Raise your hand if you’ve ever been told — directly or indirectly — that there’s a “right way” to build a business. A right industry. A right identity. A right way to show up.
For LGBTQ+ entrepreneurs, those unspoken rules have a way of showing up everywhere: in the investors who don’t take the meeting, the networks that never quite feel like home, the quiet calculation of how much of yourself to bring into the room.
But here’s what Pride Month makes visible every June, and what Hello Alice sees in its community every day: the entrepreneurs who stop doing that calculation tend to build something better. More distinctive. More durable. More theirs.
This month, we’re spotlighting LGBTQ+ small business owners who are doing exactly that — building companies rooted in their full identities, on their own terms.
The landscape: LGBTQ+ entrepreneurs in America
According to the National LGBT Chamber of Commerce, there are more than 1.4 million LGBTQ+-owned businesses in the United States. Yet access to capital remains a persistent challenge — the Federal Reserve’s Small Business Credit Survey found LGBTQ+-owned businesses are more likely than their peers to be denied credit and discouraged from applying altogether.
Those barriers are real. So is the resilience — and the results — of the founders who push through them anyway.
Building the instrument, building the self
Nicholas Wilson didn’t start Prophecy Instruments because it seemed like a smart business move. He started it because he saw Prince onstage in middle school and never recovered.
“Building unique electric guitars is all I’ve wanted to do since that moment,” says Wilson, the gender non-conforming founder and luthier behind Prophecy Instruments LLC in Maryland. “This work has always been deeply tied to my identity and creative vision — a way to explore the tension between innovation and tradition, between accepting assumed roles and subverting them.”
That tension is visible in every guitar Prophecy produces. Wilson’s instruments aren’t built to replicate what already exists — they’re built to push boundaries, the same way their maker has been doing since middle school.
“Developing Prophecy Instruments has been an exercise in authenticity,” Wilson says. “Creating instruments that feel true to both my artistic voice and the legacy of boundary-pushing artists that shaped me.”
Getting there required more than vision. It required infrastructure. A Hello Alice grant gave Wilson the space to invest in the foundations of the business without compromising what it was built to be.
“Receiving a grant from Hello Alice was a pivotal moment,” Wilson says. “It gave me the bandwidth to invest in building my early infrastructure and pursuing my long-term vision, rather than immediately chasing work that might have pulled the business away from its core identity.”
Opening doors that were never built
Tanya Adamo-Johnson has spent more than two decades in philanthropy — helping nonprofits, healthcare institutions, and mission-driven organizations raise funds, build donor relationships, and grow their impact. Over the course of her career, she has personally helped raise more than $50 million for the organizations she’s served.
But the view from inside philanthropy came with a clear-eyed understanding of its gaps. Smaller, under-resourced nonprofits were doing extraordinary work — while larger organizations took for granted the strategic coaching, donor planning, and fundraising infrastructure that made their work sustainable. Many development professionals were navigating complex donor relationships and high-stakes decisions entirely alone, without mentorship or practical support.
When AI technology began evolving rapidly, Adamo-Johnson saw an opportunity — not to replace the relationships at the heart of fundraising, but to expand access to the strategic guidance that had always been unevenly distributed.
That’s what inspired Beacon by Lighthouse.
“As a queer woman building in both philanthropy and AI, I hope Beacon represents the possibility of building ambitious, mission-driven businesses without having to shrink parts of yourself in the process,” says Adamo-Johnson, Founder & CEO.
Beacon — which officially launched this month — is an AI-powered coaching platform built specifically for fundraising professionals at small and under-resourced nonprofits. It helps users think through donor relationships, portfolio strategy, stewardship, communication, and fundraising planning — built from real-world philanthropy practice, structured around the way fundraisers actually work and make decisions.
“Authenticity is not separate from leadership,” Adamo-Johnson says. “It strengthens it.”
Hello Alice has been part of the journey. “Platforms like Hello Alice have been valuable because they help make entrepreneurship feel more accessible and less isolating,” she says. “Seeing stories from other founders, learning about grant opportunities, and having access to practical business resources has been encouraging while building Beacon.”
Her advice for other mission-driven founders: “Do not wait until everything feels perfect before you begin sharing your work. Momentum matters — talking about the problem consistently helped clarify the solution and opened doors to conversations, partnerships, and opportunities that would not have happened otherwise. People want to help. It’s fine to reach out. And mission-driven businesses should not think small — it is possible to care deeply about impact while still building something ambitious and scalable.”
Hello Alice is here for LGBTQ+ entrepreneurs
Every business owner featured here found Hello Alice at a different point in their journey — some through a grant, some through community, some through the simple act of finding a platform that felt like it was built for them.
That’s what Hello Alice does every day: connect small business owners with the funding, tools, and community they need to build and grow. For LGBTQ+ entrepreneurs navigating a landscape that still has too many closed doors, that community matters.
If you’re building a business — and building it as your full self — Hello Alice was made for you.