sure. That's, that's

great.

Continue.

But, but we were excited because it was the first time anyone exchanged anything of value, for the services that we did. And, it was that following spring, , Katie, you were speaking at, Uh, community event called One Million Cups. And we got done and the owner of the pumpkin patch was there.

They have this time for audience questions, afterward. And he stood up and said, I don't have a question, but I just wanted everyone to know that, they created this tour and our gate admissions were up 30%. It was the only thing we changed in our marketing. And that was one of those moments where it was like, Oh my gosh, there's, there's something here.

That was very encouraging. He came all the way out to listen and tell everyone this. So we're like, all right,

So word of mouth still works, right? So forget about the five star reviews. The word of mouth still [00:06:00] pretty powerful marketing tool. That's fantastic. And, and what a great, way to support what you guys are doing. Like that, that obviously took time and effort on his part to make sure he was there to compliment you.

That's really awesome.

Absolutely. Well, and, and what that ended up doing is that got us on a path. We got, pretty much got out of real estate. We were trying a lot of different stuff to try to see what stuck, but we really got out of the real estate market and started, working in travel and tourism. Then that opened doors into, visiting with our state's department of commerce.

And it was actually at a tourism convention. I ran into. Our state's director of commerce and on a whim, I just said, Hey, what if we use this technology to help solve some of the workforce issues that we're seeing in the state? And this would have been in April of 2019. And she said, you need to come talk to the workforce development council.

So fast forward to June, 2019. I had an opportunity to present and we ended up with two of the, the, Council members who were, were business leaders [00:07:00] in the state said, we need this. There was a, heavy equipment sales and service company that says we need more diesel tax. We can't get, we can't show students or get them to feel what it's like to be working on a big piece of equipment.

So they have no idea what, what these careers are like. And, also the North Dakota Building Trades Unions, we visited with them and they are having a terrible time trying to get, students to experience what it's like on a construction site. So originally, we were going to be creating these recruiting experiences, but what ended up happening is, well, we did create the recruiting experiences.

But then, we saw teachers seeing these experiences and they said, Boy, if you put an educational message into this content, then we could use this in the school. And that was the aha moment. That, oh my gosh, we don't have to be a production company, we can be a software as a service company, we can be delivering these experiences, we can be creating it once and delivering it to the millions of students.

that need to have access to these authentic [00:08:00] career experiences.

That's really. Amazing and I, I, I can't agree with you more as far as the overall need because I feel like when I grew up, right, like you would go to, you'd go to high school and you'd prepare yourselves to go to college and you would go to college and then you try to figure out what am I going to do in college and what kind of work am I going to get and I really feel like that need for the college education that everybody goes to college, I just don't think it's necessarily relevant, but.

Answering that question of what am I good at and where do I go is super, super relevant, probably more relevant today than ever before. And to provide that kind of a resource for educators, I think is really, really smart. Walk our audience through CareerView XR, you know, how it works, how you guys develop the experience, and then some of the feedback you're getting from those people that you work

with.

Yeah,

Well, as far as, , developing the product, [00:09:00] we got most of our information as feedback from the hundreds and hundreds of hours of conversations that we're having with educators in person. Recruiters and other people and we just, we just listened to what everyone wanted and, tried to go that direction instead of saying, Hey, look at this cool new thing we have.

So actually solving, solving their problem.

So are you creating in a 360 environment or are you doing real, say virtual reality where you're creating, um, everything from scratch?

The technology is called 360 degree photography, or spherical. And this is, our main technology that we use and everything that we record is real. Real people, real jobs, real environments, so that was, that was very important that we, that we did it that way.

Yeah, one of the things that I, that I know, when it comes to, to VR and what I love about what you're doing is that the human brain can't distinguish between, a real event, in a [00:10:00] virtual event, regardless of whether or not it's animated or in your case, you're using actual real footage that it's the greatest empathy tool known to man, right?

I can, I can go into a, to a job site that I've never been to and, and have that experience and come back from that. Um, I think it's really cool. So. When you're first starting out, right? And you're thinking about like, if you've got this experience and I want to deliver it to educators, like, was it a pretty easy sell to educators?

Like what's that process of building and selling in

that product?

So it, it wasn't easy at first. What, and well, I'm not saying it's easy now either, but, originally the career view platform, we thought it was going to be strictly 360 video delivered through virtual reality headsets. And I had an opportunity to be at. , a counseling association annual conference, and we brought our headsets and our brand new VR videos that we'd produced and expecting to get all of this [00:11:00] glowing feedback.

