EA - Lessons learned from Tyve, an effective giving startup by Clifford

Link to original articleWelcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Lessons learned from Tyve, an effective giving startup, published by Clifford on December 18, 2022 on The Effective Altruism Forum.This is a Draft Amnesty Day draft. That means it’s not polished, it’s probably not up to my standards, the ideas are not thought out, and I haven’t checked everything. I was explicitly encouraged to post something unfinished! Commenting and feedback guidelines: I’m going with the default — please be nice. But constructive feedback is appreciated; please let me know what you think is wrong. I probably have a lot more thoughts I haven’t written down so feel free to ask me questions in the comments.In 2019 I tried building a startup to promote effective giving in workplaces. It didn’t work out as a for-profit but looks somewhat promising as a non-profit and has facilitated £630k in donations (around £160k of this went to Founders Pledge recommended charities). In this post, I share the story and my lessons learned.Since writing this draft, I’m excited that a new CEO with vastly more product experience than me has taken on Tyve as a nonprofit.HT to Sebastien who I met at EAG 2020 and suggested I write up a post-mortem and to Lizka for encouraging me to post as Draft Amnesty Day 2 years later.Main learnings:Fall in love with the problem, not the solutionI’d prefer to do similar projects as nonprofits in the futureProbably don’t try to solve a lack of effective giving with technologyFundraising at workplaces can work decently well but I’m not sure EA/tech helpsDon’t confuse “this should exist” with “people want this to exist”Ignore all the above adviceBrief historyI started Tyve (like Tithe with a funky spelling) after working at Founders Pledge in September 2019.The idea was to encourage employees to give a % of their income to charities and we’d encourage them to give effectively.My startup pitch was as follows:millennial employees care about purpose and employers need to find better ways of delivering thisone way they could do this would be by supporting people in giving to causes they care aboutthere’s a nifty system in the UK called payroll giving where the employer can play a helpful role in enabling employees to donate pre-tax to charity through their payrollpayroll giving appeared to be a potentially untapped market. Only 2% of people in the UK give through payroll and apparently this is 30% in the USthe existing players all had terrible UX and we were going to fix it and create a modern experience (like challenger banks had done to high street banks)we were also going to use the cost-effective estimates of our recommended charities to quantify the good they were doing, making it more satisfyingI now feel pretty iffy about most of the assumptions and the argument - I’d like to think this is based on what I learnt but I also think I could have realised at the time that some of this argument is pretty weak.I was relatively sceptical about donation apps but I thought I might have found a problem (small startups have employees who want to feel like they’re at a “good” company but doing CSR at small startups is an effort). I thought a cheap alternative would be to provide a spruced-up version of payroll giving.I built an MVP with my cofounder Ben O (a great software developer who I met at EAG Oxford 2016 with the explicit intention to find cofounders - kudos to that conference).I got 5 companies whose founders I knew well signed up and paying for the beta. We were pretty excited as people were giving unusual high amounts (thanks to anchoring people on % and targeting fairly well-paid startup employees) and about 50% was going to charities we’d recommended (either based on GiveWell or Founders Pledge).I quit my job and then raised £150k SEIS from well-known angel investors in the UK.It was a buzz raising this money ...