Austin Lopesilvero
Ecosystem Builder · Louisville, KY
Capabilities overview
Empowering communities from what if to I can.
Let's explore ways we can work together to support our community of founders & your organizational goals.
Capabilities overview
Let's explore ways we can work together to support our community of founders & your organizational goals.
Entrepreneurial ecosystem & economic development support
Entrepreneur support organizations and economic development organizations do hard, important work. Programs get built, events get hosted, founders get helped. But the stories often stay inside the room, the resources stay scattered, and the marketing fundamentals get squeezed out by everything else on the plate.
What follows is a collection of ideas, concepts, and capabilities, shaped by years of doing this work, offered as ways we might work together. It is not a prescription. Each section separates my skill sets from example concepts and projects we could work together on, so you can see the skill set and the related work side by side.
How I show up
Amplification. Telling the stories of founders, programs, and wins so the community, and those outside it, know what's happening here.
The front door. Introductions, founder conversations, and environments where connections happen easily.
Programming. Events, programs, and partnerships designed around what the community says it needs, delivered in a timely way.
Currently building
A few of the active initiatives that keep me close to founders, ecosystem builders, and the work of moving a community forward.
Leading a group of volunteer organizers to bring the entire Louisville regional ecosystem together to invest in founders and their teams while celebrating the community, held as part of Global Entrepreneurship Week.
Learn more ↗Bringing the Startup Champions Network Summit to Louisville to showcase how the region supports its entrepreneurs, and to bring ecosystem builders from across the country to share what they've learned and help us tackle the challenges our ecosystem faces.
Learn more ↗A weekly live show interviewing ecosystem builders from around the world about their experiences, what they've tried, the challenges along the way, and their superpowers.
Learn more ↗Where I can help
Each one pairs my background and expertise with ideas and potential projects we could build together.
Engagement area 01
Our region has amazing founders, insane potential, and incredible contributors. Let's make sure the world knows what's happening here: Who our founders are, what their companies do, what their wins and needs are, what they've learned, and what's truly possible in Possibility City.
Planning, production, hosting, distribution, and placement of the assets. I've done this end to end, from in person Storytelling to digital mediums to word of mouth. Any role in the process, in front of the camera or behind it.
Concepts & projects
Short-form and long-form videos to spotlight the founders and startups in our region and what they're building, and where they're going.
An ecosystem news and spotlight show, and/or a founder interview series going deep on lessons, needs, and stories along the way.
Capturing what's happening around the city so those who weren't in the room still benefit, and the stories keep working after the event ends.
Written stories that earn media mentions and get indexed by search engines and LLMs, plus clips packaged for social.
Engagement area 02
Gathering the tips, lessons, and assets from founders and ecosystem contributors and putting them into structured, searchable, shareable formats.
Structuring knowledge so it's useful to humans, search engines, and AI agents alike, with strong schema underneath. Plus the program design to turn a pile of resources into mentorship and learning experiences that respect everyone's time.
Concepts & projects
Categorized, filterable, searchable. A knowledge base AI agents can answer from when someone has a question.
Pieces like "Where do entrepreneurs work in our region?" pairing the places with stories of founders who've used them.
Matching, training for mentors and mentees, and pre-reads so sessions skip the basics and get to the founder's real questions.
Telling the stories of regional programs and their alumni, plus designing new programs around what the community says it needs.
Engagement area 03
Most ESOs and EDOs pour energy into programs, then struggle to fill the room. Reach is the bottleneck, and email and social alone rarely solve it.
Positioning and messaging as a StoryBrand Certified Guide, SEO/AEO/GEO so programs get found, paid and grant-funded ads, and distribution channel support such as email, social, and video that actually drive engagement. The strategy and the hands-on build, including the technical schema work.
Concepts & projects
Optimization for search engines, answer engines, and generative engines, plus UX work so visitors find what they need.
One consistent understanding of who you are, what you offer, and how people engage.
Securing the grant (free ad dollars), paired with paid strategy across Google, Meta, LinkedIn, and emerging LLM ad platforms to get in front of community members
Audits, campaign planning, list growth, content strategy, and improving open rates and engagement.
Placement strategy, sponsor messaging, inbound pipeline rather than only outbound, and the assets to support it.
Engagement area 04
Creating the events, connections, and pride that make a community feel like one. Grounded in what founders are actually asking for.
Creating, organizing, managing, running, and promoting events in any role. And a commitment, built into every engagement, to regular conversations with founders and ecosystem members so the work stays tied to real needs and systemic challenges.
Concepts & projects
From planning through promotion, designed around what the community actually wants.
Introductions and environments where connections happen easily.
More ways for people to wear, share, and show where they're from. Swag and assets people actually want to use.
A standing rhythm of founder conversations that feeds everything else: events, resources, programs.
Engagement area 05
Community is people and organizations working together. Bringing together those with common goals to do real work, beyond sponsorship.
Bringing organizations, industry leaders, and investors around a shared goal, then designing the structure that turns a loose group into something durable.
Concepts & projects
Groups of founders built around an industry, connected to the companies, leaders, and investors who can fund and support the work.
Hubs grow into incubators as they gain traction, eventually launching accelerators to help budding startups scale faster
Businesses built in a weekend, but every idea comes from university IP to activate our region's research while forming viable companies.
Showing the ecosystem momentum these collaborations create.
Engagement area 06
Getting entrepreneurship in front of kids earlier, and tying the region's universities and schools into the ecosystem.
Equipping students with the connections, skills, and resources to launch real companies and real solutions to challenges they care about, with the entrepreneurial mindset running through all of it.
Concepts & projects
Hands-on programs that put real company-building in front of students.
Deeper ties between school systems, universities, and the founder community across the region.
Equipping your team
Not every organization has the people or budget to hire out everything. Part of this work is equipping teams to do more themselves.
| Playbooks | Best practices for marketing, communication, and promotion in organizations like yours. |
| Templates | Ready-to-use storytelling and marketing templates your team runs internally. |
| AI skills & workflows | Skills files, agent setups, and tools that let a small team produce at a larger team's pace. |
| Courses | Full lifecycle: planning, recording, assembling, managing, and promoting a mini course your audience needs. |
| Case studies | PDFs, one-pagers, and web pages built for human readers and readable by AI and agents. |
Working together
| Full-time ** | Need a full-time ecosystem builder with these skillsets? Let's talk! |
| Contracted / fractional | Ongoing capacity across several areas, embedded with your team. |
| Project-based | A defined build: podcast launch, resource library, Ad Grant setup, website overhaul. |
| Advisory | Strategy, positioning, and program design while your team executes. |
| Templates & training | Playbooks, templates, AI workflows, and courses your team runs internally. |
* Engagements are with me personally. Depending on scope, we can bring in Aspen Studios team members and assets for added production capacity. If you have an existing project where any of these skills would help, that's a fit too.
** While my full-time commitment in time and effort would be to your organization, I may still periodically step away to support other community projects and side work such as Startup Week or long-term agency clients.
This document was always meant to be a starting point. Let's meet to discuss what your goals are, where you may have gaps that my capabilities can fill, and what crazy ideas we can come up with and execute on to benefit our community.
Start the conversation