Start-up Life: A day in the life of building a SaaS platform for nonprofits to create digital reports

Yearly’s Josh Kligman interviews with Jorge Mendez of Seed Spot, an accelerator program for new ventures, whether for profit, nonprofit or like Yearly, here to help support nonprofits.

You can read the discussion here:

Hello, everybody. Welcome. Good afternoon. Good morning from some of you as well. Pleasure to be here with Josh from Yearly. Josh, how are you doing?

Hey, doing great. Thanks for having me.

Yeah, absolutely. Thank you for being a part of this. We always love to highlight alumni that are doing incredible work, mentors and community members as well. Josh, I’m so glad we get to chat today and get to know more about the work that you do, the impact that you’re having, as well as your experience thus far being an entrepreneur. Yeah, I mean, I love seed Spot, so hit me up with any questions you want and happy to talk and help today. Yeah, absolutely. Whoever’s joining us live as well, feel free at any point to drop any questions or comments or resources or highlights, whatever you like in the comments section of this live video, and we’ll make sure we address them in the next 25 to 30 minutes.

Awesome. Josh, josh, you graduated from the Impact Accelerator in 2020, am I correct in that?

Yeah, that’s right.

Right on. Awesome. Okay. And so before we could talk about that, I would love to learn more about Yearly. So what was the moment of inspiration, if there was one? Right? Or maybe it was like a slow burn.

I would love to learn from you what the process was of saying, oh, actually, there’s an opportunity here to launch something. I want to hear from you. Yeah, there was a moment at a diner with my co founder where we were sitting there, and he told me he has this idea to build a platform for nonprofits and let them create their own digital reports, like web based annual reports or impact reports, which they’re making anyway. And I remember that for years when I was working at a nonprofit as a marketer and I was creating different types of reports. We spent a lot of time and a lot of money creating reports, either with in house creative or farming it out to different size agencies or individual contractors and then the printing of it, spending tons of money, a lot of staff time during a four to six month process with, like, a big national annual report. Even for small and mid sized nonprofits, that’s still a real pain point. So we were trying to think, how can nonprofits deliver the stories of how they’re moving the needles with making impact in their community without paying an arm and a leg and spending so much time on the process and produce something that’s as beautiful as what you see? Nonprofits with $50 million year budgets creating.

And now that exists. So that’s what Yearly is all about. Yeah. Awesome. Right on. And so you have mentioned, I think a key word here is people to tell her story. Nonprofits tell her story.

For folks that don’t know or may not be fully acquainted, how are these reports used by nonprofits? These reports are used to take the programs that they have and show various stakeholders how impacts being made in the community. So you have a board as a nonprofit, you have volunteers, you have donors, most importantly, right? And they’re individual donors and they’re corporate donors. And it’s nice for people to see when they’re donating their time or money, how it’s being used. So the stories that we encourage nonprofits to highlight when they’re creating something like an annual report or an impact report with a platform like yearly, is really about finding someone who’s making an impact in your community, like an individual person, and show how they’re being affected by the donations that are coming in. So neighborhood is building a new playground and it’s being put in place because of your charity. I would encourage nonprofits, and this is for profit social impact teams too, not just focus on, you know, oh, new playgrounds there, and it’s making a difference. Focus on like, you know, the, the kids in the neighborhood that are getting use out of that program and talk about why the playground is important to them and how they’re getting used out of it, how it’s changing their lives.

And from a marketing standpoint, that’s how you can really appropriately pull at the heartstrings of the donors and show them money is being used. Yeah, it’s a strong tool for sure. And we talk about this often with entrepreneurs, not only nonprofit, but also for profit, and saying, look, if you’re not able to tell your story to the right people, to the right audience, it really can limit or stunt your growth or your potential reach. The work that you’re providing, all the work that you’re doing for these nonprofits, it can be invaluable, can help them fundraise to build new partnerships, go into new markets, really showcasing the work that you do and saying, look, we’re doing important things, and we have the individuals, the stories, the data to prove it. In your case of the work you’re doing, this beautiful report that people if you’re at a for profit and you’re in sales, right? You’re a nonprofit, you’re in fundraising, you pick up the phone and you call someone and you say, hey, I want a partner, or I want to try to sell you something. It’s a lot better if they know about your company or your organization, right when you introduce yourself on the phone so you don’t have to explain and kind of backpedal and get the whole story there. So I think that the stories that you could put out there through social media or through reports can help build that brand awareness so that when that other person picks up the phone, they’re already familiar with where you’re calling from, it makes the sale or the donation you’re trying to get a lot easier.

