This essay draws heavily from Paul Graham’s How to Start a Startup and How to Get Startup Ideas, and Ted Suzman’s Using methods from YC to help protect US democracy. All are worth reading.
My background: I’ve been a co-founder of three successful political non-profit startups and the largest or substantial early funder of another three. I’ve also been an advisor and/or funder to many others - some that have worked marvelously, and others that haven’t.
As a result, people ask me for advice on political startups. I want to help as many people as possible, so in this essay I write what I find myself saying most often.
Note: From here on, I just use the term “political startup” but typically mean non-profit ones. I believe most of the startup opportunity in the political world is non-profit (more on this in a future post).
Introduction: Three things you need
Graham begins How to Start a Startup,
You need three things to create a successful startup: to start with good people, to make something customers actually want, and to spend as little money as possible. Most startups that fail do it because they fail at one of these. A startup that does all three will probably succeed.
And that's kind of exciting, when you think about it, because all three are doable. Hard, but doable. … If there is one message I'd like to get across about startups, that's it. There is no magically difficult step that requires brilliance to solve.
Similarly, you only need 3 things to create a successful political startup: to start with good people, to make observable cost-effective impact, and to raise money from donors.
That’s exciting, because it conveys that the political world is changeable; it’s full of untapped opportunities for impact, and has a rich variety of people and organizations who could use YOUR help.
That was a big surprise to me. I used to think that in politics, what needed doing got done, and what needed creating got created.
But that’s wrong; so wrong that political professionals laugh when I say that. There are so many new things in politics yet to be developed and discovered.
I hope that you discover one.
Part 1: People
Who can start a political startup?
To learn what kind of person can start a political startup, go look in the mirror.
I’m serious. Successful political entrepreneurs come in all shapes, sizes, colors, and backgrounds. Some are already political professionals; others come from other fields. With so much room for invention, the political world always needs new people. New people bring new ideas and skillsets, and excitement to try new things unburdened by the scars of past failures.
That said, for those who aren’t already at least somewhat familiar with the political world, starting a political startup shouldn’t be a first step. With so many high-quality organizations doing great work, and important ways that individuals can make a difference locally and nationally, there are easier and lower-risk ways to make impact than starting something new. One of the best paths to political entrepreneurship is by first getting involved in some existing organizations. (More on this in the next section.)
Some knowledge of the political world is also important because it will give you conviction. Starting a political startup is really hard work. One thing that’s kept me going is knowledge of a real, fixable problem and a deep desire to see that problem fixed and create the impact that results.
One thing you DON’T need is to have everything figured out ahead of time. Entrepreneurship is a constant cycle of learning and trying. The next section has my best suggestions on how to get started.
Part 2: Making Observable Cost-Effective Impact
Step 1: Noticing an Idea
In How to Get Startup Ideas, Graham writes,
The verb you want to be using with respect to startup ideas is not “think up” but “notice.”
The best way to notice a political startup idea is to get involved in political work, even as a volunteer, and look for unsolved problems. You’ll find plenty. Numerous successful political startups (both non-profit and for-profit) started this way.
In the same essay, Graham writes,
When you find the right sort of problem, you should probably be able to describe it as obvious, at least to you. … Which means, strangely enough, that coming up with startup ideas is a question of seeing the obvious. That suggests how weird this process is: you're trying to see things that are obvious, and yet that you hadn't seen.
Some political startups of the past several years that now seem obvious:
Individuals around the country want to be politically active but lack a clear roadmap (Indivisible)
Campaigns should incorporate behavioral science best practices to get volunteers to ask their friends to vote (Vote Tripling)
Hundreds of amazing young adults would run for office but lack the idea, encouragement, or support (Run for Something)
Relational organizing could scale if only key bottlenecks were addressed (Organizing Empowerment Project)
Suzman lays out another approach to finding good political startup ideas, which is looking for bottlenecks. He writes, “When something isn’t happening yet … there must be at least one critical bottleneck that is preventing it.”
In this method, you ask why something important isn’t happening, e.g. “Why aren’t people in this neighborhood voting at higher rates?” Then you find and list the bottlenecks - and I endorse Suzman’s conclusion that, “If all the bottlenecks seem tractable, then your plan can just consist of focusing on beating them!”
Step 2: Evaluate the Idea
Having noticed an idea, Suzman writes about his evaluation process,
[T]he first question I ask is: if it truly succeeds, how much does it matter? Try to imagine the largest plausible success case. In that case, how glad would you be to have worked on the project?
