- Mail call in prison
is like hitting the lottery.
It's that moment of the day that you know
that someone is signaling
that they absolutely still love you and care about you.
- I served over 20 years
and to be able to have a connection
through a postcard is what kept me going,
is what gave me hope.
- Family connectivity is the number one contributor
toward success after prison.
- What if you could connect to someone in prison
as easily as you do with someone on social media?
That's what Marcus created with Flikshop.
Take a photo, add some text,
and for 99 cents, have it printed on a postcard
and sent to any person in any cell
anywhere in the world.
- 95% of people in prisons are coming home one day.
We want to see people come out
of these jails and prison cells and stay out.
And so how we build a scalable tech
that solves that problem was gonna be key.
- You just started your dream business.
How much profit would you need to pay
your basic living expenses,
like rent and ramen?
This is a show on the economics of entrepreneurship,
and founders turning their dreams into reality.
This is: Ramen Profitable.
- It was interesting going to prison
as a 15-year-old kid.
You know, in prison,
it's a dark and hopeless place
and most of us felt as though we didn't matter anymore
once we got that prison sentence.
It was my mom's letters and her photos
that saved my life.
My mom provided a lens,
a window into the world
that others weren't getting in those cells.
I remember when I came home,
I knew that I wanted to be able to help
keep families connected
the same way I was connected to my mom.
I think the other side is your um...
(laughter)
I had no idea how to build a tech company.
I mean, all of the capital for our company
was coming out of another construction business.
I would have to do a kitchen remodel
just to be able to hopefully net some profit out of that
so that I could take that and invest in postage
for the postcards.
- After years of building Flikshop on his own,
Marcus got into the Techstars' business incubator
and received his first big investment.
He could finally hire employees and grow the business.
Then in March of 2020, the pandemic changed everything,
and Marcus faced the possibility
of having to lay off his new team.
- When the pandemic
started to sweep across the country
there were no more investment checks.
I'm watching payroll go out the door,
and I'm sweating bullets as the CEO
that just asked a bunch of people
to leave their awesome-paying jobs
to come work at a startup.
I honestly thought it was over,
if we hadn't come up with a solution.
- Their solution?
A new service that connected people in prison
to organizations that offered healthcare
or legal representation,
as well as information about employment or housing
for those being released.
- For years, we had been building
this direct-to-consumer product,
but we also knew that there was a growing community
of corporations, other nonprofit agencies,
and even defense lawyers
that would want to be able to connect
back to these same people,
and over the next two weeks in March,
I literally spent all day and night
building a platform that we would end up
duct-taping and Elmer's gluing together.
- They went from sending
10,000 postcards every week
to sending tens of thousands of postcards every day.
It was an additional revenue stream
that stabilized the business and prevented lay offs.
- Launching the enterprise platform
was one of the things that allowed us to save our business.
- One of Marcus's first employees
was the original inspiration for starting Flikshop,
his mom.
- When Marcus came home,
I was like, "Marcus, leave that behind.
That's your past.
Leave the past in the past."
And then when he came up with Flikshop,
I'm like, "Oh God, this is crazy,"
like, he's bringing this right in my face.
And it took me a while
to really understand how important it was with him,
how important it is for our communities to understand
that just because you have made a mistake
that you deserve a second chance.
I don't hide behind the shame that my son was incarcerated.
- It feels pretty amazing to know
that I'm making my mom proud now.
It's gotta be cool to see her son in environments
that we probably weren't even smart enough to pray for.
We never thought that this would be our lives,
but today, I mean...
yeah, that's a'ight.
- Flikshop now has eight full-time staff
and has connected over 170,000 families
back to their incarcerated loved ones.
- The photos and postcards,
those snapshots that I had into my loved ones' lives,
that's really what kept me going.
It positively reinforced all of the changes
that I was making.
- You know, most times it feels surreal
to know that we're connecting tens of thousands of families
every single week, every month.
It's legacy building.
It's an opportunity for my children
to be able to see what the possibilities are,
no matter the background.
Because now I'm bigger than just a guy who was in prison.
Now I'm a dad.
I'm a brother.
I'm a son.
Now I'm a CEO.
I couldn't do it on my own
if we wanted to build a scalable business.