August 2020: Monthly Recap

This is your monthly behind-the-curtains sneak-peak of what Purposely has been up to over the month of August. I hope you'll enjoy some insight into what it's like as a tech startup grappling with COVID, product-market fit, social entrepreneurship, and more.

August is a slow month! An overlapping series of (close-to-home) breaks has been a welcome relief for everyone, and has slowed down our (admittedly ambitious) timeline.

Our biggest goal this past month has been to speak with as many potential product users of our employee volunteering platform, so we can verify our entrepreneurial hypotheses and really sink our teeth into some lean development cycles.

By way of reminder, we're pivoting our volunteerism platform into a more niche employee volunteering platform, to focus on solving problems for companies that have ambitious volunteer programs but are struggling to drive employee uptake. We're taking this step because we believe that driving employee volunteering is the single-most effective step we can take to get more people volunteering more often.

In August we started meeting with startup sales guru Artiom Komarov, who has helped us reshape and optimize our outreach strategy and implementation, so we can identify and find folks who can help us shape our platform. Also helping us out as advisors are the amazing folks at Thrive Digital and Rian Gauvreau, co-founder of local success-story Clio.

In finding and talking to business leaders and great employee engagement professionals, we're already learning! We know we'll need to take a close look at integrations with HR software like BambooHR. We've learned that most business leaders totally get the importance of volunteering as a workplace engagement strategy, as well as CSR centrepiece. They often struggle to build and run a workplace volunteer program, particularly when it comes to driving employee uptake.

We've also been steadily adapting our back-end so we can hit the ground running in the coming month, with all sorts of technical updates that I don't fully understand, and won't dive into too deeply, but involves moving our focus onto a fresh database at purposely.co.

So, while August was a little slower than we'd have liked, we kept learning, building, and improving our system, and we're excited for a fast-paced September!

Want to help us out? We're currently looking to do 'customer interviews' with the folks who might use our future product. Get in touch with me at amcgowan@purposely.ca if you or someone you know would like to lend us 30 minutes. No sales pitch or commitment, we're just looking to learn.