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Start up: The Journey Part IV “What Numbers?!”

PTP logos FOR SOCIALOh… the many adventures of a “start-up.”

A “start-up” is commonly defined as a company or entrepreneurial venture in the form of a company, a partnership or temporary organization designed to search for a repeatable and scalable business model.

There can be several variations to this definition. Some attach a length or time in business, others impose a revenue variable. Whatever the case the next question is,

“So when does a start up begin to no longer a “start-up”?

As a young business, we at Pass the Plate wanted to address this question and see where we were at in our quest to make giving easy.

So for some perspective, let’s recap the Pass the Plate journey…

About 24 months ago, we validated the initial business model by listening to potential customers to finding out pain points. This took about 6 months… (about 5 months longer than we thought it would). Everyone was very “part time.”

Next, we built a limited working prototype, not a MVP and then completing the market research… Another 6 months.

This feedback confirmed our initial assumptions, but we encountered resistance in the part of friends who ran different non-profits. How will this help us? What about our current solutions?

Feedback on a whole was positive… donors did not think that non-profits were taking advantage of technology to raise funds some were even unhappy that non-profits sometimes made it difficult to give. On the other hand, friends who ran their own non-profit questioned why they would implement yet another way for their members to give money. “We already use Pay Pal”, or “We already take credit cards” even the “we just started to use text to give…. wait for it… and love it!”

Thus, we were encouraged to continue to focus on building the experience around the donor experience and not building a product to sell to non-profit business’.

Our theory is that by making the donation experience positive and as frictionless as possible for the donor, we will increase overall donations.

From this round of feedback, we removed several more obstacles to giving, and streamlined the entire process. This would later become our “full production” model.

“Full production” means all the security issues are addressed, issues of instant scalability addressed, error reporting etc, have been addressed and that the app overall works. (This took about 9 total months with 6 months of that dedicated to programming and back end database administration.)

With the minimum viable product up and running, we started conducting real world market research.phonev2

As an operations guy with Pass the Plate, I think of this part of our start up journey as priming the pump as we are getting ready to take our solution and scale.

For an illustration, when I think of starting something up, I think of starting a lawn mower. You know, you bend down, take a hold of the black handle that is attached to a chord. That chord is attached to a motor belt.

But what happens if you pull the chord and nothing happens? Did you forget to prime the pump? Did you know that you even had to prime the pump? Priming the pump puts gas into the carburetor so that that when the chord is pulled, the engine will start and you can proceed to cut your lawn.

In the start up world, specifically in the technology space, priming the pump helps determine whether the business idea works in the first place (is it the right kind of gas) and is venture scalable.

For Pass the Plate, priming the pump was accomplished by gathering feedback from early adopters, drilling down on user habits, and completing the sales cycles.

To this end, we began to answer a few key questions…

What is the cost to acquire a customer? What is the value of a customer? How often do they give? Do they refer others? What are other ways to add value to the customer experience? How do we use donor feedback? What types of customers are most attractive to the business?

Additionally, from an operational perspective in this the mid life cycle “start-up” we needed to complete several key tasks. Here are some…

We built a Pipeline management tool to manage the steps in the donation process.

For instance, when someone adds a non-profit that they could not find in the database, what does that look like?

Submission… Validation (make sure we validate) … Response (we may add, we may not add with reason, we will message the person that submitted the request.

Or

A donation is made, the money comes into the PTP account, we then cut the check to the non profit and mark it as pending. Once the check is cashed, we mark the donation as paid.

Going through interactions like these has allowed us to improve and automate. For instance, if someone wants to add a non profit and we are unable to find it, then there are several items we need to collect for compliance reasons. Among these are 2 documents and a signature. Initially we had to create the process… now it is done, more efficient, and scalable.

With the MVP product up and running we have also been able to gather data from the use of the app. How many people downloaded the app? Where did they come from? Did the users donate? If not why? How many repeat visitors? How much time in the application?

Wow, that’s a lot of stuff! Now what about the numbers!?

We have a certain number downloads and a certain number of donations, each donor that actually gives or donates 2.8 times per month. What can we do to make them donate more?

On Twitter, when we thank someone by a direct message or post, for following Pass the Plate we have a click through rate of only 10%. Not that good… however some of those people then share or favorite the “thank you for the follow.” We then get a 6x response rate. So the for every 1 out to 10 people that follow Pass the Plate, we get 6 click throughs to read the Pass the Plate blog. Now how do we convert these same people to Pass the Plate users who vive 2.8 times per month?

