

The Life and Death of a Political Startup - cereallarceny
http://poliana.com/

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marchustvedt
Interesting read and sounds like a noble effort. It's a bit of a pivot, but I
would think there's a market for better tools for campaigns to target would-be
donors. There's clearly demand for anything that is revenue-generating for a
campaign, and while I'm not fully versed in your product, I think that smarter
access to the data you were tracking could be useful there.

Most serious campaigns, even state level ones, have invested heavily in donor
and supporter retention software. But fundraising outside of the painfully
repetitive emails, still seems to follow what I found to be rather dated
practices. I hosted a campaign event for a Congressional candidate (who ended
up winning) and I was shocked at how manual the process was.

Heading into 2016, there sure will be no shortage of campaign dollars (and
contracts) up for grabs.

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cereallarceny
That's a great idea honestly. We hadn't really put in thought as to creating
better tools for donors. Of course, this idea would only hold any weight if
the donors are of substantial wealth. Being able to tell a donor "here's where
to put your money based off of the district's political opinions or sway"
would also be incredibly valuable, but is it enough to substantiate paying for
a service?

I'd be more surprised if people with large amounts of money didn't already
know where they were going to put their hard-earned cash. I'd be equally as
surprised if those donors didn't already have connections of their own on the
hill, at which point they wouldn't need our service for enlightenment (they'd
have their own direct source).

I like the idea though, I would just worry about the ability to generate
reliable revenue from this. Perhaps also the issue of ethics I wrote about
would come into play here. It somewhat might follow the same path as we did
when I talked about selling the data to politicians for use on their
campaigns.

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mc32
>Simply put, our primary goal was to avoid the very same bias that we felt the
media had.

I'm not so sure that's what i'd want as a goal. I don't want to live in s a
society where there isn't a bias against rape, murder, etc. You have to have
biases but ensure they are well founded --based in some kind of set of
principles. We don't need to start from the beginning and evolve our line of
thought every time we discuss something.

I'm totally okay with someone saying I'm for increasing alcohol taxes because
of reasons a, b and c which are based on peer reviewed and internationally
accepted studies x y and z. So long as they are open to change were the
conclusions to change over time (due to say new studies revealing something
different.)

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Quizz
Good post mortem, ironically most startups won't listen because startups by
their very nature have "blinders" on.

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cereallarceny
Thanks Quizz, I completely agree. From my experience that's a lesson that
takes going through a few startups to finally break.

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petya08
Simply genius.