To put some numbers around potential impact, most projects do at least one of the following:
Generate votes
Generate donations to candidates or organizations besides your own
Organize and/or mobilize people to take some action(s)
Provide a tool or service helpful to people doing tasks 1-3
Those four goals don’t encompass all worthy or politically important projects. However, the further you get from those goals, the more challenging it will probably be to demonstrate your impact and in turn to enlist partners (e.g. employees, partner organizations, donors, etc.).
Whatever your project’s goals, think about what would happen if you were wildly successful. How would the world be different? What exactly would your project have done, and how would that have generated outcomes? How many votes would it have generated? How many volunteers would it have mobilized? Etc.
Some back-of-the-envelope math is helpful here. If your project will touch x people, and make each of those people y% more likely to vote for Democrats, then you'll generate (x * y) votes. If the x people you touch will volunteer their time or take some other action with y frequency, then again your impact is (x * y). The goal isn't precision, but a sense of magnitude. Echoing Suzman, if you succeed, will your work have the big impact you want?
(Note: Seeking advice from political entrepreneurs or other professionals will probably be very helpful here. Don’t feel like you need to do all of this analysis on your own.)
Next, think about the cost of achieving the outcomes you’ve envisioned. How much lower is your cost versus current approaches (if there are any)? For example, if you’re generating votes, is your “cost per vote” way lower than other approaches? (This is an important metric to some but not all political professionals and donors.) Or, are you achieving something that existing approaches simply fail to accomplish?
Startups are hard and risky; to be worth doing, there has to be a potential of producing something way better than exists already. If your approach isn’t materially less expensive than existing approaches (or way better on some other metric), think about whether your idea needs its own startup or if instead it might be an improvement to what an existing organization is doing.
Step 2a: Learn the landscape
Whatever your idea is, it’s likely that some other groups have done or are doing some version of it. That’s ok! Small tweaks in execution can make a big difference; MySpace and Friendster were already doing social networking before Facebook, but didn’t find the right formula. So don’t be dissuaded when you hear things like, “Group X is already doing that,” or, “That’s been tried and failed.” Either statement is just a starting point to learn as much as you can - and hone what you can do differently or better. That learning will accelerate your own success, as well as improve your conversations with potential partners and donors.
The political startup ecosystem is sparse enough that it’s possible your work is entirely novel. But far more likely, if you find yourself saying any of the following, you’ll probably benefit from further landscape scans:
"We're the only group tackling this problem"
"No one has tried this"
"There's no reason why X" (there's usually a reason, even if it's not a good one)
Step 3: Find traction
Having noticed an idea and determined that it could have big impact, the next step is to get some traction.
In Ideas, Graham shares a valuable concept:
When a startup launches, there have to be at least some users who really need what they're making — not just people who could see themselves using it one day, but who want it urgently. …
Imagine a graph whose x axis represents all the people who might want what you're making and whose y axis represents how much they want it. If you invert the scale on the y axis, you can envision companies as holes. Google is an immense crater: hundreds of millions of people use it, and they need it a lot.
Translating this into the non-profit space by changing the axis labels; the y axis represents the impact of your work towards a single achievement; the x axis represents the breadth of your impact across multiple areas. A large organization like Indivisible is a big crater; with chapters around the country, the volunteers Indivisible supports are continually making impact on all kinds of local, state and national issues.
You can’t get there on Day 1, Graham explains:
A startup just starting out can't expect to excavate that much volume. So you have two choices about the shape of hole you start with. You can either dig a hole that's broad but shallow, or one that's narrow and deep, like a well. … Nearly all good startup ideas are of the second type.
So your job is to find a way that your little startup can make real impact. To do that, you typically need to find people who really want what you are doing. And that means getting out in the world and looking for “traction.”
Traction is a broad word that includes many things, including when people:
Pay money for something you make
Give you other scarce resources for what you make (e.g. time)
Use what you make in their work (e.g. using your technique to reach voters)
Give you their reputation (e.g. sharing your work with their networks)
Unlike the for-profit world, it’s not fatal if people can’t or won’t pay money for what you’re making. However, this raises the bar for demonstrating your project’s impact. (I wrote more about this challenge here.)
Back to Graham:
When I was trying to think of the things every startup needed to do, I almost included a fourth: get a version 1 out as soon as you can. But I decided not to, because that's implicit in making something customers want. The only way to make something customers want is to get a prototype in front of them and refine it based on their reactions.
So start testing your idea not just by getting advice, but by actually offering it to prospective users.
