Free for high impact charities - Founders Update #48

We’ve done close to 50 founder update posts, but this one is definitely the most special so far🥰

Joel and I are extremely happy to launch our official 1-for-1 charity program!

If you’re a charity entrepreneur, learn more here

One paid = one free (for good)

Going forward, every paid account we gain will let us offer a free spot for someone from a high impact charity.

Probono, with no strings attached - we simply want to support high impact work over the long term.

We hope by helping those folks who are doing a lot of good in the world and could benefit from daily accountability, it will indirectly help those projects achieve incrementally more.

What type of projects? Those working on the world’s most important problems - from AI safety, S-risks, animal suffering, global health and development, mental wellbeing to community building and more.

Completing a 6 month beta program

This has been in the works for a while.

At the start of the year, we launched an unofficial beta program for around 20 folks.

Those folks have founded and worked for nonprofits in various areas: mental health, animal welfare, sustainability and AI alignment among others.

The accountability coaching was the same as offered to our paid customers - allowing clients to choose what goals and targets focus on, whether personal, professional or both.

When we looked at the results, they were well beyond our expectations.

Long-term retention was over 90% with most folks using the app daily.

And more importantly, an average subjective productivity increase of 20%.

Seeing those numbers made us eager to launch a 1-for-1 program, but there was a hitch.

Making it work

One challenge was to make sure we could support this program financially.

Which meant figuring out how a single paid subscription could deliver enough profit for 2 accounts, whilst letting us grow sustainably.

This seems obvious but it caused us to look at different aspects of our business model, and one bottleneck identified was the time needed to coach each client.

Quite simply, it took a lot of time each day to coach, mostly due to slow loading times of the 3rd party backend our coach platform was coded on, which added up to increased coach cost.

So we decided to start a project to migrate to our own backend, optimized for performance and our unique requirements.

Whilst it’s taken 3 months (and still has rough edges to clean up) the new system is radically faster for coaches, which helps us effectively double our coaching throughput without sacrificing quality.

We’re optimistic this makes the 1-for-1 program sustainable for the long term.

Virtuous circle

Whilst this program is all about giving, we also have found we take a lot of positives out of it as well -

• Charity entrepreneurs tend to be highly driven and capable folks, which helps improve with their suggestions and suggestions😅
• Doubling the userbase helps us find scaling issues earlier than we would have
• It motivates us personally to grow the paid user base faster so we can support more folks pro-bono
• It lets all of the coaches to interact daily with folks doing such good things, and feel extra satisfaction to share in their successes, and positive impact to their audience

We think it’s a win-win, and are excited to kick this thing off 🌱