We built selflessly as a platform for companies of all sizes, all industries at all stages to be able to rock out social impact.

Welcome back powderkeg fans and hello to first timers. Good to have you here. This is episode 70 of powderkeg igniting startups who show for entrepreneurs, leaders and innovators, building remarkable tech companies and communities outside of Silicon Valley. I’m your host, Matt Hunckler. And this episode is our third experiment before we return to our regular format next week, which quick aside, I am super excited about next week’s episode, and can’t wait to give you more details about that at the end of the show. But back to today’s episode, because I’m also very excited about this one, we’re going to share one more of our favorite pitches from last year 2018. This pitch is from a live event we hosted focusing on diversity, inclusion and the future of tech. It comes from a Midwest entrepreneur striving to create a Google for good platform that helps companies give back. Alright, so if you’ve been following our content lately, you know, we believe in the power of culture to attract and retain tech talent. That’s only becoming more true as transparency increases into how companies operate. workers want employees to weave corporate responsibility and social impact into their cultures. Likewise, consumers want to buy products from companies that create social good, sounds simple, but it’s not. Today’s pitch comes from a founder who realized that even though companies want to make a social impact, the logistics didn’t work in their favor. The consequences are that up to $10 billion in matching gift funds were left on the table last year. Now this is money that could go towards charities and nonprofits put to work in communities to do good. And so today’s entrepreneur built an online platform that streamlines how companies and their employees create social good. That entrepreneur is Josh, driver, co founder and CEO of selflessly, after Josh pitches, you’ll hear him receive feedback from three advisors Shark Tank style, in this particular order. First up, you’ll hear from Daniel McDowell, serial entrepreneur and investor. Then you’ll hear from Chris Campbell, who is the VP of Product Development at Angie’s List. And finally, Ashley berkovitz, the former CFO of Interactive Intelligence, and it has now a board member of CO delicious as well as an angel investor and advisor to many startups. Once again, it’s a short episode, but Josh’s pitch packs a punch. Let’s listen in.

Hi, everybody. I’m Josh, driver, co founder and CEO of selflessly, our platform helps companies that believe in the value of social impact and makes it easier. So let’s get started and talk about social impact. Right now, your employees, almost half of your employees are considering leaving in the next two years. According to a study from Deloitte, increasing ethical behavior going on in the for profit space is leading people to start second guessing where they work and where they shop. Over 87% of consumers surveyed by Deloitte actually use social impact metrics in their decision making on what product they’re going to us. So knowing that there’s a bunch of stuff going on, including legislature that may be coming available here to make more companies available. How do we how do we monitor that? How do we track it? The good news is there are a lot of companies that believe in social impact and are doing it, the bad news is to make it successful and actually make that change is super painful. And that’s where we come in six to $10 billion a year left on the table, because matching donations and that whole logistical nightmare of getting resources out there makes it almost impossible to get all the resources out there. So we wanted to build a platform that takes that six to $10 billion each year and get that to nonprofits that you care about. Could you imagine what $10 billion could do for charity. So we built selflessly as a platform for companies of all sizes, all industries at all stages to be able to rock out social impact. We built not specific features that everybody can use. It’s easy to onboard and exclusive for or inclusive of all. So we focus on volunteer time off that to connection with Nam. profits, sponsorships grants, seamless integration with benefits programs. And that’s something that we’re finding companies with to employees up to 2000 need. Our system also automates donations with matching and bonus programs. So instead of sending your receipt in getting an approval and getting a checkout, but within 90 days, we can actually do that within three. So our revenue model, I am so sick of going and seeing websites asking for me to look at a demo, I just want to get going. And that’s why we built our pricing model, we want people to swipe a credit card and get going, you can either do it without having to speak to us whatsoever, or we provide that onboarding help and customer support to make your platform successful. We also offer a white label branded integrated offering so that we can be part of your EHR software or existing technology. So to talk about this market of social impact, is a huge market and growing. Right now we’re focusing our pilot program here in Central Indiana, but nationally, about $3.2 billion are spent each year on social impact in Central Indiana alone, about $5.1 million. So and that’s growing. So we’re right at the beginning of that wave of social impact being more of a mandatory thing than just a nice benefit. So apparently, we have some competition. I’ve never heard of any of these companies. But now. So we know that our competition out there is legacy software, and is looking at how social impact works now, but not what’s going on for our future generations. So at our price point, there is nothing on the market that has the same features and functionality and the intention of being a partner in the future when social impact expands.

