Our Alumni Newletter Interview

Heath and I are both graduates of Royal Roads University’s Commerce program. Last week, we were featured in the Alumni Newsletter. In our interview (which I have pasted below) you will see into the history of our company and some of our thoughts as entrepreneurs. I hope you enjoy it, it’s a great read if I can say so myself.

What is Urbantastic and where did the idea come from?

Urbantastic is a micro-volunteering site. Micro-volunteering is just what it sounds like: bite-sized ways for busy people to help out a cause they believe in.

We didn’t start with an idea - we started with a problem that we wanted to solve.

The problem we chose is that our present-day urban culture has a lot of us feeling disconnected. Engagement with your city leads, in our opinion, to a lot of great things - a wider social circle, a greater feeling of commitment to improve things, etc.

Furthermore, we felt this was just an information problem – there are great things to get involved with, but there’s no really good way to find out what.

The original solution (and the website that we launched in September 2008) was an event listing site. Instead of categories, we just had a big list of every event happening that week.

The clever bit was that the site would learn what you liked and didn’t like, so fairly soon the things that interested you the most always showed up at the top.

The ultimate goal was to just have people receive an e-mail every week telling them what five things they should be going to this week.

The good thing was that it worked. The bad thing was that we found that we’d solved the wrong problem. Going to shows and other entertainment still left a big hole in the engagement puzzle.

Back at the drawing board we realized that engagement means more than just showing up. It’s about getting involved - working collaboratively to accomplish something. That’s where micro-volunteering comes in.

What’s your plan and where do you want it to go?

We’ve subsequently become a non-profit so the bottom line for the company is to a) break even (it’s nice to not feel the pressure to hit multi-million dollar valuations for the investor’s sake), and b) make a real difference. Not necessarily in that order.

The plan from here is to move the product road-map forward (the site’s very new - there are a lot of features still to go in), raise a lot of noise through PR, and start selling heavily to non-profits.

Our revenue model is a subscription that non-profits pay monthly to access the more sophisticated features of the site (the classic premium model). They’re our clients and the more they hear about us the better.

What’s it been like to build a business from the ground up?

Surprisingly - just like they say: exhilarating, exhausting, terrifying and elating. Certainly not boring.

It takes a lot of faith to keep going sometimes, and you have to make a lot of important decisions without having the time or the information to really do it properly. But the feeling of freedom is addictive.

The biggest surprise was how marked the difference was from before we found the right product or pitch, to right after. Suddenly something clicked and everything was so much easier. People returned our emails, our communications became short and to the point, our Twitter following bloomed.

The hardest thing was getting there. Nobody tells you what the product should do, or even what their needs are. You pick it up in little pieces from having a hundred conversations.

You throw a duct-taped site together, somehow get people to look at it, then sift through the luke-warm responses until you find some grain of real information.

You then duct-tape that into the product and then rinse and repeat.

It’s been a grueling process, but without the right product all of our other efforts would be wasted.

Everything else aside, being able to say that we’re building something that people genuinely want, something that has monetary value to them, is something we’re immensely proud of.

What are the benefits to registering with Urbantastic?

We make it very, very easy to get involved with organizations that are doing good. So the benefits follow from that: feelings of well-being and connectedness, a better world, and a better resume.

If you could give advice to other alumni wanting to take the leap, what would it be?

Have enough cash on hand to make a least one big, “we need to start over from scratch” mistake.

What’s the best piece of advice you’ve got so far in this venture?

One of our clients quoted William Faulkner: “kill your darlings.”

It’s actually advice for writing, but it works just as well for business. It means that you need to have the courage and self-honesty to get rid of elements that you’ve fallen in love with, but just aren’t working.

How can other alumni get involved?

A surprising amount of the non-profit world is run by people who just fell into it because they believed in a cause. There are huge gaps in skills, particularly in accounting and business strategy.

Using the site is a great way for both students and graduates to exercise their skills and get credit for it. Not to mention how great it feels to help a worthwhile organization out.

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Link to the original article: http://tinyurl.com/d6vdw7