The Queen's Partnerships and Innovation (QPI) team supports the University’s strategic goal to build community partnerships and fully embed Queen’s in the community. With support from external funding, the QPI team offers numerous services, resources, and programs to support entrepreneurs, including those from Queen’s, and to accelerate the growth of startups and small- to medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) within Kingston and Eastern Ontario. The University is receiving federal funding from the Women Entrepreneurship Strategy (WES) Ecosystem Fund, which helps to address gaps and build capacity in the entrepreneurship ecosystem for women. Led by QPI, the WE-CAN (Women Entrepreneurs Can) Project inspires and empowers existing and aspiring women-identifying entrepreneurs by providing them with tools, resources, expert mentors, networks and community building to expand existing businesses and to launch new ventures.
WE-CAN client Kristina Stanley is the founder of Fictionary, a technology company that develops software which helps writers visualize their story arc by analyzing key story elements with artificial intelligence (AI) and gauging how their manuscript compares to fundamental storytelling components. In 2021, Kristina was accepted into the second Compass North Accelerator, one of WE-CAN’s signature programs co-designed by QPI and L-SPARK, a key partner in the WE-CAN Project, and delivered by L-SPARK to women entrepreneurs leading technology-based or enabled companies poised for growth.
“Compass North provided amazing support. The program guided us through the process of raising a seed round that led to a $1.8M investment in Fictionary!” says Stanley. The substantial investment in her business is from StandUp Ventures, a VC capital firm dedicated to investing in women-led businesses. “The excellent advice provided by experienced advisors through personal meetings and online webinars gave us the support and information we needed to succeed.”
The following is an excerpt from an article published by StandUp Ventures in Medium.
Our Investment in Fictionary: Enabling A Nascent Story-Editing Economy
Serving the Proliferation of Self-Publishing Authors & Editors Mastering the Art of Story Editing
StandUp Ventures is incredibly excited to announce our investment in Fictionary’s $1.8M seed round to accelerate growth of the creator economy platform. StandUp co-led the round with BDC’s new Thrive Venture Fund, with The51 and other angels also participating.
Founded by Kristina and Mathew Stanley, Fictionary is a community-led SaaS-enabled platform that produces a better story edit for writers, and by increasing the productivity and skill of editors, unlocks a a new gig economy.
Because there are a lack of structured tools to streamline the process of story editing, writers often use a manual, trial-and-error-based process, along with a combination of Microsoft Word, Excel, and pen and paper to perform a story edit. Writers that can afford it hire expensive editors to fill this gap, but in many cases, the story editing step is skipped and writers end up publishing a low quality product that does not sell.
After a career in technology and during her second trip sailing around the world, Kristina began to write. After completing her first fiction novel, she began the complicated and difficult process of editing a storyline, quickly learning that there remains a deficit of effective tools to support this process. After 2 years of her own proprietary research, Kristina identified 38 key components that contribute to more effective storytelling, and decided to integrate those factors into a software solution that could easily analyze a story and support the editing process.
Fictionary has two products — StoryTeller, and StoryCoach. StoryTeller enables fiction authors to evaluate the 38 components that Kristina identified contribute to an effective storyline quickly and in a way that facilitates simple editing. Writers are able to visualize their storyarc through the automatic analysis of several key story elements, and see how this storyarc compares on a number of measures to the storyarc often present in the best stories. StoryCoach on the other hand, allows editors to provide better, deeper, story edits in half the time, increasing both quality and profitability of the editors services.
To read more of the article, please visit the Medium page.