Jack Fleming is yelling, but not because he’s mad or angry. He’s driving from Wilmington to Charlotte for a startup conference, and his AirPods are competing with an air conditioner on full blast and the whoosh of traffic passing by. He’s hard to hear. He apologizes.
“But, I mean, that truly portrays who I am,” he said, his voice scratchy, then crystal clear. “And it shows you who I am as a person. I’m yelling because first, it’s my job as a marketer to yell on behalf of the businesses we support and help grow, but also as an advocate for the startups in Wilmington too.”
Fleming’s day job is growing his social media marketing company Socialry, which he started five years ago. The company specializes in social media management, branding, videography and web design, among other services. He’s also a local chapter organizer of 1 Million Cups (1MC), a free, weekly program with local chapters across the U.S. designed to connect entrepreneurs and communities.
The Asheville native and self-proclaimed “mountain boy” circled back to the conference he’s headed to, where he said a select few have been chosen to pitch their products to investors.
“I actually applied to pitch for one of my startups,” he said, “but I wasn’t selected, but it’s still a pretty good opportunity to go and meet other startup founders and investors and business leaders. I tend to travel to Charleston and Raleigh and Myrtle Beach a good bit to go to the different conferences around the region.”
Fleming’s current startup is called Phrayz.
“Basically, it’s an information aggregation and content research tool,” he said. “We chose the word ‘paraphrase’ because that’s what we do as marketers … we sift through content and adapt it, paraphrase it, for ours and others’ uses. So we called it ‘Phrayz.’”
The fee-based, online platform lets marketers subscribe to industry specific newsletters without them flooding their inbox. It then summarizes them and offers content outlines for further elaboration, making content creation more efficient.
“You can read each and every individual email or you can just keep refreshing on social media and see what other people are posting and kind of repost it, but we are able to put a lot of information in one spot for you to review at a single time,” he said.
“I’m my own target market,” said Fleming, whose voice has finally won out over the air conditioner. “We’re targeting small marketing agencies like myself and larger ones too. Marketing directors, entrepreneurs, realtors, insurance brokers, other people who have their hand in content and social media.”
Fleming’s professional platform began in the Port City after graduating from the University of North Carolina Wilmington.
“I originally came to UNCW to study film and entrepreneurship, but I quickly switched over to marketing and entrepreneurship,” said Fleming, 28. “I enjoyed the beach so much, and I had the ability to get involved in the community and do extracurriculars that were impactful for what I wanted to do in the business world.”
Fleming went to a lot of networking events during his senior year at UNCW “to start to get a feel for meeting the community,” he said. They were a place to “help get job interviews and meet influential people,” he said.
But these events lacked the kind of connectivity, feedback and direction the young entrepreneur was looking for, he said.
Enter 1 Million Cups, an event platform established in 2012 by the Kansas City-based Kauffman Foundation that “provides a supportive, inclusive space for entrepreneurs and their communities to gather and connect, where they can work through business challenges and identify opportunities,” according to its website. This is often done over cups of coffee, the platform’s namesake. Fleming is the local organizer and facilitator.
The volunteer-run group is composed of Wilmington business owners and entrepreneurs who meet weekly at UNCW and give six-minute presentations on their products, businesses or ideas, followed by a 20-minute question-and-answer session. Attendees then ask the presenter, “What can we, as a community, do to help you?”
“We do have two requirements or rules, and they are that businesses presenting have to be under five years old and we don’t want any MLMs (multi-level marketing) or pyramid schemes,” he said.
While Fleming won’t be pitching at the conference in the Queen City, he’ll be a veritable town crier in the court of marketing and public relations, chatting up Port City people, businesses and, above all, opportunities.
“Wilmington startups are swinging for the fences right now – like they’re doing some incredibly cool things on all fronts,” he said. “We’re fighting in a weight class way above our own, you know?”
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