How to reinvent your startup embracing the help of volunteers

At the beginning of the pandemic, I came across a post on Facebook from a French friend who was looking for companies interested in receiving assistance from students that were staying at home basically with spare time.

My first thought was that it was a simple but great idea that I could emulate for people in my region. As curious as I am, I started researching how the whole thing worked inside. So I quickly figured it out that the only thing they had was two forms, one for recruiting companies, and another one for the students. Seemed pretty straight forward.

Immediately I replicated the post on a startup group(in Spanish) with the same idea trying to get feedback and seeing if there was some kind of interest on it. Well after 200 comments, I took the impulse, gathered a couple of fellow supporters, and we launched a landing page, missionstartup.org was born.

Before I continue, let me tell you a bit about what I do. GET MI PULPA is a family business I co-founded over 5 years ago with my partner in life, Carolina. We are a startup hosted in the Founders Program at Station F. It is a concept inspired in the meal box trend that exploded about 6 years ago with the arrival of big players such as Hellofresh and Blueapron.

We just did a couple of tweaks to their model and focused only on smoothies mainly in Bogota, Colombia.

I just came to realize that I’m very good at cloning things, or how someone said, ‘stealing like an artist’. If you notice the similarity, it’s just the same I did when I saw the post from my french friend, but that’s not the topic for this post.

To keep the story short, back in 2015 we decided to create a meal box with everything you need to create smoothies recipes at home. Always new recipes, always healthy and fresh ingredients, everything pre-portioned in the right amount, in conclusion, the perfect way to take the juice out of that Nutribullet at home. We grew pretty fast in Bogota, Colombia, but honestly, we lost some of the impulse cause even though we had some sales, there was a problem with the churn rate that was causing to stagnate our growth. I must confess that we reach a peak in 2017, and the business became a lifestyle business instead of the booming startup we thought of pursuing in the beginning, and then we run it for a couple of years on autopilot.

As the media increased the panic, I decided to take matters immediately and started offering a hand to all fellow startup founders on the local startup group with more than 20K users. This kind of assistance sounded great for many of them. A freehand ready to assist you with all the hot skills of the moment, sounded too good to be true right? Who wouldn’t need assistance in web development, content for social networks, digital marketing, strategy and growth?

We recruited over 400 volunteers and almost more than 60 startups willing to participate. People filled their profiles, I started matching them via email, and people started connecting and executing short tasks for startups, in theory.

It sounded that it was the right thing to do but it didn’t work the way I wanted it to be.

Why?

Because I came to understand that volunteers are great in a concept but are honestly a hustle to coordinate. Many good intentions but then lots of time trying to catch them. In some cases, lots of emails without response, some of them worked great but that’s not the norm, not everyone is ready to take action, and yes this is the only risk of the model, that in the end, it’s time-consuming, but no one said it was going to be easy right?

I wasn’t prepared for that. In the end is time. My time. And I needed to move fast.

When you are running a startup on autopilot, and out of the sudden a world pandemic hits you, you have got to take control as well to prevent an accident and for sure I wasn’t envisioning all the tough work that I had to do.

Then an idea came to my mind.

Instead of focusing on helping others, I had to start thinking about helping myself. Selfish or opportunistic. Maybe.

But it doesn’t mean that the initiative stopped, startups can still find their volunteers on their own.

I just automated many of the things I was running manually with mails. Made some videos instructing people to get help on their own based on the database I shared and made all the data available for the startups. Instead of me doing the match, I encouraged them to start looking in the database for their talent.

So instead of leading the platform, I took a role more like a beneficiary of the service I had created. And why not? In the end I was the one who created it.

I must confess it took me a night to take action. I felt kind of guilty, but in the end, I woke up with a clearer vision, if I’m going to offer something, let’s create the best work offer for them to participate.

The biggest realization for me was that you can’t help others if you aren’t in a safe position. I guess that’s why there’s a Maslow pyramid.

But if you aren’t safe but you have a good resource to offer your community, it’s dumb if you do not put it to the service of others, especially if it might help them save themselves. And in this case, my startup (or yours) can created meaningful experiences.

My startup had many challenges before the Corona virus, some of them were very challenging. But we had the perfect timing on our side. We’ve been workign to boost people’s immune response with foods and with the pandemic, lots of people were looking for alternatives during their days at home in curfew. In fact, it allowed all volunteers to use my startup to try my product to stay safe and sound and in the meantime they occupied their time with me, and I don’t know if it was a great move to do, but hearing from their mouths, for them our startup meant so much. I just couldn’t believe it.

As you might imagine, It accelerated so many things I had in the backlog, adding top talent and fresh blood made things happen.

It was like running hackathons with every volunteer every week.

We improved our conversion rates, increased 2X our sales, relaunched our website, boost our social networks, designed a brand new way of delivering our boxes, improved the logistics, launch a social donation campaign, open sales in nearby cities, created a model to expand our operation and all of this in just the past month. You can’t imagine how grateful we are with them and It hasn’t stopped. Today I’m working with a team of more than 50 volunteers in many cities like San Francisco, Madrid, Chile, Bangalore, Cairo and Colombia reinventing the way our startup can pursue its vision.

The coolest part was that It brought me the opportunity to meet amazing people. More than a dozen volunteers that had helped me in many ways, that I couldn’t have met in another way. I even hired a couple of them after their 15 days of volunteering were over. Of course, it’s not free forever. In fact, most of them have found a way to demonstrate their skills, and that’s how I ended up seeing that there’s a great business model that can be developed afterwards, but that’s another story.

But the key take away is that it really meant something, I felt that I was doing a good thing for the world. It created a community, it created a sense of belonging and this capability of bringing people not just for the profit but for a good cause could change the world, your world.

Well I think it’s quite simple, today if you have a startup that can offer a solution that appeals the post-pandemic world then this model might work for you. You just need to arrange a volunteer work on your communications and test it out. An ambassador program is something you can start doing and some of my friends have started doing it.

Existing frameworks are available. You can test with existing freelance sites or hiring platforms to promote it. Obviously you can start with your own Facebook , Instagram or Linkedin accounts are great. (Or you could give it a try, enter the missionstartup site again if that’s the case or go to Torre.co which has helped us a lot)

Of course, some people will say that they won’t do you any free work. But hey that’s life. Haters gonna hate. But on the other side, there’s a group of very sharp people that can help you save your business and make you feel alive with all the energy they bring. Believe me, people are into this kind of purpose driving gigs these days, not everything is just for the money, some of them are here for you, just for the chance to build a relationship with you. How cool is that?

It’s important you consider the kind of profile you might be looking for. These volunteers assemblies are there in any university or any good company that is still running, these people are mostly safe individuals. Students in their last year or recent graduates. Expert people without too much housework overload. People that in the end are the professionals you wish to meet, humans with a big heart, excellent professionals committed with the society, willing to take fresh air and get an opportunity to put in practice all their skills and knowledge.

Missionstartup.org is an evolving concept for any company to embrace the power of volunteers. Of course, it needs improvement just in the same way any other startup needs work and tuning, but it can be replicated by you, it can mean a lifesaver for many and it means the satisfaction to do a good deed. It helped us, we created our own with getmipulpa.com/ambassadors and now it has empowered so many people to achieve great things with the help of others.

I invite you to get use this untapped resource which I sought only for NGOs or nonprofits, but during the pandemic, things have changed, the world has changed, and volunteering is a tool that has existed for ages might help you get the right boost your startup needs to reach the next safe harbour. Hope it helps and let me know your opinions in the comments. Godspeed.

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