So find ways to show that impact, especially for nonprofits, through annual reports. You should and I think there’s different specific ways you can go about making your reports stand out over others. And that’s part of the entrepreneurial journey we’re going on, is trying to find ways to make tech work for that work hard for those solutions to become easy for nonprofits through a platform. Yeah, certainly fully agree.

If you joining us on this live conversation, know that you can drop in the comment section. Drop any questions that you may have for Josh. I believe you have a couple in here, so I’m actually going to pull from one of these.

Why do you think for you in particular, why do you think entrepreneurship is important? For me, I just love creating things. I like creating things from scratch. I love creating things that don’t exist anymore. And then I think the challenges that come with it. We have customers that tell us great ideas that they think should be in our product. And I love kind of figuring out which ones have the most demand and things that we can run with and it will help them and tie back to our mission of helping nonprofits have more time and money to put back into what they do best in their community. So it helps company, it helps the nonprofits, and it feels nice to put something out there and say personally, oh, I helped be a part of this and created and I’m helping the nonprofits with their mission.

And it’s just a lot of fun. Yeah, it should be fun. I think I did a day as well. You should have fun doing the work that you do. You’re not having fun doing it, moving on to something else. So it makes it a challenge if you don’t love it from the very beginning. Yeah.

I have a follow up question based on this comment question. Kind of thinking back at that process of the last couple of years, josh, what’s been a challenge or something that was challenging that you didn’t predict when you first kicked off? I think that one thing that we couldn’t really predict is figuring out the right marketing and sales channels to go through. And it’s something that is we’re kind of going through the scaling process right now as entrepreneurs. We’re starting to figure that out. But I didn’t know there’d be so much trial and error. I thought for sure if we advertised on Facebook and we targeted the right people that worked at nonprofits that that would lead to this conversion funnel where they’ll definitely buy a profit. And that’s an example where I just learned by trying it that it was expensive and it wasn’t converting.

So I had to go and find something else and think completely differently about it. So that takes a lot of time and takes a lot of budget. But I think being aware that there’s going to be a lot of trial and error, no matter how much of a slam dunk you think a sales process is going to be, you just got to be willing to be flexible and really creative and go through the motions and don’t do it alone in a vacuum. And find multiple people from different backgrounds in and outside your industry that can help give you ideas and you’ll find the right ones. It takes a lot more time than you think. Yeah, we think it’s a linear process, right. Like you said, we’re convinced that Facebook ads is going to work and it’s actually not so linear.

It seems as if it’s more based on like, leaps, like when’s the next leap happening. Yes, a series of experiments and that’s what leaps are. And it’s so hard and it’s very frustrating, but it goes back to what you were saying before. If it’s fun and you like your job and excited by what you’re creating, then you’ll be very okay when you find that one experiment out of ten that works because that’s going to drive the sales. Yes, it kind of continues to think of that process.

How has it been in terms of bringing in new team members or consultants or co founder? What’s been the process of bringing in that team to support for you? Yeah, we’ve been slowly building and bringing in people where we have the most need. So it started out with me and my Cofounder. And then we had our first hire, which was someone in customer success. And that’s a big tip that I got just from reading and learning and talking to a lot of people in the SAS world, especially in the Tech for Good Space, where software is being created just for nonprofits. And giving that support to customers is so important, especially as nonprofit marketing founders, we want to show that, hey, we’ve been in your shoes before and we’re here to support you through the whole way. Then after that, we added someone that helps us with sales so that we can close deals, content writing and then so on, but doing it all with the advice of people that have been there before and not rushing into it very important. That way we’re not burning through cash too quickly and we’re making sure we’re making very kind of predictable moves with our hiring.

It’s helped us a lot. Yeah, that makes sense. With really good tips in there about hiring. You mentioned having a co founder and so there’s actually a question in the chat I want to pull from. Do you have any tips on working with a cofounder? It’s very similar to having a marriage, at least what I’ve been told.

Tell us more about what that’s like and if you have any tips for folks that have a cofounder or looking for a cofounder. Yeah, I mean, if you are looking for a co founder, I think you should find someone that you get along with really well. It would be a big plus if you’ve known them for a long time before we even started working together because then you kind of know what you’re getting into. My co founder and I were friends for probably almost 20 years before we started yearly and we knew what the working relationship would be like, I guess for the most part. And we were right and it’s great. And I think that that’s a huge advantage that we have. And if you don’t know the person, go into it very slowly.

