Nonprofit HQ

Finally got to a launchable state with the nonprofithq.org

It's not perfect, but that's ok. :)

Also decided to start growing a Facebook group to fuel lead gen, so began by running a likes campaign on Facebook. Averaging a dollar a like in the US and 18 cents internationally. The plan is to build the page audience up then use the "invite to group" feature on the page to launch a group with a few hundred people right off the bat.

Conducted and almost finished my first interview. Had a brief thought that maybe there should be a tool that faciliates this process a bit better, but will probably just pop that on the back burner.

Here's how I did it:

Created a template in google docs with the questions I want to ask. Placed bullet point prompts underneath each question and added a title page to the doc with general notes and a word count for each question.

Sent the doc and waited for the answers to be filled out. When it was done, I realized that the questions had been interpreted differently than I planned, so I had to follow up with individual questions over email. 6 emails later and the interview is wrapped. Now I need to combine all the responses and the original interview into a single doc then prep for publishing.

Finally got around to sending an email to 7 people on the email list asking if they'd like to chat so I could better understand their needs. Went 0/7 on this, unfortunately. Need to reevaluate the copy and ask. Will also follow up with those emails sent.

Finally, I plan to set up Memberspace this week and get payments wired up. Next week might be able to finally get this out the door!

The first 100 people who care enough about something you’re working on can be incredibly validating, especially if you’re working in a new audience. Turning that into growth and distribution is the key and the way to move it forward is through talking to those users.

With 100 users, it’s not time for newsletter distribution and large scale pitching of your idea. If you have 100 people on your list, it’s time for interviews.

Each one. For people with a name, address them by it, don’t use merge tags. For those without a name, start the conversation by introducing your self then asking them to do the same. At 100 users, you can have conversations and not newsletter subscribers.

For example, here’s what you shouldn’t do:

• Add them to mailchimp
• Write a long email as your first contact that dives way too deep into what you’re working on
• Forget to follow up in the near future, then blast them with another email next time you want something.
• Realize you need customer input after you launch and mass email everyone with a calendly link. This shit is weak.

What I’ll be doing:

• Emailing each person individually
• Thanking them for joining for updates on what I’m working on
• Introducing myself
• Asking if they have some time to chat for 15 minutes some time in the next week

I forgot to do this the last time and ended up pivoting myself into a hole, working at 1/5 my contracting rate a million miles away from the reason I started the company.

Time to get ahead of the curve and find out what exactly people need before I overcommit to an idea without a passionate audience.

I spent awhile thinking that I needed to play to very specific business traits for my side projects to succeed.

Here’s the list I put together, based on my strengths:

• B2B
• Recurring Subscription
• Sales based acquisition with large average order prices / ARPU
• Productized service which caters to my strengths: strategy, marketing, paid acquisition or public relations

That alone would have resulted in a profitable project. Here’s how it worked for the couple months I tried it. PR as a service. Made $2K in 2 months. Closed 2/5 sales calls. Content writing as a service. Outsourced it, maybe $1200/month in 2 months. Closed 3/7 calls. Total I racked up 5,000 email subscribers by growth hacking with projects like this calendar.presskite.com

The problem was I built a productized service that generated a fraction of my contracting rate and doubled the amount of work I had to do since I had to be constantly closing new clients while also executing on the product vision.

That sucked. And it also made for a terrible side project. It took up way too much time (sales calls happen during business hours, not great for a side project) and B2B with large orders had a long funnel with multiple touch points. That’s a lot of effort with know promise of revenue which is rough if you don’t have product market fit. A recurring charge means you have to provide value on a recurring basis and a service based product means tons of HR overhead.

I abandoned those profitable projects and now I’m moving on to a new set of parameters a side project should fall into based on my learnings:

• Nonprofit sector
• One time payment
• Plays to my strengths: marketing. public relations, sales and paid acquisition.

Why nonprofits? The sector is underserved. I’ve recently spent some time working on it and have made massive fundraising gains for charities in need by applying basic marketing and acquisition principles while aligning them to new donor acquisition. Marketing for good, not evil.

The one time payment allows me to create a source of value and sell it multiple times to multiple people, without crippling an org with a recurring payment or signing myself up to a tight deadline to produce new content while I’m traveling or busy with the main gig.

And I care. I can’t stop thinking about it. And really, that’s what matters most. If you really push, care deeply and create a good product, it doesn’t matter what the outcome is. You know it needs to exist in the world and you’re going to fucking sculpt it into existence with late nights and bouts of inspiration.

That’s what I’m building at nonprofithq.org

Something I care about.

Working in nonprofits has been an experience. Taking what I’ve learned in B2B and B2C and applying it to the nonprofit business structure has been incredibly rewarding. It’s amazing watching charities double their productivity by switching over to tools like Notion, Slack and Trello or saving money by learning how to manage their free $120K ad grant from Google and save thousands a dollars a month they were paying to a contractor.

My goal with Nonprofit HQ is to bring the tools, strategies and techniques of the startup world into the nonprofit space and enable people everywhere to do great things faster and more effectively than ever before.

So I’ve started sketching out the site in Webflow and purchased my domain.

I also shared a google sheet with the nonprofit community outlining some of my plans and already have my first 100 people signed up for updates. We’ll call that validation for now.

This week I plan to record my first screencast and polish up the site.

I’m off to the races, again. 😅