38. 1. Innovation is a series of “Aha’s”;
2. Embrace constraints;
3. Pay attention to meta trends;
4. Make innovation part of your culture
Summary
Editor's Notes
I’m Desiree & this is Ethan, and we’re here to talk about innovation.
Now, you might be wondering, “What qualifies you two to talk about innovation?” Honestly, we were kind of wondering the same thing when Donna called from Inc
I studied pre Colonial Spain in college and Ethan has law degree, so we’re hardly the silicon valley paragons of innovation.
We were pioneers in our industry.
When we launched GiveForward in 2008, the only way to raise money if you weren’t a non-profit was like this
Now there are over a thousand crowdfunding platforms and last year, crowdfunding platforms across the world raised $16.2B.
But that didn’t happen over night. The industry took 6 years to get to this point
Innovation is really about taking small steps. It’s about recognizing an opportunity, evaluating it, and figuring out the best way to execute it.
Today, Ethan and I are going to talk about how innovation has been a major part of GiveForward’s journey and hopefully inspire you to think a bit more about how innovation can impact your businesses.
Constraint #1. We were starting a website and Neither of us were engineers. So we outsourced it to a shop and spent $40K to build this beautiful website [don’t laugh].
Constraint #2. We spent nearly all our money on building our website. We had about $10K left over. Fortunately Desiree got us a deal on an office. So in June of 2008, we get a fancy office in the loop.
When we started GiveForward, we started with about $50K. We spent $40K on building the website and had about $15K
Two laptops and two flip phones. We had no money for marketing
And this horrible product…and we thought to ourselves, what are we good at?
Good at being nice. No welcome emails. We used our constraints to our advantage. Customer service would become the core of our company.
Eventually, we had too much work to do. We’rent taking salaries.
Again, we were cash constrained and financial crisis had just hit so we used this to our advantage. So of course, we did what any two enterprising entrepreneurs would do: Interns.
We paid our interns with only currency we had
How do you pay for burritos if you have no money?
What I call, Business card innovation. We would staple 4 business cards together and drop them in the chipotle card drop for 10 free burrito. We won it like 7 times.
We were having a ton of fun. We weren’t making any money. But everyone at the company loved being there.
Erica – 1.5 year. Biggest team.
What we didn’t realize at the time is that we were building an innovative culture where people wanted to work.
We were forced to be innovative because we were broke and non-technical. But you don’t have to be bootsrapping to be innovative. Even if you have money, you should intentionally build constraints in
Live streaming onto Twitter. The Idea is to see the world through other people’s eyes.
This is not a new concept. Livestreaming launched in mid two thousands. By 2008 there was Q, U, J. They all failed. So why didn’t it work? The infrastructure wasn’t built yet.
Because if Periscope launched in 2008, it would have looked like this.
Infrastructure has allowed live streaming to move past the innovators and early adopters and into the mainstream.
Smart phone penetration + Bandwidth (4G LTE) + Social Graph (twitter credentials = automatic followers) + Snapchat (ephemeral messaging).
Meerkat and Periscope aren’t brilliant ideas. They are iterative ideas with great timing.
Same can be said for GF:
What happens? What were the infrastructure changes that allowed GiveForward to be innovative?
50% FB
FB explodes: Aug 2008 100M. Sept 2012 1B
FB sharing explodes b/c Twitter
Twitter 2007 400K tweets/ quarter to 2010 50M/day
FB copy Twitter: 2009 tag people. 2011 Timelines
Kickstarter Nov 2010 Tik Tok $940K (reign for 441 days feb 2012)
When it comes to innovation, timing is everything.
We couldn’t have predicted all those events would happen the way they did but FB came out while we were in college, and in general we could see the trends, Because of that we put ourselves in a position to get lucky.
Ideas without the right infrastructure die. Watch the trends and position yourself in front of them.
Give people a framework, and they’ll amaze you.
We give people $500/year to bring unexpected joy to our users, vendors, and each other. Our team has bought homeless men bus passes home, bought toys for children after a home fire,
Reward risk taking
Celebrate failures that lead to discoveries
Create room for ideas to come from everyone
Describe how we handle quarterly ideas and brainstorming sessions