You want to get to know them well because you want to get to know their behaviors and how they’re going to react with certain things. So it’s okay to kind of test the waters and work on a short term contracted basis first if you’re not sure who gets started with. But once you’re headed down that path, it could be kind of sticky to get out of it. So you want to be sure, but don’t let that hold you up from starting a venture because it is easy to overthink things and never really get started. If you don’t want to share your idea or you think you’re never going to find the most ideal partner, you may not find the ideal partner. You have to go with someone that’s going to help you get going. I think I just got lucky and found the ideal partner.

Yeah, what you mentioned there is a really good insight. I mean, there were many, but I want to .1 of them out. Is the trial piece often, like, you don’t have to go straight into the contractual agreement off the bat. Try it out and see if the relationship works as well. That’s a really good tip there. Yeah, there’s a couple of questions I’m going to get back to as well. Both ones that I have for you, but ones that are in the chat that I actually find more important because I love to have people involved.

I mentioned when we went on Live that you had graduated from the Impact Accelerator back in 2020. What was your decision making leading up to joining that program? So you were seeking an accelerator. What was the reason behind it? Yeah, I mean, we were looking for guidance in areas where we don’t necessarily have enough training or expertise. So I think one thing we found really helpful from Seed Spot, which is what we were hoping to get out of the program was finding mentors in the right places that can help fill the gaps for us with some financial modeling and then we’re both marketers. But getting into some areas of marketing where we just wanted to get second opinions or foster other ideas.

We were really hoping that an accelerator program would open the door to people that work in those areas and have experience with SaaS models that are similar to what we decided to build that could give advice and that’s what we found and we still maintain those relationships now. And even with pitching, I mean, I hadn’t raised money before we started yearly, so I didn’t know what a pitch should look like for a SaaS program for the type of investors that we wanted to get. So getting that walk through it and we talked about storytelling, telling the story of our company and where we see that growth growing and why down on paper and rehearsing it over and over turned out to be a lot harder than I would have thought. So I’m glad you had a formal program that can take me through that. Yeah, well, I’m glad to hear that journey from you. In the decision making, you mentioned mentors and actually was going to ask you a question about mentors based on what you shared, but someone beat me to the punch in the chat, so I’m going to pull their question instead. And so how should entrepreneurs respond to feedback that I agree with from a mentor? How should entrepreneurs respond to feedback that they don’t agree with it with a mentor? Okay, well, I mean, you want to be open and flexible and realize that a mentor may be coming from a specific experience or experience that you don’t have.

But if you have that same or similar experience and you don’t think that they’re necessarily approaching it the right way and they haven’t done it before, then sometimes you just got to go with your gut. And I think it’s totally fine to have an open and honest conversation with that person directly if you have to. But you don’t have to necessarily tell them that you disagree either, because you’re going to get different pieces of advice from everybody. And not all of it is going to be a perfect plug into the puzzle that you’re building, which is your company. It doesn’t even necessarily mean that there’s going to be a right or wrong answer. Sometimes you just kind of need to go for it. I think one thing that I like hearing, like, a person like Gary Vee talk about, follow him on, say, like, LinkedIn, is that you don’t want to sit around forever thinking, oh, is this right or should I post this on social media, or is this the right way to go? Sometimes you just got to start marching and put some of the pieces together as you go, and then you’ll figure out what’s right and wrong.

I talked to people that weren’t necessarily mentors, but in pitch practice conversations that told me that my model wasn’t necessarily right and they wouldn’t necessarily do it that way and it’s not the right way. And I take most of the advice, but I don’t necessarily take all the advice and doesn’t mean it’s necessarily for better or for worse. You just got to sometimes go with your gut and just keep marching forward. Yeah. You’re the captain of the ship, right? At the end of the day. Yeah. You should have multiple mentors.

I mean, there may be a one that you really trust and that’s the person’s advice you’re going with. The other ones could be helping out in certain areas, but you don’t have to go with 100% of what they say every single time. Yeah, no, it makes sense. And kind of continuing that thread of mentors, borrowing again from a question that is in the chat. So thinking about either in the past or current, when you’re looking for advice or mentorship in a particular part of your business, how do you seek that? How do you seek that mentor, whether short term or long term? Well, what’s your process like and how do you find out if it’s the right person as well? Well, I think we didn’t necessarily have those mentors before accelerator programs. So finding the right person at an accelerator program and we did this with Seed Spot. And just asking if there is someone that could be a good fit that can help you with something specific has panned out to us talking to at least one person in that area of expertise.

So you don’t know unless if you ask and I would be strong with what they ask because if I say, oh, I need help with financial modeling, that’s not specific enough. I would need to say for a SaaS company, that maybe is even my space. Because the way you might model something out with like a deferred revenue calculation is going to be different than a non SaaS company and it’s really important to get something like that right. Same with all the accounting that you do for me, when I’m in doubt, I just go to my dad and ask him if I get lost because we don’t have all the answers. But hear me the right way.