And, I, I distinctly remember one of the counselors coming up to my desk. Well, and the idea was that we were going to load all these videos onto headsets and there would be this traveling set of headsets that would go from school to school and somehow magically not have any technical issues. And. All the headsets would always be charged and nobody would forget to send something along.

this is how it, right, this is how we envisioned it. And by having those conversations directly with educators and counselors and administrators, one of the pieces of feedback I got at that conference was what's going to happen with those headsets is that box will sit in my office. Collecting dust until I have to send it on to the next school and then I'm going to be irritated with you that I had to do that and it was like, Oh, we learned from that though, is that just because the virtual reality video and in VR headsets is more immersive.

That doesn't discount the need for [00:12:00] accessing that content through web based virtual tours, which had been our bread and butter for the prior four years. So what ended up happening there is we built CareerViewXR to be this hybrid approach, where we have a web based platform that any device can access.

It's, uh, virtual tours, like a home virtual tour where we, where we started, but focusing on different careers and you can navigate it at your own pace and click on different interactive elements. Um, but that's accessible on any device. Plus we have companion virtual reality videos that can be loaded into any mainstream VR headsets.

So you can get students completely immersed in the heart of the action. And what we found that does, that also helps solve the issue of budgets, being able to afford enough VR hardware to support an entire school. A lot of our schools have one or just a small handful of headsets because they've got the web based platform that they can utilize their labs and their student issued devices for accessing the [00:13:00] content on the web.

And then students can VR headset. It's, it's. Gaining the knowledge and then knowledge reinforcement and immersion. There, there are lots of different ways that it can be approached because it truly is multi platform.

Yeah, no, I think that's the right approach. You can have an amazing experience with 360 on a laptop or at a desktop or, you know, in front of a classroom, like, and can still use your mouse and turn around to see everything and get that immersive experience. And I love how, like, hey, you want the full meal deal?

You want the e ticket? Okay, I just dated myself, right? You want the e ticket ride to this? Then, you know, we go ahead to get the virtual headsets, which I think is great. I think one of the things, and you're right, one of the things I think is really important is that there's that cost factor. with VR that a lot of people don't necessarily think about.

So if I don't have the deep pockets, that's fine. And then COVID really made that. Extra tricky because now I got to super clean it and who wants to do all that. You can still get the experience you want, in the way that you guys are providing it, which I think is [00:14:00] super great. Quick question. So like thinking about your journey, right?

So getting started, putting this together, love that you shared some learnings, like we expected this, but then we got that. That's super great. Where are you today? Like, in your journey, where are you today and where are you going tomorrow, with this platform and be more colorful?

We are, we're doing really well today. We are growing. And we are getting more ideas and, well, hiring more people with different expertise and it's just going great and we have plenty of great partners that we're working with

Well, yeah, so we, we've had this, um, the wonderful good fortune to be able to, , develop this product here in our home state. And we've launched statewide in North Dakota. That was through some legislative funding that's, uh, that we, we helped, lobby to, to secure. And as we're continuing to expand, we're building out this content library where Katie, how many, we've got how many experiences right now?[00:15:00]

believe there's 68 up or maybe 66.

66, 68 experiences currently we're on pace for producing 50 plus per year. So we're really working to expand that production footprint and even expanding production to other states, because while we've been, we've been really fortunate to have great employer relationships in North Dakota and be building out, content produced here, we also realized that, North Dakota is not the most diverse state in terms of both its economy and the people who live here, right?

We want to make sure that this platform is representative of the workforce needs across the country and the student demographics across the country. And that's something that we're, as we move into 2024, something that we're really actively working to promote. We actually are just in the midst of, of wrapping up application or accepting applications for a production grant that we've created.

And that production grant, we are going to be focusing on producing at least two [00:16:00] experiences in three other states, with an eventual goal of hopefully in the next five years, having produced content in all 50 states, because it's really important to have some, some locally relevant content that, is especially meaningful for, for students.

It, it creates a tether. between the platform and, and the schools and, and the employers for that matter, who have to be a part of this whole career exploration conversation.

What's your, uh, what's your goal, vision? I mean, how far can you go? how many

people can you reach?

Our, our vision for 10 years is CareerVX are accessible to every student in every state and the pathway to get there is, Initially, this is done through subscriptions that schools have or state agencies purchase, but as we start to hit critical mass, there's value in the platform to employer partners, and that's something that we're already starting to see with the roughly, , 150, 000 [00:17:00] students that we have across, um, not just North Dakota, but we, we're in Kentucky, we're in, 10 other states as well, there's value in that for the employers to be recognized as one of the experiences that is featured in this career view library.

