Kezia Williams knows how to listen to her audience. In 2015, she worked at a major nonprofit organization and was tasked with launching a national entrepreneurship program that taught Black undergraduate students how to start a business before they graduated. But while traveling across the country to sell the program, she realized that her idea wasn’t resonating with her target audience. 

So how did Williams get college students—a notoriously elusive consumer segment—excited to participate in a project that they weren’t interested in? The answer is simple: she couldn’t. Williams quickly realized that the motivations of her target audience did not align with the program being pitched.

“The students were more interested in the scholarship opportunities we offered than the entrepreneurial curriculum I was promoting,” she explained. 

Scholarships, internships, fellowships, and jobs are naturally more interesting to college students because those opportunities solve an immediate need. And the easiest person to sell to is the person who actually needs what you’re selling. (Check out this article on Mailchimp: How to Sell to Any Audience)

But Williams didn’t have to look far to find those people. “The individuals who were interested in the entrepreneurial curriculum were the parents, the big brothers and sisters, the aunts and the uncles of the college students,” she says.

In failing to reach her initial target audience, she found a more robust audience. She discovered that the program resonated more with this older segment because it aligned with their motivations—building their dream business—and it filled a need: attaining the knowledge, tools, and resources to launch their venture. “[The older audience] had already experienced the pain of Black employment in majority non-Black spaces,” Williams explained, so they viewed entrepreneurship as a pathway to freedom.

But Williams’ pathway to launching the program at her place of employment would not be as certain. “I actually brought the idea back to my employer to extend the curriculum to the parents and not just the students, but they declined that opportunity,” she says. “So I asked them if it would be okay for me to pursue the opportunity outside of my 9-5. They agreed, so I did.”

Armed with a new target audience and the freedom to pursue the venture on her own terms, Williams went to work validating her idea. She developed a separate curriculum and program, recruited her own faculty, and scouted a location to teach her course. She called the new bootcamp “The Black upStart,” and put the word out to the followers of her steadily-growing personal Instagram page that she was going to be training Black entrepreneurs on how to start a business in 2 weeks.

But before she made any firm plans, she needed to validate her concept. She figured the best way to do that would be to have people put their time and money where their mouths were by requiring prospective attendees to fill out an application and charging an upfront admission fee of $300 to admitted students.  

This approach proved wildly successful. “I teach my entrepreneurs proof of concept—how you can start with a minimum viable product, a prototype, and introduce it to customers in such a way that they're activated to purchase it and then scale from there,” she explained. “We expected to get 40 applications, and we ended up with over 100 in the span of a week.” Williams and her small team then narrowed the applicant pool down to 20 students.

This approach enabled The Black upStart to validate their business while also bootstrapping their startup capital. “Before we actually ever scheduled a bootcamp, the customers had helped with our initial budget,” Williams says.

Fast-forward 5 years, and The Black upStart has trained nearly 150 Black entrepreneurs, some of whom have received investments from venture capitalists, opened retail locations, won pitch competitions, and have been featured in Black Enterprise, the Washington Post, and ABC News.

But Williams and team were just getting started.

During the racial reckoning of 2020, Williams organized her Instagram audience—now exponentially larger than when she first launched The Black upStart—once again to further Black economic empowerment.

The #MyBlackReceipt is an initiative started to hold people accountable for their Internet activism. At a time when “#BuyBlack” was at its mainstream peak, Williams wanted to make sure that people were actually buying from those Black-owned businesses that they were posting about.

“We asked ‘How can we hold people's feet to the fire?’" she says. “We wanted to know, ‘Are you just saying it? Are you preaching it and also practicing it? ’So My Black Receipt was a technical intervention that created a way to measure the extent to which this social message actually had financial traction to materially benefit Black-owned businesses.”

She once again put out a call on Instagram, and people coalesced. The initiative benefitted from the #BlackOutTuesday and other moments during the peak of the racial uprising around the murder of George Floyd, but Williams had a longer-term goal in mind.

“You have these really important movements like Blackout Tuesday, and that's significant, but we had respect for movements like the Montgomery Bus Boycott,” she explained. “They didn't protest for one day; they went weeks, months, because for them, it was about justice being served more than just lip service.”

For 17 consecutive days, #MyBlackReceipt set a goal to collect $5 million in receipts from Black-owned businesses. The campaign surpassed that goal, ultimately collecting over $7 million in receipts in less than a month.

Although Williams is an expert at mobilizing her audience, her hope is that those days will be few and far in between when it comes to supporting Black-owned businesses in the future. “My hope is that people look at Black-owned businesses not as a charity but as a value-creating enterprise,” she explains. “ I think when that happens, buying Black will become habitual and then it won't have to be a movement. It will be ingrained in everyday practice.”

But until it does, Williams will be on the front lines rallying the troops.