To give you an idea of the company, we have not taken on any outside investment. We are currently in our pilot program with 70 users in the system, finding every little bug, thankfully, before we scale out, and right now we’re at $4,700. In annual recurring revenue, we were in a incubator, and we actually launched the product quicker than we originally intended to. And we’ve built in some new features based on that. So now we’re ready to start our next round of sales to really rock out of the out of the park. So far, our accounts have donated or completed 73 hours and donated over $1,000. And there’s a reason for the donations that are so low. And I’ll tell you about that in a little bit. So to tell you a little bit about our team, we’re Three’s Company. And Lisa, my co founder and I We come from a background of both for profit and nonprofit technology and community service. We built this system originally, so it make our lives easier. So we’ve I’m excited to say we finally found a CTO after begging, who I can announce until we close our funding round because they’re still in flight someplace else, but also very civic minded, and an awesome CTO, and we’re really excited. So we’re selflessly were the first domestic benefit Corp and certified B Corp. And we’re partnering with the ICF to process our donation. So we’re we’re locally minded. I’m Josh, and that’s my company. 08:44 Hi, guys, Josh, thank you so much for a great presentation. I have to tell you that first and foremost, your logo is awesome. And I rock your sticker on my laptop. And I love I love what you guys are doing. As a former executive director of a not for profit, I can tell you that. Finding a way to get organizations engaged at a level that’s you know, below the decision maker is really tough. So as you start thinking about different matches and things like that, and you start thinking about your national launch, talk to me a little bit about how, what that total available market looks like and talk to me about how you plan to scale outside of Indiana. Sure.

So we have a channel partnership mechanism. That’s something when I was on the founding team of Bloomerang. We really leverage heavily nonprofit associations, Corporate Social Responsibility associations and HR associations are great friends to have. And so with our partner program and reseller program, we can create that channel where we don’t have to grow and have a huge sales team running around the country. We actually can partner and offer incentives or channels and just focus on art. technology instead of how to fix everything else.

I just your job. I think that there are a lot of companies out there that would love this product. I think that corporations want to do the right thing, but it’s difficult to track. And then on the not for profit side, there’s a lot of times they’re looking for board members or just people to volunteer. So talk about how you pull that into your product, like how, how can you network the not for profits, to give people a chance to serve on boards or be tears in addition to that? 10:40 Sure, the whole purpose of the platform is to help nonprofits. So we have and be employee empowered. So a lot of companies right now are putting people into buckets into what types of nonprofits they have to work with, which is okay. But sometimes, people just don’t want to plant a tree, they want to go work at Indy humane or they want to go work in a different space. So we let employees go out and volunteer wherever they want to, and they can log their hours to the system. And that becomes a referral channel for us. The all the cool thing with our partnership with CIC f we built custom technology. So you can donate to any nonprofit in the US that’s active with that with one click of a button. So it’s not us reaching out, it’s literally one click donation, and we handle the rest. And so what a great way to get nonprofits in the system with our first connection being a check in their, in their hands. So nonprofits can get in this system and use it. But we can integrate with other platforms that may be existing or a company is built internally and push that information in. So we had originally wanted to be a two sided marketplace. But we found that nonprofits are just naturally getting in the system. So we really don’t need to prioritize that. And and we focus on the for profit, and then nonprofits have just naturally been rolling in.

Josh, Chris, and nice presentation. Thank you. Couple of questions. One is, so for profit, how’s adoption been so far and tell me about that strategy and process.

So it’s been a little bit slower than I would like because of our capacity into so many hours in a day. We originally focused on small to medium sized businesses, 250 employees or less. But now we’re seeing a big influx of large enterprise fortune 500 companies, which is a different ball of wax and sales cycle. But the nice thing is, is that we’ve been able to handle our growth at a comfortable pace for now to get all the kinks worked out. And now we are actually going through and connecting and scheduling out our sales calls. So we actually have initial sales meetings through January. But we’re hoping to be able to finish out our wizard so to speak, so then people can just self onboard not have to deal with me.

That’s nice. Tell me about the onboarding process for for for profit. What’s that look like?

Sure. So we had clear object and via genomics get into the system without any help whatsoever. And so we live with clear object and platonically. And we were in the office kind of watching what an onboarding process would look like at that stage. So right now, it’s it’s very much a tutorial based system like here’s what we recommend is step one, step two, step three, certainly open to using it however you’d like, but very much like a stepped process. And then we have checklists and things to think about when measuring that impact. And so we’ve we haven’t had any pushback yet. Thank you. Thank you. 13:59 Hey, it’s Matt here again. Thank you so much for listening to today’s special episode. Please give me some feedback. If you’ve been listening to these last couple of episodes, or even if this is your first one. What do you think about this format? How do you like these startup pitches on the powderkeg igniting startups podcast? Let me know I’m just at Hunckler on Twitter. That’s h u n CKLER. Hit me up. Let me know what you think. At the same time, I highly encourage you to follow selflessly on Twitter. That was the company pitched on today’s episode. They’re just at give selflessly. All one word, and then Josh, the founder of selflessly is just at Josh, driver Show All one word. And for links to the rest of the people, companies and resources mentioned in this episode, head on over to powder keg.com and check out the show notes. To be among the first to hear the stories about entrepreneurs, investors and other tech leaders outside of Silicon Valley. Subscribe to us on iTunes. You can do that very easily by just going to powder keg.com forward slash iTunes. Do subscribe before next week because we’ll be chatting with six exit entrepreneur comm Ron a lot yawn, who is also an investor and founder of Global Innovation catalyst. Fascinating guy. We’re going to be doing a live show so we’ll have 100 plus people in the audience and we’ll be hearing directly from Qumran as well as the founder of Kinsey Academy and Chuck boy, both fascinating guys and a lot Ian as much as a philanthropist. He’s also an entrepreneur and investor cannot wait to talk with him. I hope you will enjoy the episode as well. We’ll catch you next time on powder keg igniting startups.