

Ask HN: Rate my startup MyRunningMate - timmaah

http://myrunningmate.com
An app that provides political campaigns the means to run and manage a virtual phone bank. Once setup, volunteers call a provided phone number which automatically connects them to voters one after another. An accompanying web page allows the volunteer to monitor their calls and report on the outcome of those calls.<p>Please poke around and try it out. You can test it out without actually contacting voters. No need to fill in real contact info, just make it all up.<p>Building this app took 16 days. The last three weekends and nights after my day job. Now comes the hard part for me, marketing it. I am going to aim for downballot campaigns. For a few reasons, no one below federal level campaigns use my main competition. I am also hoping the name MyRunningMate will be a container company for several services directed at political campaigns.
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JimmyL
Best of luck with this - political software is a great niche industry,
although a very competitive one.

If you're looking for a new feature, I would suggest some type of offline
mode. Many people have this image of a political phone bank being a room full
of people on headsets with computer screens in front of them, reciting
carefully-prepared statements. For centrally-run national campaigns, this is
correct. But for more local ones - which make up the vast majority of
campaigns, and the ones with the lowest barrier to entry - a campaign office
is a vacant storefront in a mall, and a phone bank is eight people in some
spare cubicles with old Nortel handsets. Find a way to make this software
useful for them.

How? Maybe something like call sheets. I press the "Call Sheet" button, select
that I want a sheet of 50 callers, and your software will generate a printed
piece of paper with 50 names on it, with each name having the appropriate
check-boxes next to them. I can then give that to a volunteer who will call
the dial-in number, enter the PIN for that sheet, and your PBX will call
though the names on the sheet they're given in the order listed, and they can
check off the details. When they're done, they give it to a volunteer who does
data entry about the results.

Want to get fancier? Make your call sheets optical-scan. Instead of handing
the completed call sheet to a volunteer who does data entry, hand it to some
guy with a scanner. The scanning volunteer places the call sheet in a standard
$60 OfficeMax scanner, and presses the "Send PDF via Email" button on the
scanner, and sends it to a custom email address you've supplied them with.
Your service then scans the PDF, figures out how the volunteers have marked
the sheets, and presents the results (and any ambiguities) to the volunteer
who is doing data validation, as opposed to entry.

Two more (simpler) suggestions:

\- The ways to respond to a call should be customizable, if they're not
already. As opposed to just yes/no, I'd like my volunteers to be able to
select a few checkboxes about each respondent (guesses at party ID, how
committed they sound, possible follow-ups, etc.).

\- Add some keyboard shortcuts. I know I said earlier that most phone banks
aren't guys with headsets and laptops, but some are. For those keeners, may as
well make it easy for them to do all their call categorization without having
to keep mousing around.

Another interesting approach - and Obama's team did something like this - was
to set up for distributed phone banking, taking advantage of people who have
free evenings on their cell phones. A volunteer would dial into your system,
get connected to someone to speak to, and then when the call finishes get
kicked into an IVR system for categorization ("Press 1 for Democrat, press 2
for Republican, press 3 for Undecided" etc.). Once they've entered their IVR
response, connect them to their next caller, and repeat until they hang up.
You'd have to come up with some decent access control (to prevent opposition
candidates from calling in and screwing with your voter lists), but it seems
like you could probably do this whole module with some judicious use of Twillo
(or whatever PBX you're now using as a back-end).

While I'm thinking about this, I would also reconsider your pricing model.
There is nothing a campaign manager likes more than cost certainty, and right
now your service doesn't have it. If I let a room full of volunteers at your
service for four hours, I don't really know what it would cost my campaign,
which would scare me. On the other hand, if you charged by the call I could
say to myself "we want to do a call blitz tonight, so I'm going to budget out
enough for 5,000 calls", pay that, and be safe knowing that no matter how
productive my volunteers are, I'll be able to have a hard cap on how much I'm
going to spend in a metric I'm used to using and can compare across mediums
(engagement cost). Put another way, it's a hell of a lot easier to go to the
finance committee/candidate and say "we're going to use this fancy new service
to make 1,000 calls" as opposed to "we're going to use this fancy new service
for 800 minutes, and I'm really not sure how many calls."

~~~
timmaah
Thanks for taking the time to reply.

I had thought of a few different "offline" mode options. I'm not sure there is
a market for printing call sheets and handing them to volunteers. Most
campaigns are fine printing off excel pages and using that. Though it is worth
more thought.

That call "tagging" is customizable by the campaign in the back end. As it is
now though, I probably need to redo the buttons as many options would take up
too much space.

Re: Distributed phone banking. That is the main target of my app. Having the
volunteers call from home instead of having them come to the campaign office
and work off of call sheets.

Pricing gets tricky. I am charged on a per minute basis and at this time I
don't really have a good idea how long the average call would last. If they
hit an answering machine it would be 1 minute, but if they have a good
conversation with the voter it could be 5+ minutes. To charge on the per call
level I'd be mostly taking a guess at this point. The per minute billing
allows me to take most of the risk out of it.

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nicholaides
Wow, this is really, really cool, and it looks like it will make operating a
phone bank really easy.

Congrats on putting it together so quickly!

It took me a while to figure out what it does and what I can do with it, and
I'm still not totally clear, but that could be because I'm not familiar with
phone banks.

I think it's time to show it to some potential customers and figure out what's
keeping them from signing up and using it!

Great job!

~~~
timmaah
Thanks. I do think I need to make a video that shows how it all works. I just
haven't had the time yet.

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faramarz
I'm very intrigued! Have you contacted any local MP's to pilot the app? I'm
curious how open they are to innovation in the space.

You have picked a great market to build products for. Congrats! $$$

~~~
timmaah
I have contacted a few campaigns, but no real bites yet. I know the market is
there, I just need to figure out how to get the word out. Working on it.

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andrewtbham
i think demo accounts or something would be good for rate my startup... or a
video. i am stuck at Add to Account Balance page unless i enter credit card.
maybe a demo or promo code to get past entering the credit card. it will
probably be useful for prospective customers as well.

