 A state of Ohio and Ohio State's Fisher College of Business launched a new venture accelerator this summer and even though the 10X program is coming to a close, the teams of young entrepreneurs are just getting started. Carlos Ramirez came to Columbus to work as a merchant at Ibercromby and Fitch, but he soon left that job after a simple idea sparked his desire to build a business of his own. The idea came when I was on Amazon and I was reviewing a book. The first hit that I got was like this essay-long review and in my mind I was like, man, what would drive someone to take like two hours of their day and write this really nice comprehensive review to help me out of my purchase. So Carlos came up with a loyalty platform for websites to help engage users. It's called In Crowd. Our strength is the real rewards program, which basically makes it so that the user can navigate and go through their favorite websites and as they're interacting with that website, they can get points towards unlocking a real reward. Carlos applied to the 10X program to get much-needed seed money to stay afloat, but he quickly discovered the invaluable insight from mentors like John Edwards. These are guys that have done it before. They're all serial entrepreneurs or heavy investors. They know what they're doing. It's an opportunity to help the inventor of the company make good decisions, get access to customers, get access to talent, get access to knowledge. That access helped Carlos make a quick business decision, an important trade for entrepreneurs. You really just kind of want to jump into the deep end of the pool, learn as quickly as possible and grow from there. Carlos will soon launch a beta version with his first client. He expects the platform to go fully live in three to six months. The most rewarding part is, you know, just having a random idea that you're like, could this possibly work? And then actually start seeing real progress.