#impact engine

Women Are Influencing Companies To Focus On Social Change

Working moms are changing the workplace for the better, and it’s time to celebrate and share that and look at how we can keep improving work life balance. That’s why I teamed up with a national financial television show to start a new weekly segment on Women & Work, which I will also be sharing in my blog.

The first episode takes a look at how women are influencing the growing impact investing…

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by Craig Shapiro CEO/Founder at Collaborative Fund

I’ve started writing about how our Limited Partners (LPs) shape and influence us. They inform our sense of purpose, support us, and inspire us.

Today I’d like to write about Chuck Templeton -- another LP that we’re proud to have on our team.

Chuck is a relentless entrepreneur. Since founding OpenTable, Chuck has focused his ambition on working to solve some of the world’s most pressing problems. He shares our belief that mission and profits are not mutually exclusive.

Here’s an excerpt from an interview where Chuck talks about the startup scene in Chicago and the companies that excite him:

Via

And he’s been a willing mentor by serving on the boards of a number of Collaborative Fund portfolio companies, including TaskRabbit and Getable.

Beyond that, he’s used his influence and his network to help impact entrepreneurs succeed. Impact Engine, an accelerator program co-founded by Chuck, helps young businesses that address today’s most pressing societal and environmental challenges -- ranging from climate change and poverty to education and public health. Their startups are tackling some of the world’s most challenging, but critical, problems.

On a personal level, it continues to drive me crazy that Chuck can run further and faster than I can. One of his goals for 2014 is to run a 50k, a 50 mile, a 100k and a 100 mile! Mind-blowing.

We’re very fortunate to have Chuck working with us. He brings a passion and perspective that is as rare as it is valuable.

With a slew of startup accelerators and incubators, choosing the best fit can be daunting. Here are three programs focused on social enterprise -- businesses designed to benefit humanity -- something we strive for at Pixlwise. 

Impact Engine is a new Chicago-based program that focuses on for-profit startups with a social or environmental mission. Impact has raised $500,000 to invest in companies and is announcing its new round of entrepreneurs this week. The 16-week program encompasses mentorship, seed funding, workshops, fundraising support and additional resources.  

Social Venture Partners grooms philanthropists, strengthens nonprofits, and invests  in solutions that address the world’s toughest problems. As part of their initiative, SVP provides the Social Innovation Fast Pitch, a two-month training and mentoring program for nonprofits that effect social change. The program is designed to prepare nonprofit leaders to pitch the way a for-profit startup would pitch to a VC -- with a great sell and a mission to close the deal. 

The Detroit-based green business incubator the Green Garage helps triple bottom line businesses grow through a community-based natural design process, focusing on sustainability and profitability, and providing one on one mentoring sessions with entrepreneurs. 

A year and half ago, when Dhiren, my co-founder and I were providing merit-based scholarships to students in rural India, we came across another problem. We found that many girls dropped out of school even after receiving financial help.  As we dug deeper, we found that the problem was a lot bigger than we’d thought. There are 300 million (that's the population of the U.S.) girls and women in rural India that miss school and work because they lack access to feminine hygiene products.  We were stunned that such a simple problem could so dramatically affect people’s lives. We had to solve this problem. We built a team in India that is working on operationalizing the business. Currently, they are working with engineers to create a machine that can produce affordable sanitary pads. Here in Chicago at the Impact Engine, the U.S. team is building the Azadi brand and a community of mentors, investors and supporters to propel the business forward.  Now we’ve reached the next chapter of our story.  Investor Day is fast approaching, and our team is really cranking up the gears. Since the start of Impact Engine 9 weeks ago, so much has happened behind the 1871 doors - and we’re ready to show people what we’ve been up to.

We’ve managed to progress quite a lot on our own, but now we need your help. In order to start creating better machines and distributing them to communities in rural India, we are launching an Indiegogo campaign with a goal of raising $65,000. We’ve already raised $50,000 and will use the money from the campaign to complete the research and development of the machine. Our vision is a world where women and girls can have greater freedom to pursue life’s opportunities. Making menstruation a non-issue is one of the stepping stones. The journey is really just beginning and we hope you can be part of the solution. Join us for the launch of our IndieGoGo campaign. We will be premiering our campaign video, and more importantly, celebrating the start of something great. What: Azadi Launch Party When: Wednesday, November 7, 6:30 pm Where:

1871 @ 12th Floor of Merchandise Mart 222 W Merchandise Mart Plaza Chicago, IL 6065. 

RSVP here (www.azadilaunch.eventbrite.com)

“If you think you have certainty as a startup, you’re dreaming.” Bernhard Kappe and Todd Wyder prefaced our Lean Startup discussion with this statement; after all, a startup is, by lean definition, is “a human institution designed to create new products and services under conditions of extreme uncertainty.” 

A key goal of the lean methodology is to run several minimal experiments to get as much direct feedback from the consumer / customer as possible... “So... how are you going to test that?” Our team heard this several times as Jamie Jones and Linda Darragh coached us through each of the canvases. These experiments are key to decreasing the uncertainty of the business while learning inexpensively. These learnings validate or falsify hypotheses, which may lead to major pivots.

Major pivots are brought on by either changing the problem to be solved or changing the target market for which the solution is being offered. A key driver of this could be customer acquisition costs (CAC) being too high (in comparison to lifetime value of the customer). We are looking to mitigate our CAC by sharing them with our business partners. Because awareness is low, cultivating awareness and education around female hygiene and our product will be a great cost. But pivots are okay: as Chuck Templeton told us, “Stay connected to your vision - not your solution.” Azadi has been exploring different entry points to launching a pilot project come January. In the past month, our discoveries about the market landscape of rural India have lead us to shift our go-to-market strategy from a B2C to a B2B approach. We are currently investigating how to employ a franchising model to establish profitable partnerships with community-based organizations (CBOs) and non-governmental organizations (NGOs). We feel this model design will be most successful in addressing the unmet accessibility, availability, and affordability needs our market faces with respect to female hygiene products.

The biggest challenge is designing an experiment to test receptiveness of our product and whether or not people will buy it. When it comes to startups in the social enterprise space, we’ve quickly discovered that these challenges will manifest themselves in various ways. For our venture, and others in the Impact Engine that have a physical product offering in an international market, this is particularly challenging because market testing is not easy to do when removed from the market.

From a customer segment perspective, we learned that our target market isn’t simply the 300 million girls and women and rural India that do not use sanitary pads due to the “3 A’s” constraints. We need to “dial in” on segments of this population (by geography, demographics, etc.) to narrow our audience down to a target. Our team in India has already identified geographic entry points to market and is currently designing field research to get to know our customers better.

We plan to print a poster size of the canvas and put it on our wall at IE to macke sure we look at it everyday. With the understanding that most people overbuild their Minimum Viable Products (MVPs), the ultimate challenge is: how do we build an MVP that keeps our value proposition intact? A possible way to test the market is with existing products - we are currently investigating this possibility.