As a social enterprise, I often like to say we're trying
to do the two hardest things in the world together.
Firstly, found a sustainable business,
where 80% of start-ups fail in the first 5 years.
And secondly, actually trying to change the world.
A world which is often not very amenable to change.
And yet, if you can pull it off, if you can create a model,
that produces both financial and social outcomes,
then the world is truly your oyster
and you have the possibility of creating change at an incredible scale.
Startsomegood is a crowdfunding platform
explicitly focused on projects that make the world better.
And helping social entrepreneurs and not-for-profit
raise the money they need to be more innovative and create more impact.
So if you're launching a social enterprise, you need a couple of things.
You need a business plan, or at least a business model.
We never really had a business plan,
which is to say we never really wrote it down as a fancy document.
But we had a business model,
we knew exactly how we were making our money,
and who we were making it from and what we needed to do to achieve that.
But secondly, you also need an impact model,
you need to be pretty clear on how you're creating social impact.
Normally, that either means that you're delivering your product and services
or creating your product and services in a new way
through more sustainable supplies or manufacturing processes.
Or, that you're creating employment
for people who otherwise struggle to find employment.
Or, you're redistributing some of your profits
in order to support good works run by a different organisation
in a different part of the world.
For us, it was all kind of bound up together,
we create impact by helping more innovative social change projects raise funds.
And then we make our money by keeping a little bit of those funds,
5% when we help them reach their goals.
So Startsomegood began with a phone call
from a former colleague of mine, Alex Vudak.
That phone call was in, I think, October,
by November we had a technical team lined up.
And we ultimately launch on March 1 2011.
So only about 5-6 months since that first phone call.
In some ways I wish we worked a bit slower and a bit more deliberately
in order to kind of prepare for launch and work with our potential customers
to refine the platform.
But equally I think there's a lot to be said for moving fast,
when the inspiration strikes.
And I certainly like to say that, if you saw the first example of our website
you would know that it is very much an example of
that common saying in the start-up world,
that if you're not embarrassed by your first product, you're moving too slow.
Well, I was embarrassed by our first product,
but thankfully we've managed to move on from that now
and I'm quite proud of the current platform you'll see at startsomegood.com.
So to launch Startsomegood we needed two main things,
we needed, of course, a platform, that was well developed and well built.
That people would want to use.
And then we needed a group of campaigns to actually go live with us.
To gain the former we worked through Alex's, my co-founder's relationships,
and secured a couple of guys he'd gone to university with
and who'd subsequently founded a web development firm,
to build it for us on an equity basis.
One of the attractions of founding a for-profit social enterprise
rather than not-for profit, is that you start off with an asset from day one.
Which is equity in the business.
And then if you can convince people that that might be worth something someday
you can trade that for quite a lot of human capital.
And for the second, we worked through both of our relationships
to secure and convince projects that they wanted to launch with us
rather than to use any of the existing platforms that they could already see.
I have to admit, it never even occurred to me
to try and raise money into the business before we launched.
Bootstrapping was by total orientation at that time.
We did raise a little bit of money through a crowdfunding campaign ourselves,
on a different platform of course.
Not so much because we really needed the money,
but because we thought we should have the experience
of actually running a crowdfunding campaign
before we told everyone else that we were experts
in helping them run crowdfunding campaigns.
You often hear that you need to design a minimum viable product
and that's exactly right.
What is the minimum service or product that you can deliver to your customers
while still making them happy.
But I think you also need to design a minimum viable life.
What I mean by that, is be really clear with yourself
as to what you need in the short to medium term to sustain yourself
while you go through this entrepreneurial journey.
Could you live on 2 minute noodles for 6 months?
Would you be willing to move home with your parents?
Or could you live in the garage?
You need to ask yourself these questions upfront so that you don't
essentially drain your energy within 3 months
from having to make more sacrifices than you want to make.
And if you can align your business so that it serves your minimum viable life
you have a sustainable platform to let the business grow at its own pace.
So plan to work hard,
expect it to take longer than you want,
and be clear on what you need and don't need to make it through that phase.
I think there's a bit of a fad at the moment for pivoting
and I actually think a lot of the success stories you see
in innovation and social entrepreneurship are those
who resisted the urge to pivot too soon, and stuck with their vision.
Gave it time to germinate,
gave the world time to catch up with them
and then realised amazing success a little bit later on.
ad certainly that's been the journey for us.
I think if someone had told me exactly what would be involved
and how long it would take, i probably wouldn't've begun.
But now I'm here I'm glad I had all the experiences we had along the way.
And it's really refined us, I think, made us a better company
and me a better entrepreneur.
Entrepreneurship is a long and windy road.
And we've certainly had some significant ups and downs.
We've had to slightly change our orientation a couple of times,
while staying very true to our core focus of inspiring innovation in the social sector.
We've shifted our revenue model, our business model
and we've rebuilt our website a couple of times to better serve that community.
Throughout that we've come close to going out of business a couple of times.
We've also had some significant breakthroughs,
where we raised money, or won awards.
And I'm pleased with where we are, we have a long way further to go.
But there's nothing else I'd rather be doing.
There's never been a better time to start something.
So get out there and make your idea happen.
We'd love to get your feedback, so please please us some comments.