Mental health advocacy meets entrepreneurial spirit in today's Wantrepreneur to Entrepreneur Spotlight featuring Victor Arias, co-founder of Mente. What started as a conversation about mental health in the Latino community has blossomed into a groundbreaking youth-focused brand that's redefining how diverse audiences approach well-being. Mente's innovative approach to combining cultural relevance with mental health resources is creating ripples of positive change, particularly among young, diverse communities fighting loneliness through connection.
Hi, Victor! Thanks for joining us today. Tell us about your business. Who do you serve, how do you serve them, and what's the impact that your business and work makes?
Mente is a youth community brand. We are building a new front door for young, diverse audiences to fight loneliness through community with positive mental health at its core.
Mente’s mission is to empower our community with practical, culturally relevant tools to improve their mental health and well-being. Mente aims to change collective consciousness through intentional, community-centered executions, both online and in real life. We destigmatize the conversation around mental health and showcase how the work isn’t just done in a therapist's office, but in the ways we live our lives and connect – with ourselves, and with others.
Tell us about the moment you finally felt like you went from wantrepreneur to entrepreneur.
Dan McSwain (co-founder and best friend since age 12) and I began talking about starting something related to mental health and the Latino community in January 2023. We spoke with more frequency and intentionally attended conferences and shared information to learn more about the space. A year later we secured our first service contract to become real. I was still holding down my "day job" as a PR professional with a local agency in LA working on the McDonald's business and managing a small team. It wasn't until the Spring of 2024 that Mente received its first big influx of capital to truly launch the brand publicly. By May, I had made the decision to dedicate myself fully to this passion project that has now become my mission and identity.
Describe the moment or period in your life/career that motivated you to make the entrepreneurial leap.
We launched mente at Belicofest, the first ever Mexican corridos music festival on US soil. It took place in Chandler, AZ (outside of Phoenix) where we built a mente bodega to provide shade, water, boot shines, glam touch-ups and exclusive merch. Seeing our newly created "mente" logo flash up on the stage after legacy brands like Estrella Jalisco, Buchanan's Whiskey and more was the ah-ha moment I needed to make the full entrepreneurial leap.
Describe a tool, service, or software that has been a game-changer for your business. How does it contribute to your success?
Slack has been our lifeblood! I would also say ChatGPT has been helpful especially when we were a lean team trying to develop marketing collateral, reporting memos and pitch deck content.
We know that success is very often a non-linear path. Tell us about a failure, pivot point, or lesson that changed your course or direction and helped to get you where you are today.
For me personally, it was when I started to weigh my work between supporting big brands in PR and the opportunity to do impactful work and build a brand like Mente. It was a risk to walk away from a PR career that allowed me to lead campaigns for brands like McDonald's, Modelo, Heineken and AXE. However, the opportunity to build something new by leveraging my Latino culture and experiences to potentially help others with their own mental health journeys was too good to pass up.
What unconventional strategy did you employ that significantly impacted your business?
One part of our mission to create community around mental health for underserved communities included engaging folks around voting. We felt that in an election year, civic engagement could be a way to help people feel connected to something larger than themselves and to their communities. Taking active steps to learn more about issues that affect you, your family and your community could be a way to improve one's mental health. In addition to building our brand and social channels, we also built an opt-in SMS list that provided voting resources, deadlines and locations to people in Maricopa County. This pillar of our mission was definitely a risk and maybe unpopular but it ended up providing Mente with an ownable asset and opened up our stakeholder audience to places like DC and beyond.
What’s something you wish you knew sooner that you’d give as advice for aspiring or newer entrepreneurs?
Trust your gut. Trust yourself and don't be afraid of the unknown.
Want to dive deeper into Victor's work? Find more on the links below!
- Visit Mente's website www.mente.world
- Follow Mente on Instagram @mente.world
- Find Mente on TikTok @mente.world