So the, the end game is to get this to a point where industry associations and employer partnerships help offset the costs for schools so that this can truly be a nationwide program that no student is left out of. Whether you are public, private, charter, homeschool, CareerViewXR is accessible to you.

That's, that's the end goal.

What motivates the two of you? Right. So if you're thinking about like, I want to hope that you're doing what you do best every day. I want, I want, I know that you're passionate about what you're doing, but talk to me a little bit about, you know, what, what, what's motivated you at a core level, driving

your, your success.

Thinking back to my career journey case in point, six and a half years for my four year [00:18:00] degree. And it wasn't because, I took a semester off or I wasn't taking all the classes that I should have been taking. It was because I changed my major four different times.

And, I ended up with a degree in math and, you know, what the heck do you do with that? Well, I ended up being an analyst and I found my path eventually, but, there is so much opportunity out there and to be sending students on this journey where ultimately the career exploration happens in college.

That's the wrong approach. We're working to flip that career exploration. Opportunity and provide that earlier. And I get a charge out of being in front of students and them seeing what their future could look like, they get so excited and that's what checks my box is just being able to see students getting excited about what they envision their future being.

I think that's really important. Cause I, like I mentioned earlier, I really started that journey realistically when I was in college. Right. And near the end of college, and, and by the way, just like a similar [00:19:00] story to you, Matt, where it's like woke up one day in class and went, I was a theater major, woke up one day and went, I'm not going to make any money.

I'm never going to make any money at this. I am not going to be the star on the stage. I'm not going to make any money at this. What am I doing? How much money did I spend? Oh my gosh, took a quarter off, figured it out, got my poop together. And then it was a matter of like, what do you do? Right? And so having those kinds of experiences before.

for you get to college, right? I think it would be super duper helpful. And something that's, that's really exciting, prospect for educators and students alike, which is great. Now you, recently were recognized, for a very important, opportunity, the, the Yass Prize. Could you talk to, talk to us a little bit about that and what's going on with that opportunity for, for you and Katie?

Absolutely. So the, the YAS Prize is, it's an education innovation award. This year there were 2, 600 nationwide [00:20:00] applicants and, we were selected as one of 64 quarter finalists, which, uh, then we were all flown out to Cleveland where they made an announcement on the semifinalists and we, we advanced to the semifinals.

There are, so yeah, 30, 33 semifinalists, um, educated, education innovators from, um, across the country, who are working to really transform what's, um, what education looks like. Being able to, , create, uh, create educational opportunities for students that are individualized, and really focused on four principles that they call the STOP principles, sustainable, transformational, outstanding, and permissionless.

and As we've kind of gone through this, this journey, it's been wonderful to, to be recognized, but we've also learned a ton about the, everything that's out there in, in the K 12 ecosystem coming from North Dakota. There's no public charter in North Dakota. So all we know is all we knew, [00:21:00] Ospreys was public school and, private parochial.

But now having our eyes open to the homeschool associations that are out there and the charter school, opportunities that are out there, it's been absolutely incredible for us to broaden, the impact that we can have across the entire K 12 ecosystem, but also the support that we've gotten from this group, both, you know, financially and being able to make connections, with other education innovators from around the country,

, unfortunately Katie wasn't able to make it to, to New York for the semi finalist slash finalist gala, but I was able to be there and I was able to speak on a panel on workforce at Forbes on 5th and Steve Forbes was there. listening to the panel. I got to meet him. I mean, it's, it's absolutely incredible the, the connections that, that are enabled through this, this movement, this group.

Talk a little bit about that. What are some of the connections that you did make and how is that impacting [00:22:00] some of your decisions and or, I don't know, projects moving forward? Like, oh, I met this person and, well, they really inspired me to think about things differently this way, etc. I'm sure

it, goes back and forth.

Mm

It does. one of the, one of the folks I met was actually the OzPrize winner from 2022. Her name is Diana Diaz Harrison. And she was the founder of Arizona Autism Charter Schools. And, we had, uh, coincidentally, we'd also worked with, a gentleman out of Colorado who has an organization.

He and his wife have an organization called Neurodiversity Works. We created a drone experience with them. And, Neurodiversity to align students who are on the spectrum with careers in the drone industry. Well, because we had both of these connections now through the Yaas Prize, I was able to connect the two of them.

And literally just before this, I got off a call with the two, introducing the two of them. And now they're [00:23:00] talking about collaboration from Arizona to Colorado. And that never would have happened if I hadn't been connected to, to, Diana through, through the Yass Prize. And we're finding that there's, it's continuing.