That’s a good option.

That’s really good advice you mentioned, hey, have more than one mentor, have several mentors. I have different experiences and points of view and then you make the decision based on that as well. But I think also on the flip side, when you’re looking for mentors, you put it this way, which is have a plan. And it’s like be specific, don’t ask a general question, ask a specific question. You find the right person for that. So that’s a really good advice there.

So Josh, just kind of thinking through the work you’ve done so far, I got you asked some questions. Can I pull one of these again? I have some questions here that are pretty good. I want to pull them and I’ll ask my in a minute. So how did you decide if you were going to be either a nonprofit or for profit? What was the top process like? We just knew that we had nonprofit experience and we knew we had technology that was for nonprofits and we wanted to sell it. We knew we had a solution and that was for us. My co founder had founded three companies that were all for profit. Before we founded yearly, and that was just our deal and what we wanted to do.

I think that we also decided we wanted to be a mission driven company that helps nonprofits, like I mentioned earlier, kind of supports them in the background, but not necessarily be a nonprofit ourselves. So I think it’s a really personal decision. At the same time, I could see us launching a foundation from our corporation one day. Maybe I would start a nonprofit on my own. I don’t think that there’s a wrong answer. It’s just a matter of what you want to do or you and your co founder want to do. Yeah, and follow up to that.

Have you ever considered being a B Corp? Is that most part of the plan at any point? I guess we considered it, but not until after we already incorporated as an LLC. So changing a structure, I think, probably has advantages for probably doors that could open or for accounting purposes. I would start by talking to your accountant and seeing what they suggest is the best route, because there could be different tasks, implementations that are for or against the type of corporation you want to start or profit or nonprofit. You want to kind of fill that out with a professional, too. Yeah, it makes a ton of sense.

And keep the questions coming into the chat. We’ll get them to Josh. And so something that came to mind when you were describing the launch of the product and interacting with customers and introducing to the market and so on is one of those pieces where you’re introducing something you’ve created to the market. And then there’s a process of receiving feedback, whether feedback that you’re looking for on purpose or feedback that is given to you by customers. And so in the last couple of years, has it been anything that stands out in terms of feedback or learnings from working with a customer that you then incorporated back into the product? Yeah, a lot. Like next week, we’re launching a whole new UX on our platform for nonprofits to build reports. Nonprofit customers of ours said, hey, we would love to have templates where the whole report is built for you, and I could just drag and drop everything into it so I don’t have to sit down and design everything from scratch, but at the end of the day, still have the branding look and feel like my own.

So we thought about that, and we figured out, all right, well, yeah, let’s have a platform where everything is drag and drop, and let’s have templates. We also got a lot of feedback that our customers wanted to have besides a web based version of the report, a way to save it as a PDF right around the office or something. And I thought for a long time, well, we’re trying to steer everything into the digital direction, and that’s the future. And I really believe it is for nonprofits and you could save so much cost on printing and it’s better for the environment. And I think that’s really important. But there’s a few board members, there’s a few individual donors that want to hold a report in their hand over and over for customers, and I heard it for a year. So we launched a tool that allows you to save it as a PDF, as a complement to your lead version, which is the digital.

So point being, we listen a lot to our customers and we give it and try to give them as much as we can because they’re the ones doing the work every day and you can learn a lot from them instead of just assumptions. Yeah, it’s almost like a scientific process or it is a scientific process where you have these assumptions and then you then invalidate or validate those assumptions out in the market. Right. Like you said, these features that maybe you didn’t want to have it first and you realize, well, actually, I can see now based on conversations and feedback, that this is actually a feature that would work or a feature you just didn’t think of before, and that’s a complete natural process. Yeah, it’s a tough balance too, between figuring out the cost to get that ready, but do a lot of interviewing, talk to a lot of potential customers and existing customers and ask them what they want. That’ll give you the answer. Yeah, for sure.

Great. Thank you, Josh. I’m going to pull another here from the chat. All right, so this is a common question now. This is going back to maybe 2018, 2019 in your journey or maybe before that. So the question here is I have an idea for a start up, but I don’t know where to get started. What do you recommend as a first step? That’s a tough one.

