backdoor

Inspiration

Our inspiration for our project came from looking at the impact social media influencers were having on encouraging people to vote. Additionally, over the past few months, we have seen more influencers and content creators start using their platforms for social good. As we thought about the space more critically we found that while high profile celebrities are able to directly connect with charities but the ability for mid to micro-influencers was not as easy. Even though those influencers still have followings that would be more than willing to contribute to a cause, they are not leveraged in the same way. Moreover, we saw a need for nonprofits to be able to access influencers. Over 40% of nonprofits only have 1 person managing their social media channels and primarily solely on Facebook. We hope to change that for

What it does

Quite simply what we do is allow influencers to leverage their followings for social good. Our platform provides a space for influencers to create exclusive content that individuals will only be able to access after donating. Moreover, what we see as a unique feature is the ability for individuals to round up transactions for purchases. Users can also make one-time donations to access exclusive content. This leverages influencers' ability to do social good even if they are not A-list celebrities because we want to make sure that we have an open platform.

How I built it

The product prototype was designed with Figma with inspiration from Google Firebase Analytics and Google Cloud Storage.

Challenges I ran into

There were several challenges that we ran into and tried to address. The primary issue that we are working on is creating an effective revenue model. The revenue model is what allows the business to be sustainable. However, what makes this space extremely hard to create an effective model for is that the impact for social good necessitates the company to be lean and push as much of the revenue towards nonprofits but at the same time try to find a recurring source of revenue. We also had difficulty in creating adequate differentiation between our platform and other companies. Eventually, we were able to sort out the nuances to highlight how we were different from any individual company but we spent a lot of time on why other companies would not be able to do what we were doing. Patreon, for example, allows content creators to have exclusive content but it is not specific to social good, does not have a round-up feature, and has no integration with nonprofits. Omaze on the other hand is specific to social good but is based on a sweepstakes model rather than exclusive content. The closest competitors to our initial version of the platform were GiveTide and RoundUp App that connect with nonprofits but do not leverage influencers at all. Thus, we see untapped potential but were struggling to find nuance and make ourselves unique. The final challenge that we worked to overcome was how to best understand the specific problems we were helping address without overly complicating our story. With three different stakeholders involved, we had to ensure that there was a Win-Win-Win.

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

The team is extremely proud of the designs created within this 48-hour sprint. We were unsure if we would be able to pull off coming up with a complete market strategy and a full design with just 3 people on our team and even though it took some late nights, we are happy that we stuck with it instead of giving up.

What I learned

We learned better strategies for rapid prototyping (such as using version control to keep track of changes that were made) which made working as a team much more efficient. In the past, we have always designated one person to do design work, but by learning about Figma’s collaborative environment, we were able to streamline the process and get everything that we needed done. Another thing we learned about is the integration of products from the Google Cloud Platform as that is something no one on our team has tackled before.

What's next for backdoor

From here what we hope to do is start onboarding a select number of influencers and manage their campaigns for social good. While developing the capabilities for rounding up transactions over a month will take more time we will be able to allow for the one-time donation users to access exclusive content faster. Additionally, we want to seek validation with the key stakeholders in the area and talk with more influencers and nonprofits to determine their needs. We are excited about the work we were able to do and where backdoor can go from here.