Actually, when I was, on the way out to New York for the gala, , I had an opportunity to speak at, Case IH headquarters. Um, we had, uh, the U. S. Custom Harvesters that invited, me out to talk about career view and how they could use it to get more students thinking about careers in, Cruise and Harvesting, and, um, that was in Racine, Wisconsin, not too far from Chicago, so I actually adjusted my flight to, go do this presentation in Racine on the way out to New York for the YAS Gala, but also, one of the other semi finalists, Lumen Schools, is it was in Racine.

So I took the opportunity to go meet with their school, and get career review in front of their students and get some feedback directly from them, get [00:24:00] ideas for what we should create. Then I went to CASE and had the, uh, had the, presented at the board meeting. And then I flew on to New York city the following day for the YAS Gala.

And, and just the, the connections here, it's, it's incredible. Case in point, the ideas that the students gave us in Racine, , one of the ideas was a, they wanted to see something in commercial fishing. Another one said they wanted to see something in the music industry, like audio recording, that sort of thing.

Another one said that they wanted to see a lighthouse keeper. Well, YAS finalists is, in St. George, Maine, has direct connections to the lobster fishery out there, and also knows the lighthouse keeper that, upkeeps the lighthouse that was in the movie Forest Gump. So this, this, this web, this connection, this connected network is just amazing.

Oh, and then, when I was sitting at the gala, I was sitting next to a gentleman who's in Tony Simmons. He's he was a semifinalist from the [00:25:00] previous year. once you're in, uh, once you've kind of made it to that quarterfinalist round, you're in this ecosystem. And, and the prior year is the current year.

Everyone gets together to talk about how they can support each other. Well, Tony. He runs a school that it's a high school that focuses on the recording industry. And we talked, I talked with him about getting aligned with employers to create that third experience that the students in Racine had asked about.

The entire path of this company has been driven by, you mentioned it earlier, word of mouth, making connections, getting in front of and talking with people. I think the art of that has been lost a little bit and what we're finding is that that is so relevant and it's so important to do is to build those face to face connections, meet with people, connect with people one on one.

And ask them what their needs are and then work to fulfill those needs. And that's something that we had that network locally. We're working to build it regionally, but the Yass prize has [00:26:00] created that network for us on a national level now.

I could add two things, right? It's just my personal experience, right? So two things that I have learned since I started doing this podcast stuff in this space. Number one, learning people are amazing people, right? So you guys are really good examples of that. Like I, I really find learning people that aren't just amazing, giving, loving, caring people.

So it's why we do what we do, right? And number two, I'm Better because of the network that, hey, I had the opportunity to create talking with amazing people like yourselves, right? Talking to other people and in the space. And again, that, that heart of, Hey, I just want to make the world a little bit better.

And, you know, if we work together on this, we can make the world a little bit better. And even on my crappiest days, I know I can go back to those people that I've met and there to amid always going to be there for me. And I just [00:27:00] think that that challenged anybody listening. Like if you haven't started to reach out and branch out and, and generate some kind of network where you have fair exchange around, here's an idea that worked for me.

And here's an idea that worked for you. , Get on it, right? So get on it. Your world will be better regardless of success or failure of your project. You're going to be a better human being for it. So that's my rant, my only rant for today. We are getting to that point where it's time to start kind of wrapping up.

Was there anything really important that, hey, I wanted to talk about today, but I didn't have a chance to, to bring it up. Or maybe there's just this really nice quaint little summary of some thoughts or

ideas you would love to share with our

audience.

Well, I think one for me and Katie jump in if you have anything to add on this one, but, we are working in the 360 media arena and we've looked at, you know, full six degrees of freedom, be able to interact with the environment experiences. And there are a lot of companies that are creating some really cool.

Content and really [00:28:00] valuable content in that arena. But ultimately, when we were developing career view, the gap that we saw, just like Katie said, was for real world content, real people performing real work in real environments. Because while yes, there's a skills gap and yes, there's an achievement gap and we need to be creating training modules in VR.

There's also a critical career awareness gap and. We would argue that that's ultimately where the skills and achievement gaps start. If you don't know the end goal, how on earth can you decide what path you want to take through school? So we're really working to close that career awareness gap so that no student misses out on an educational opportunity just because they didn't know that job exists.

Real important stuff. Do me a favor, could you let our audience know how they could

connect with you?

Reach out to us on our website, www. careerviewxr. com. We've got a contact form out there, or you can shoot, uh, shoot an email to info at be [00:29:00] more colorful. com.

Excellent. Katie, Matt, true pleasure. Thank you so much. Thank you for all the wonderful work that, uh, you're doing in the ed tech space. It's really needed and I'm sure that you, , users of Career View xr love you for it. I think it's great. Thanks for

joining us today.

Thank you.

Thank

you.

Thank you.

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