Ten Complete Strangers Walk into a Room And Decide to Start a Social Enterprise
I can’t remember exactly how I heard about GiveBackHack, but I do recall being disappointed with myself as the 2016 event came and went while I hedged on buying my ticket. When Facebook started telling me about the upcoming 2017 event, I resolved to go (and even conned a couple of friends into joining), not really knowing what to expect but being nevertheless certain that I wanted to be a part of it.
Fast-forward to March 31, 2017, and I found myself in a complete frenzy of social entrepreneurship. There were over a hundred people I’d never met, people screaming at us to hustle and raving about scratching itches I wasn’t sure I even had.
I was completely out of my comfort zone and loving every minute.
And, by God, everyone had an idea. Dozens of people stood up and pitched: in 60-second bursts punctuated by applause letting them know their time was up, people presented half-baked, fully-baked, naively ideal, completely pragmatic, silly, salient ideas. There were over sixty pitches, all told. I was even moved to pitch my own half-cocked idea for moving the social impact needle forward before I even realized I was going to. At the pace we were going, I could barely jot down the names of the ideas that struck a chord and scratch down a few hieroglyphics to try to make some sense of things later, because soon, I understood, there would be a reckoning.
After the pitches, you see, we were going to dot-vote on the ideas. Those ideas that received the most votes would get 30 more seconds to pitch, and then, anyone whose idea didn’t make the cut (or never pitched to begin with) would form into teams to start turning the ideas into reality.
Once the voting had narrowed the field into about a dozen truly incredible ideas, that’s when I really started to panic. I mean, I have no early stage startup experience, no professional software development experience, and zero marketing or sales chops. I’m a technology consultant. Who’s going to want a technology consultant on their team? What’s a technology consultant even going to do on one of these teams?
You know what? It didn’t matter.
Everyone needed help. Everyone pitched in however they could. And, at the risk of being cliché, it was kind of magical.
From Dream to Reality
I landed with a team that started out as DreamTime. The vision was simple: TurboTax® for DACA applications.
Before the moment the team’s founder, Brook Kohn, pitched his idea, I wasn’t even aware that the DACA process was so arduous and impactful. Brook’s solution to the problem was so elegant that it was just begging to be realized, and it turned out that I wasn’t the only one who thought so: we ended up being ten people strong, one of the largest teams to organize around a problem at the event.
The following 36 hours blurred by. We worked ceaselessly throughout the next day and evening and then the next day again, plucking real, valuable things from the ether of uncertainty surrounding whatever might happen next. Trying to chronicle or sequence what we managed to accomplish over the weekend would be impossible, but here’s a punch-list of the things I can remember:
- Competitive landscape analysis
- Pivoting
- Rebranding
- User validation
- Problem space validation
- Pivoting again
- Creation of a live website
- Pitch practice
- Technology proof-of-concept
- More pitch practice
- More pivots
- Even more pitch practice
Anyway… you get the idea. The team accomplished more over the course of a weekend than many teams with which I’ve worked have managed to accomplish over the course of an entire business week. By the time we were getting ready for the final event of the weekend, our public presentations, we had actually moved the idea forward from something in somebody’s head to something real and actionable. DACA Time, the social enterprise, was born.
From Real to More Real
As fate and hard work would have it, the ten enterprising souls on our team weren’t alone in their conviction.
Along with our fellows within the GiveBackHack Columbus 2017 cohort, the DACA Time team presented our vision — and how close to reality we’d taken it over the course of a weekend — to a roomful of mostly strangers. Not only did Brook nail the pitch, but I think it’s safe to say that the audience got it. Our mission resonated. I feel pretty confident saying so, because… well… see for yourself:
We took home a prize package, too, graciously provided by GiveBackHack’s sponsors and by the extreme generosity of the United Way of Central Ohio. But as much as we very sincerely appreciate how the package will help us advance our mission (seriously, again, thank you, thank you, thank you to the GiveBackHack partners and sponsors), for me personally, the Crowd Favorite acknowledgment was the most meaningful outcome of the entire weekend’s labors of love. As much as we validated our ideas and assumptions with our users, the audience of the presentations helped to validate that our drive and passion were well-placed.
I can’t underscore enough the value of community engagement in the sort of thing that we’re up to. I’m discovering more each day about the community of support that exists in Columbus for social entrepreneurship, and we learned that evening that the community sees in our mission and vision something that they can get behind.
Next Up…
A lot’s transpired between GiveBackHack weekend (just three weeks ago!) and now, and the coterie of co-founders that have the time to continue focusing on DACA Time’s growth keeps on hustling to materialize the social impact we’ve promised.
I’ve taken up enough of your time for now, but stay tuned. The journey’s only just begun.
