Following his senior year at UNC-Wilmington, Nico Mancuso opted to stay for the summer and wrap up a second degree (finance, following a first in economics) in the fall. He wanted to find summer work, but wanted to remain in the Wrightsville Beach area and avoid minimum wage jobs.
Tapping into his roots as a competitive baseball player, Mancuso sought out personal coaching opportunities. He was setting up a website and preparing to advertise on social media when it dawned on him that there ought to have been a smoother way.
“I came to the realization that there was not an application out there like this for me to just go sign up,” he said. “And I thought there should have been.”
Mancuso discussed the idea with his best friend and former roommate, Austin Bates. Soon thereafter, the duo co-founded Roshi.
From the seed of Mancuso’s realization, the startup emerged as an effort to help Wilmington-area parents pair their kids with UNCW student-athletes who could coach them.
Mancuso and Bates began talking to university athletic directors and were initially stymied by the complexities surrounding student-athlete compensation. But as the NCAA gradually embraced the “name, image, and likeness” (NIL) regulations enabling student-athletes to be paid, a path emerged for Roshi.
Mancuso and Bates started signing university athletes up on their platform and quickly saw positive responses from parents and kids tapping into those athletes’ expertise.
“The feedback we’ve gotten from the parent side and the student side has just been extraordinary at this point,” Mancuso said.
Training across skills and interests
Roshi has rapidly grown beyond its roots in sports, evolving into a platform that facilitates lessons across five categories: sports, music, languages, arts, and education. Each category also has specific sub-categories (such as baseball within the “sports” category, etc.).
On the instructor side, the platform still relies entirely on university students. As Mancuso explained, this serves three important purposes.
The first is that it addresses potential safety concerns parents might have entrusting their children to private instructors. Mancuso said that by sticking to university students, Roshi can essentially “piggyback” on the screening work the schools have already done to allow students to be part of their system.
The second is that it provides reason for parents to trust that instruction will be valuable. In addition to being vetted by Mancuso and Bates, students who sign up to be instructors on Roshi post information about their skills and experience.
Finally, the arrangement also empowers the university students to find legitimate, suitable work—on their own time and at their own rates. All too often, college students seeking part-time work wind up with meager pay, limited hours, or both; they are also seldom able to work in areas that necessarily interest them or tap into their skillsets. Through Roshi, however, the same students can arrange opportunities to generate income through their own talents and interests.
Once a student signs up as an instructor, Roshi functions as a marketplace. Instructors set rates and provide details (such as where a lesson with them might take place). Parents select instructors according to their kids’ interests. Once an arrangement is made, parents and instructors can communicate directly to arrange specifics.
Parents pay instructors directly through the Roshi platform, via Stripe. Roshi’s revenue comes from a small platform fee on the parents’ side.
Roshi moving forward
In the near future, Mancuso and Bates are focused on continuing to prove their concept through UNCW—as well as establish a sense of community impact that will help them partner with universities.
Based in part on what the team has witnessed with Mary Ferrito—a UNCW basketball player and Roshi’s first student ambassador—Mancuso envisions kids taking lessons from university students they truly admire and then looking for additional ways to engage. For example, a kid who took basketball lessons from Ferrito might want to go to more of her games or participate in a UNCW basketball camp.
“One of our [loftier] goals is to really partner with these university systems and make an offering that they are forwarding to the community,” he said.
From there, Roshi aims to branch out across North Carolina communities—including the Triangle and its robust university ecosystem.
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Startup: Roshi
Co-Founders: Nico Mancuso, Austin Bates
Founded: 2025
Team size: 2
Location: Wilmington
Website: www.roshico.com
Funding: Bootstrapped
Roshi soft-launched late last year and went to market in 2025. Already, the platform covers more than 30 disciplines and has some 100 instructors signed up. The startup has been bootstrapped to this point.
Mancuso asked that anyone interested check out the application and provide feedback to help them continue to make improvements.
“The better product we can build, the more useful and the [better] value add it will be for… the communities and the universities themselves.”
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