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Over the next few weeks, NewsOne.com will highlight 3 Black entrepreneurs who are part of the NewMe Accelerator. The NewMe Accelerator is a program for minority led start-ups that will house a handful of visiting start-ups during the summer of 2011 in Silicon Valley. The three entrepreneurs, Pius Uzamere, Tiffani Bell, and Chris Bennett, will reveal the inspiration behind their web ideas, and talk about the opportunity this new program has presented them. The NewMe Accelerator will be featured on CNN’s Black in America 4 this fall.

The first NewMe entrepreneur is Pius Uzamere…

I’m Pius Uzamere and I co-founded BeCouply with my girlfriend Becky Cruze in Washington, DC. BeCouply is the web and mobile app for couples. Specifically, we help couples have epic social lives by making it easy to discover great date spots and ideas, capture special moments, and connect with other couples.

My little secret is that I built the first version of BeCouply to impress Becky. You see, there were three big things we started to notice after we started dating last summer.

First, we quickly found that we’d come up with and hear about date ideas all the time, but then forget them when we were actually ready to go out. We love dinner and a movie, but you can only do that so many times a month.

At the same time, Becky and I were both into capturing relationship moments: her with scrapbooking and a digital camera for big dates and events; me with my camera phone and location-based apps like Foursquare for all of the little, everyday moments.

On top of all this, Becky and I found that our social graph was changing as our relationship grew more serious. The thousands of friends on Facebook we had between us became a lot less relevant on a day to day basis and instead we were hanging out with a tighter circle of friends and sharing our moments with other couples more than ever.

So, with all of these forces at work, I built the first version of BeCouply and Becky loved it. After fleshing out the product and hearing great feedback from our friends, we decided to make a business out of it. Becky and I both began working full time on BeCouply in December 2010 and haven’t looked back!

Being a Black founder with a new early stage company, I knew that we would need to do everything possible to maximize BeCouply’s odds of success. After a few months of dealing with the somewhat anemic investor community in DC, it became clear that we should move the company to Silicon Valley. Becky and I were fortunate enough to be selected for the NewME Accelerator and that’s what finally pushed us into making the move.

So far we’ve met lots of fantastic people who are waiting to see the polished product; now it’s on us to deliver.

Can we do it?

Follow our journey here on InteractiveOne!

For more information about the NewMe Accelerator, go to their official website.

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