Laneisha Roberts Made Room for Faith, Then Built the Tools to Prove It.
“Laneisha Roberts flew from Atlanta to Detroit and found confirmation. Now she’s building Career Companion and Testify & Pitch to turn experience into economic proof.”
On September 26, 2025, at Black Tech Saturdays' Digital Empowerment Summit in Detroit, a session was underway that most tech conferences wouldn't have scheduled.
Marc Alexander was talking about faith, stewardship, and waiting, the kind of waiting that doesn't look like strategy from the outside but feels like obedience from the inside. Laneisha Roberts had flown in from Atlanta that morning. She walked straight from the airport into that room, sat down, and knew something she hadn't been able to say out loud yet: she was on the right track.
It was the first time she had experienced faith integrated into a tech conference. Not as decoration. Not as a pre-session devotional that everyone politely waits through. As content. As framework. As something the room was willing to take seriously.
She stayed in her seat and kept listening.
Laneisha Roberts is founder of ReviewTailor and creator of Testify & Pitch. She is building from Atlanta, and she describes her identity arc with the precision of someone who has thought carefully about what work is actually for: she is becoming an architect of opportunity by building products and platforms that help people recognize, document, and move boldly in what they carry.
That sentence matters. Because what she is building is, at its core, a response to the gap between what people have earned and what the market is willing to see.
That gap is structural, and it is widening.
Sixty-one percent of employers have increased experience requirements for new hires over the last several years, a threshold that keeps rising even as the entry point stays labeled "entry-level." Most jobs bearing that label now require two to five years of prior experience, a requirement that functions less as a standard and more as a filter: one that disadvantages early-career professionals who have done meaningful work but lack the tools, language, or documentation to prove it in the terms the market demands.
The workforce data confirms what many candidates feel. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the gap between credential attainment and employment outcomes among workers under 25 has not closed despite record college enrollment, suggesting that credentials alone are not the bottleneck. Documentation and translation of experience are. The candidate who can articulate, quantify, and present what they've done moves forward. The one who can't, even if their work is equally strong, often doesn't.
The founders building in this environment carry their own parallel weight. Techstars' 2024 Pulse of the Entrepreneur survey found that 78% of founders reported high stress, 70% reported anxiety, and 55% said they work too much. These are not personality complaints. They are data points describing an infrastructure failure: a startup culture that demands constant output while providing almost no architecture for the kind of human sustainability that makes output possible over time.
Laneisha is building into both of those failures at once.
The barrier she encountered was not a single wall. It was a pattern of closed doors.
Access to growth, she has found, is often gatekept, not always by malice, but by the invisible architecture of who gets the information, who gets the mentor willing to say what others won't, who gets the room where the real conversation is happening. Hard-earned lessons circulate among people who already have access to each other. The professional who is already inside the network gets the referral. The one outside it gets the job posting.
She learned this not as an abstraction but as lived experience, and it became the design brief for what she decided to build.
The hinge was quiet. It happened in a room in Detroit, listening to someone talk about waiting.
Laneisha had been building ReviewTailor, a career documentation platform, since 2024. She had already cleared real hurdles, an MVP built on Bubble, a Techstars investment in March 2024, entry into a second and then a third accelerator. The momentum was real. But momentum and confirmation are different things, and what she found in that session was the latter: a room that took seriously the same integration she was trying to build into her work.
She flew home with more than she landed with.
Here is how she built it, in the order it actually happened.
Early on, she connected with a developer to build the ReviewTailor MVP in Bubble, a no-code platform that let her move before the funding was there to hire a full engineering team. That MVP opened the door to Techstars, which opened the door to mentors who expanded not just her knowledge but her network and her sense of what was possible. Through Techstars Baltimore, she discovered Black Tech Saturdays. Building alongside others, she has said, became a gift she hadn't known to ask for.
As the product evolved toward a broader pivot, Career Companion, the tool designed to help early-career professionals turn experience into documented proof, she needed engineering capacity. She found it through Atlanta Tech Village's Reverse Pitch event, where she secured a local engineer. The lesson she carried forward: you don't have to build alone. Community gives you access to the people, knowledge, and courage to keep going when the product isn't ready and the market isn't patient.
The harder lesson came from inside: building is about people before product. Her team. Her customers. Her relationship with herself. "Your confidence shapes how you attract, lead, and steward every relationship around you," a discipline, not a disposition, and one she says she learned the hard way.
The receipts tell a story the market should pay attention to.
Before dismissing what it takes to build a career documentation product inside an ecosystem that doesn't yet have a standard shelf for it, consider what Laneisha has actually done:
ReviewTailor MVP launched, 2024 (self-reported)
Techstars investment secured, March 2024 (self-reported)
Three accelerator programs completed (self-reported)
Revenue-generating, with 100% year-over-year renewal rate (self-reported)
Career Companion pivot initiated, Q2 2026 (self-reported)
Career Companion beta: 1,000+ people supported (self-reported)
Accepted into the Google Data Center Community AI Fellowship, September 2026 (confirmed, per subject)
Testify & Pitch launched August 10, 2026, during Atlanta Tech Week (self-reported)
Approximately 350 registrations for 175 available seats, two times capacity, standing room only (self-reported)
Eleven community partners, four founder pitches, six executive panelists at launch (self-reported)
A launch event that fills to two times capacity on its first run is not an accident. It is evidence of unmet demand.
When Laneisha talks about why this work matters beyond her, she says it plainly:
The next professional won't have to wonder how to turn their experience into opportunity. Their proof will be theirs to leverage. The next founder won't have to build without a room to exhale.
That sentence, the room to exhale, is not a metaphor for comfort. It is a design specification. Testify & Pitch is built on the argument that founders who can pause, share, connect, and breathe build better, for longer, with more people, toward more durable outcomes. An entrepreneurial ecosystem that extracts maximum output from founders without investing in their sustainability is not building an ecosystem. It is burning through people.
Detroit found its way to an automotive future in part by learning, eventually, that its workers had to be sustained, not just deployed. The same logic applies here. When we limit the conditions under which founders can thrive, we limit what they build. And when we limit what they build, we limit what cities and communities and industries become.
Laneisha Roberts is making the case, with tools, data, events, and lived experience, that there is another way to build.
If you know an early-career professional who is doing meaningful work but struggling to make the market see it, share Career Companion with them. Visit Testify & Pitch and join the mailing list, because the next summit is going to need your presence in the room. And if you represent a brand or organization looking to invest in the infrastructure that helps people recognize what they carry, Laneisha is ready to build with you.
She flew to Detroit looking for confirmation. She came home ready to build the room herself.
Now she needs people willing to walk into it.
