Buy Positively

Buy Positively, with Mike Rome: a Groupon for conscious local businesses meets Kickstarter for social enterprises. We designed it, tested it, called it.

Role: Co-founder, with Mike Rome
When: October 2011 to December 2012
Where: Chicago and New York
Team: Two co-founders
Scope: A marketplace concept: the model, customer research, wireframes and a Tumblr

A wireframe of a Buy Positively project page: a video, a countdown and a support button — **Buy Positively,** the project page in wireframe.

What if buying something were a good thing by default? I’d grown dubious of mass consumerism, and in late 2011 my co-founder, Mike Rome, and I set out to flip it on its head.

Groupon meets Kickstarter

The idea: a Groupon for conscious local businesses meets Kickstarter for social enterprises. Customers would discover good local businesses through deals. Each business would give 1% of its profits to a shared fund. Social entrepreneurs anywhere in the world would submit projects, and the customers would vote on which ones got the seed money. Every purchase would do a little good, whether or not the buyer was thinking about it.

It was a three-sided business: shops, buyers and entrepreneurs, each needing the other two before any of it worked. That turned out to be the whole story.

Lean, by the book

We ran it the lean startup way. I did scores of interviews with every kind of stakeholder. We drew wireframes and built the minimum viable product as sketches, so we could test the idea before paying for code. I started teaching myself Ruby on Rails. I did not get very far.

While we built, Buy Positively lived as a Tumblr of other people’s good ideas, with my notes on each one. Those posts are still here, filed under Buy Positively.

Why it never took flight

There were too many moving parts and too many kinds of customer to win at once, and we didn’t have what it took to execute it well. By the end of 2012 we let it go and both moved on.

It never took flight, and it taught me more than plenty of things that did: test the riskiest assumption first, and be honest early about what you can actually build. A few months later I was shoveling compost in Costa Rica, working on a simpler version of the same question.

What I did

Co-founded Buy Positively with Mike Rome to make buying something a good thing by default
Designed a three-sided model: local deals for shoppers, 1% of each business’s profits into a shared fund, and a customer vote on which social enterprises got the seed money
Ran scores of customer development interviews, lean startup style, to test the model before paying for code
Built financial models to test whether different social enterprise prototypes could stand on their own
Drew the wireframes, built the minimum viable product as sketches, and started teaching myself Ruby on Rails (I did not get very far)
Wrote the Buy Positively Tumblr, with my notes on other people’s good ideas, to build an audience while we tested
Called it at the end of 2012, when the evidence said we couldn’t execute it well

Deliverables

A business model canvas for a three-sided marketplace
Financial models for social enterprise prototypes
Wireframes and a sketch prototype
Customer and stakeholder interview notes
The Buy Positively Tumblr, still on this site under Buy Positively

Skills

Customer discovery interviews
Marketplace and business model design
Financial modeling for early-stage ideas
Wireframing and paper prototyping
Writing for an audience
Knowing when to stop

What I learned

Test the riskiest assumption before anything else, and stop when the evidence says stop. A clean ending is a skill too.

Working on something like this?

Get in touch

Groupon meets Kickstarter

Lean, by the book

Why it never took flight

What I did

Deliverables

Skills

What I learned

Related work

The Simple Good

System Solutions

Rancho Margot

Working on something like this?