The two responses
Suzman taught me that there are only two responses when you offer someone a new thing:
“I want it now”
Everything else (aka polite interest)
Be careful to distinguish those two categories. Graham writes:
[People] don't say "I would never use this." They say "Yeah, maybe I could see using something like that." Even when the startup launches, it will sound plausible to a lot of people. They don't want to use it themselves, at least not right now, but they could imagine other people wanting it. Sum that reaction across the entire population, and you have zero users.
If you’re not getting “I want it now,” keep refining the product and/or pitch.
Step 4: Use traction to get more traction
Suzman makes a great point about momentum, which is closely related to traction:
What is momentum? Momentum is something good having happened recently. (More precisely: something good having happened in or over the last n days, where the size of the thing relative to the amount of time portrays an impressive trajectory.)
For example:
We just raised $x from (impressive person).
(Impressive organization) just started using our tool.
(Impressive person) just joined our team.
Over the past (time) we’ve been growing by (impressive percentage)
Momentum is valuable because it can form a positive feedback loop: you can intentionally use your current momentum to create more momentum, repeatedly.
Part 3: Raising money from donors
My best advice for raising money is simple: Make observable cost-effective impact. In The Lesson to Unlearn, Graham writes:
What's the trick for making venture capitalists want to invest in you? The best way to make VCs want to invest in you, I would explain, is to actually be a good investment. Even if you could trick VCs into investing in a bad startup, you'd be tricking yourselves too. You're investing time in the same company you're asking them to invest money in. If it's not a good investment, why are you even doing it?
Tweak the language, and the same point holds for political startups:
The best way to make donors invest in you is to actually be making cost-effective impact. Even if you could trick donors into investing in a bad startup, you’re investing your time in the same organization you’re asking them to invest money in. If you’re not making cost-effective impact (or on that path), why are you even doing it?
Beyond that simple point above, I’ve learned to be humble with advice about fundraising. Donors and their advisors (I’ll just say“donors” to mean both) are heterogeneous, making most advice narrowly applicable. Well-intentioned people may offer advice about “what donors look for;” in my experience it’s more often what that individual looks for, which may or may not be broadly representative. At risk of falling into that very pattern, here are a few points I consider worth sharing.
Categories of Political Donors
I think of the donor pool as roughly broken down into three categories:
Analytically-minded donors who focus primarily on funding evidence-validated projects with a measurable and low “cost per vote”
Donors who mainly focus on specific areas, for example funding projects that:
Empower under-represented communities
Work in a particular state or geography
Work with a particular ethnic or religious group
Advance goals in a specific policy area
Generalist donors, who fund a wide variety of projects
Categories 1 and 2 are somewhat easier to engage with, because you can know their preferences ahead of time and hence focus the conversation on how your work fits their goals. However, the category of generalist donors is large and hence good to access if possible.
Talking with Donors
Here are a few general communication tips that benefit many political entrepreneurs. They’re good for speaking with donors, but also with other audiences.
Have a clear story of what you do
I find that the “problem / solution” frame often works well.
Convey what you do before getting into how you do it. The how is what you focus on every day, and so you find it endlessly fascinating. But listeners often get lost if you reach the how before they understand what you’re working to achieve.
What three one-sentence bullets do you want the listener to remember? Figure that out ahead of time, then emphasize them appropriately.
“Short answer, long answer”
A typical donor pitch is around 20 minutes. That means every minute is 5% of your meeting. If you spend just three minutes providing more detail than the listener wants, then you’ve wasted 15% of your meeting.
An excellent way to answer questions is: “The short answer is [1-2 sentences]. Would you like more detail?” Usually the answer is no, and you’ve just kept the conversation on track.
Lead with your most impressive results
For example, what have you achieved that others couldn’t or didn’t?
What traction can you show? Where have people chosen to give you scarce resources for what you’re making?
Present your most impressive results that are intellectually honest. If your listener pokes at one piece of information and finds it not well supported, that undermines the credibility of all your other points.
Conclusion
Thank you for your interest in political entrepreneurship. We need more of it, and it’s unfortunate that there isn’t more support for your journey. But I and others are here to help as much as we can, because you may hold the key to future victories and the better, stronger democracy that we all want.
The organizations that fund and provide support for political startups are:
New Media Ventures (funds non-profits and for-profits)
Higher Ground Labs (funds for-profits only)
More resources are on my web site, https://bluem.ventures. For occasional brief updates on political entrepreneurship (way shorter than this one), subscribe at https://slifka.substack.com.