I think the first thing we did for Yearly was we just found as many potential customers as we could through our own network and through surveys that MailChimp offers where they’ll find people from their database. That your demographic. And you could just email them and put a survey out and get some proof in the pudding that there’s demand for whatever it is that you want to start. I think when you hear the feedback, that will be the motivation to really get it off the ground and then you’ll have to find a way to go build it and find the right partners to go and building it. I mean, outsourcing is hard. So if you could find a co founder that has, let’s say, like technical skills or marketing skills, skills that aren’t your own, that complement it, that’s like almost golden ticket. We’re non technical founders, so we had to go outsource all the technology.

But that’s where you got to start. Yeah, that’s really good advice. And you mentioned MailChimp, right, as one of those features that they have if you’re listening to this conversation and you want to share a similar resource and say, oh, I actually have used this in the past, drop it in the chat Josh started with MailChimp. So if you’re watching, drop a few more as well, because there’s so many resources that people just don’t know of or may not know that, for example, MailChimp did. That right. They can think of it just as an email marketing platform, but it can do a bit more than that as well. Like you share.

Yeah, that’s true. And we’re always looking for new ideas, so please do drop them in the check. I’m going to need them, too. Perfect. All right, so we got five more minutes or so left and here so I want to make sure I get to some of these questions. Here one from about 15 minutes ago that I wanted to say towards the end. Any out of the box tips that you have for founders in general? Oh, boy, this is a tough one.

I’m going to have to go back to what I said before about experiments and being willing to test a lot of different things.

I like to think of it in terms of marketing and sales and where I can go find new customers, and I think I try to tie everything back to our sales and marketing strategy. But when it comes down to the tactics, I’m always willing to try many different things if it’s for the right cost or investment and see what works. But how you determine if it works, I think, is really about a method of conversion and saying, I’m going to put X into it. I’m going to reach X number of people, but how many of those people are going to then get interested where you can explain things a little further to them? And then how many of those people can you sell and they’re going to sign up to purchase your product or your service? And then there’s your answer as to what pieces your experiment are going to work, and then you can double down and put more into that. So get as many ideas as you can down on paper and then just start putting them out there. And it doesn’t mean a lot of those have to cost money to start getting the word out. We found a lot of chatter and customers, too, using Facebook, private groups that are targeted to certain industries.

And as a nonprofit marketer, I can go in there and just say, hey, I’m Josh. Thinking of building this thing. What do you think? You’ll get a lot of comments back within a few minutes. Yeah. It’s incredible what resources you have available. You’re supposed to just kind of know they’re there, right? Yeah. Linking groups is another one.

Linking groups, slacks as well. Groups. Good one. Yeah. I’m curious, actually, this question just came to mind. What was your first sale like? Was it. Memorable in any way or what was the process like? Yes, I think the process for us was a little difficult because we knew what we wanted to sell a subscription, but we didn’t know exactly how to price it and exactly how to structure when we first started.

And then pretty immediately the pandemic started and we were we have to try something a little bit different. So we actually were just giving our subscriptions away at that point for free. But what we did was we said, you know what, let’s get creative and we’ll help our customers design the reports from a creative services standpoint, almost like advertising agency styles. And we did the design for them while we figured out our subscription plan. So we had a lot of things, I think, being thrown at us no different than anybody else, but we figured out how we’re going to earn revenue for the business. And then once we launched a subscription platform, that’s when we knew, like, all right, now we have this repeatable predictable model that we start to really double down on. And once those sales started, then we really just focus on, all right, let’s have great customer service and great customer marketing because these are the customers that we need to come back year by year.

And then we’ll just kind of grow slowly from there. So hang on to those that you got. Yes.

So much of it. Where I’m hearing from you is also like, you are building the plane as you’re flying as well. A little bit of that. Yeah, I think we know our strategy, but not everything is going to pan out exactly how you want it to be. So you got to learn as you go. You’re right. Yeah.

Right on. Josh, thank you so much. So many good insights in here. Is there anything that the CSA community folks are watching or are going to be watching the recording of this? Can they connect with you? Is there anything that you’re looking for as well? This is your moment to pitch. Yes, I would say that if you’re starting up a company or nonprofit and or if you’re interested in seed spot, I think it’s a great thing for you to consider as wonderful accelerator program. So, yes, you can reach out to me. My email is josh at yearly report and you can also find me on LinkedIn.

I’m sure I might be tagged here on the broadcast. Josh and the company is yearly. We’re a platform for nonprofits to create digital reports. So if you know of a nonprofit, then send them our way, too. All right on. Awesome. You need that report is going to be one of the best, most creative URLs for sure.

All right, Josh, thank you so much. Thank you, everybody, for your wonderful questions and we’ll see you at the next one.

Hey, thanks for having me.

You got it. Take care.

Take care.

Bye.