Have you ever sat around with your girlfriends and a glass of wine and the banter turned into playfulness and you thought — “Wow, this would make a really great game?” You’re not alone. This woman and her best friend turned play into a business.
Known professionally as ‘A.V. Does What’, A.V. stumbled into entrepreneurship by googling a drinking game she wished existed, but didn’t. “My college friend Marian and I were at dinner in Brooklyn and I asked her if she could name all the members of the Wu-Tang Clan. She said ‘Yes’. I didn’t believe her and we searched for “Wu-Tang drinking game.” When they couldn’t find it, they decided to create it.
Spark, boom, business. University of Dope is the first card game to celebrate hip hop culture and has become the centerpiece of a lifestyle brand. As a finalist in Selfmade’s Pitch Day competition, A.V. took home thousands of dollars that she and her team used to grow sales and spark partnerships with Sony, Bleacher Report and others.
“Seeing people play a game that we created literally from our own minds is such an exhilarating experience. People tell us that they are having shared moments with others and creating memories because of our invention, and that’s beautiful.”
The pandemic impacted their business which was in the midst of a rebrand as everything including manufacturing came to a hard stop. They were able to pivot and created: The University of Dope Game Show, a virtual experience they hadn’t thought of pre-quarantine, which provided an opportunity to reach an even bigger audience. It also created a new revenue stream because they were able to host private and corporate events in a virtual setting.
A.V.’s advice to other aspiring entrepreneurs: “It’s easy to talk yourself out of an amazing idea because you believe you can’t do something. My thing is ‘why can’t you?’ Oftentimes you will find you are stopping you.”
Her future plans for University of Dope include “world domination. We want it all. ‘It’s Not Just A Game’ is a phrase we stand by and include on our website in a section called UDopeTV where we create original content. We want to have a music festival, a television show and of course more merch and card decks! We are creating an entire lifestyle brand, not just a game.”
For Rekemo Fungawing, her entrepreneurial inspiration was born from frustration. As a mom of three, she found herself buying entirely new wardrobes for all of her kids. “I want them to look cute, they want to be comfortable. With their tactile preferences and need for supportive shoes, I found myself tapping back and forth between sites in an effort to balance look with the right fit and feel…and it was utter chaos. Most times I forgot what I chose where, or didn’t know what matched or not, leaving me with an overload of items —which are still in my trunk to be returned!”
If that depiction of online shopping for kids’ clothes sounds familiar, you can understand why she decided to change the experience. “I wanted to be able to bring all the items into a single screen, supported by a single checkout.”
With Cartet, a user can combine all the items they like in a single cart, get clarity on what they’re buying and then check out from one place. “It’s a post-pandemic idea. I was actually working on a baby product which came to a screeching halt during the pandemic as I invested in ‘special time’ with my kids as a homeschool mom,” she said with a hint of sarcasm.
To pursue her dream she built a presentation in Canva that was representative of the clickthrough experience she wanted to create. “I reached out to some friends and received amazing feedback. I then hired a startup agency and started building out an MVP (minimum viable product). I had joined Selfmade in an effort to revive my baby business, and during the P&L (profit and loss) session I was challenged to do an exercise and think of something new and completely unrelated to my original idea, and this is it. The rest is history.”
Reflecting on lessons learned, she urges other female entrepreneurs to “find a startup ecosystem and surround yourself with a community that literally celebrates failure. Disclaimer: Failure still hurts, but people in the startup community will just celebrate that you tried. Have faith that when you try again, you might succeed.”
As a partner of Selfmade, Office Depot OfficeMax has provided over 1000 scholarships to women of color, women from underserved and underrepresented communities, and women in need of support to help make their business dreams a reality. A.V. and Fungawing are just two of these success stories.
