

Tell HN: Seeking Cofounder for Twilio-based Startup - danielle17
http://www.impactdialing.com/

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adriand
This sounds like a cool idea, and the premise doesn't sound too complicated.
You could probably build something very useful quite quickly.

I think political campaigning is ripe for cool startups. I have an idea that
I've dubbed "Pressure", which would be sort of a hierarchical, goal-setting
and -rewarding online campaign management tool.

Basic premise: any sort of campaign, to be successful, must bring pressure on
a variety of fronts - in traditional media by way of letters to the editor,
calls to talk shows, etc.; online through blog posts, social media engagement,
and email; by applying pressure to elected officials with phone calls, emails,
and snail mail letters, and so on.

So, you would start a campaign by setting a variety of goals for these ways of
applying pressure: number of letters to political representatives, size of
social media presence, etc. Then you delegate these goals to top lieutenants,
so that one person becomes solely responsible for social media presence - the
social media division if you will. They can further delegate others, e.g.
setting some other person as responsible for number of Twitter followers in
the social media division.

To make things interesting, the site could either automatically, or via
control by "upper management", promote people to higher levels if they have
demonstrated exceptional ability in the goals they were originally assigned.
Goal progress would be visible, creating a competitive, game-like aspect to
the application.

Anyway, perhaps not the best idea. But the point is, I think that the field of
political campaign management software could really use a shakeup.

Good luck!

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patio11
There is probably a market for allowing the challenger for the 3rd
Congressional District in Nebraska to have an online operation as
sophisticated as Obama's was. Unfortunately, it probably requires a lot of
consulting in addition to product development. And if you thought politics was
a blood-sport you haven't seen the politics industry.

~~~
adriand
> There is probably a market for allowing the challenger for the 3rd
> Congressional District in Nebraska to have an online operation as
> sophisticated as Obama's was.

I agree. Except I think that you could do this just as effectively all the way
down to the city councilor level, and you could also use it for any virtually
any campaign - including ones for social justice, for changing governmental
policy, etc. That's a lot of campaigns. Tie it in with innovative technology
for integrating with social media, Twilio-powered telephony, etc., and you
could have a winning application.