Other results that are good are sales. Users. Donations. With minimal effort, these are coming in… Now there is the B2B sales, the non-profits that want to start to use Pass the Plate in as part of their own donation experience. Well want started out as a steady trickle has turned into a steady stream. Over 20 non-profits are in the pipeline to use Pass the Plate several of which have already signed up.

So what is the next step?

Well, I believe we will continue to be aggressive in working with other non-profit groups. The immediate plan is to stick with our monthly goal for this month (March) and shoot for a 300% increase in April.

Additionally, for the month of April we are starting to put emphasis on strategic partnerships. These are partnerships or alliances that will give Pass the Plate access to thousands of potential donors at a time.

In conclusion…

For Pass the Plate priming the pump or the “start up” has meant more than 10 presentations in front of large audiences (more than 30 usually around 75 sometimes over 100), answering the questions, and building responses.

Priming the pump has meant asking friends and family to “Like” our Pass the Plate fan page, and if they really loved us to comment and like our posts every now and then.

For operations, priming the pump has meant learning the in’s and outs of how social medial should interact with a business before handing it off to a more seasoned veteran. It has meant building business systems that will make the machine work.

For compliance, priming the pump has meant talking to and working with attorneys and accountants.

For the Founders team, it has meant persistence and determination. I like to call it “Grit”.

Here is the the Pass the Plate team, who have pursued the dream. We have started, we are no longer a “start-up!” Let’s finish this race strong. Let’s make giving easy!

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Start Up: The Journey Part III

There is quite a bit going on at Pass the Plate these days. In this post, we are going to update you a little on what is happening behind the scenes.

As with most businesses, there are two faces to the business. The side that faces the public (in our case the Pass the Plate phone application and website) and the side that is behind the scenes. For Pass the Plate, this is database maintenance, sales funnel management etc.

So today, we are going to talk about what is going on behind the scenes at Pass the Plate. Our foremost objective is to make giving easy, but we must not forget all of the work that goes into making that possible…

Early on in our discovery process, we determined that the donation process was one that had many different pain points and that in order for Pass the Plate to be successful, we had to fix or eliminate as many of these pain points as possible. When looking at the general online experience of donors that are looking to give online, we found the process to by clunky and outdated. We wanted the Pass the Plate user experience to be much better.

This experience starts the moment a customer downloads the Pass the Plate application. For Pass the Plate, a simple “search” function was an easy step in the right direction. Unlike other donation services who have a limited database, Pass the Plate allows the potential donor to make a donation to any of the 1.6 million non-profits in our database.

But what if a donor can not find the non-profit?

To answer this problem, in early January, with the release of our minimum viable product or MVP we included an add a charity button that returns in the event that a user is not able to find their desired non-profit. While admittedly, this function still needs some UI improvement (User Interface), we are happy with the results we have seen.

Immediately after implementation of the add a non-profit function, we started to receive requests to add non-profits to the database.

While this is a good, it creates a potential bottleneck in the Pass the Plate pipeline. What is meant by this is that there MUST be a process that is followed each and every time a non-profit is added to the Pass the Plate database. Not to get too complicated, but we are talking about IRS rules here, and we need to be sure we are following acceptable practices of verification.

I’ll address how we solved this problem in just a bit…

Another item that we had to address on the back end after the launch of the MVP was the process that each non-profit had to go through once a donation occurs. Let me explain…You download the Pass the Plate application and then make a donation to your favorite non-profit. Next what happens?

First, the merchant account charges your credit card, then the merchant deposits the funds into the bank account. While that is happening, we generate a record of the transaction that triggers a check getting cut, mail getting sent out, then verification that the check was cashed etc. Additionally, a call must be put into a que so that Pass the Plate can contact the non-profit.

Clearly, that is lots of stuff to manage…

Sure it is!  But we are so fortunate to have technology that can help us to do many of these items.

To managing the different pipelines i.e. add a non-profit, donation received etc. we use a system called Pipedrive. Pipedrive allows users to set up different pipelines and edit the phases of the pipelines etc. For us, this because a simple and intuitive tool that we could use in the early phases of Pass the Plate.

For the checks getting cut and mail going out…initially we have been handling this process in our office so that we could make sure we had a handle of the sequencing and timing of events. We have already contacted and interviewed several companies that can handle this part of the process quicker and more cost effectively than we could do ourselves.

In summary, we are still a start up and are finding creative and inexpensive ways to manage our business better and more efficiently. As we grow, we are sure to adopt technology that is more integrated. For now, this works. Things get done and our customers do not fall through the cracks.

In our next blog post about what is going on at Pass the Plate we will discuss the customer journey and what we are doing to improve it.

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