Lessons from the Startup Journey

Ahmed Cheema: Coming up on the branding deep dive podcast

Chris Blauvelt: in all of his years is decades of, you know, mentoring startup founders. The most important quality in a successful founder is to be relentlessly resourceful. So that means, you know, get what you want with what you've got, you know, so you, you really want a great team and great talent.

You don't have money. Well, you, you just got to be resourceful and relentless and, and try. And sometimes people are going to say no. Sometimes people will say yes.

Ahmed Cheema: This is Ahmed Cheema and welcome to the Branding Deep Dive podcast. If you're new here, this is a podcast where we have in depth discussions about what brands are doing well to drive customer loyalty and how you can take those principles and apply them to your own brand. Today, we're talking to Chris Blavelt.

Chris is the CEO of Launchgood, which is a crowdfunding company based out of Detroit, Michigan. For those that don't know, crowdfunding is a way for people to fund their ideas through the power of an online crowd, also known as backers. Being an entrepreneur, Chris saw the power of crowdfunding to help entrepreneurs like himself, so he created Launchgood, a global Muslim platform built to leverage the power of crowdfunding to support great ideas.

In this episode, we dive deep into how Launchgood broke into an already saturated space of crowdfunding, why a company might pivot from their original vision, how to attract talented people on a shoestring budget, and much, much more. If you're a founder or have ever thought of founding a startup, pause this right now and go grab a notebook.

You're going to want to take notes. Now, here's Chris Blauvelt.

All right, Chris, welcome to the show. It is an honor having you on for the audience that may not be familiar with who you are and the work you do. Can you give a brief introduction to yourself and launch good?

Chris Blauvelt: Sure. Hey, everyone. My name is Chris. Abdurrahman Blauvelt, as the name probably indicates. I'm a convert, you know, I wasn't born into a Muslim family.

I did become Muslim when I was in high school. I lived in Massachusetts at the time and I came to Michigan where I am now for college. I studied engineering here, mechanical engineering. A lot of people do that to get into like Ford and General Motors, et cetera. I, I didn't, I don't really care that much about cars.

I probably should have known that before I came to Michigan. And so I started, you know, exploring different careers throughout my twenties. Some advice I got. So I did work as an engineer at Intel for a short time in California. I worked as a teacher. I worked as educational nonprofit. Co founder, I worked as a film producer.

I like, it's really crazy jobs, but eventually I landed on starting my own tech company. Launch good. And so that's why you're probably listening to this today. If you know me, why you know me is I'm the founder and CEO of launchgood. com, which is a crowdfunding platform for the global Muslim community.

So you can think of it like a Muslim GoFundMe or a Muslim just giving. And that, and I guess I should mention, I have I'm married. I have three kids. And I live in Canton, Michigan, a very, very suburban lifestyle. Now,

Ahmed Cheema: Canton is one of the greatest places on earth. So welcome to the community. One of the things that I wanted to ask you about I want to take it a little bit chronological and then we'll, I'm sure we'll go all over the place, but you know, starting, I talked to Abdulmanon a lot about this, right?

When Abdulmanon was in college working for LaunchKid and LaunchKid was just getting started in those days, a lot of people had this perception about LaunchKid that like, oh, like, why are you wasting your time, especially for Abdulmanon? I'm sure he heard it a lot. And, you know, like, you wasting your What was the toughest part for you building this startup?

And, and now you guys have raised what, like 200, $250 million? Yeah. Yeah. So like, what, what is, what was the toughest part in that journey from the beginning to where you guys To now, actually, like in that journey,

Chris Blauvelt: you know, I, I'm a really stubborn guy. So I think that has its pros and cons. But definitely with entrepreneurship, you need to be a bit stubborn, right?

Like you have a vision, you have, you have this belief in what you're building that not everyone will share or not. Everyone will see And nothing like success, right? So once you make it, and I don't think we've made it yet, we're still getting there, but, you know, over a quarter billion raised for charity now, it's pretty significant.

I think the early parts, you know, every phase has a different challenge. I'd say the early parts was. Just money, you know, like how, like, how can you sustain this thing? So initially we're like, oh, but we're a tech company. Let's go to Silicon Valley and get investors. And we know all these Muslims in BC and Muslims in the Bay area.

Like this should be easy. And we went out there and this was 2014.

I want to say maybe 2013. I can't remember, to be honest, I think it's 2014. Went out to the Bay Area and like zero investor, like I couldn't get anybody. We got a lot of meetings, but like no one was really taking us seriously at all. And, and part of the reason is like, you know, name a successful Muslim tech company.

Now we can in 2021, we can name a few like most match. But at that time, like there were none. So and not just Muslim, Christian, Jewish, like any kind of, you know, faith or religious group is really hard to. Have a model of success. And then the following year we went back and we actually had awesome growth metrics, you know, and we were bootstrapping at all.

And I just thought like, wow, you know, now we've really proven ourselves and we, you know, we face the same hesitation and a lot of people, you know, still were like, well, you're honestly, I felt a lot of people were perplexed because they're like, yeah, actually you do seem like a good investment. But you're still like a religious company.

And so it was really confounding for a lot of people. And then we almost got this investment from somebody else. And, but we're looking at the numbers and our revenue, it wasn't great. It was like, I think 30, 000 our first year, then 90, 000, then like 180, 000. So, you know, 180, 000 might sound like a lot of money, especially if people are listening to this and like kind of sole entrepreneurs, like, yeah, it's definitely a lot of money.

But not when you have a tech company, when you have developers and you have a team like I wasn't paying myself yet. Right. So it was. Yeah, not, it wasn't a lot of resources. However, you know, it's like basically doubling every year. Right? And so we could see like, okay, this is not easy, but we can just hang on for another year.

Maybe we'll get, you know get up to like half a million or in a couple of years, a million. And that's exactly what happened. Right. And then all of a sudden we can start paying ourselves salaries. We can start paying, you know better salaries for people that join the company. You know, I think Abdulmanen, unfortunately he was in the group that got nothing.

Right. Like we had the, we used to call it a fellowship and we still have a fellowship, but the early days we didn't pay our fellows anything. It's like, Hey, we'll fly you out to Michigan. We'll give you some cool, you know, swag. We're going to give you an amazing experience. We're going to personally train you, but we don't have money to pay you and we don't have money to pay ourselves.

LaunchGood.

But in every phase of a business, you're going to have different challenges. And then on a personal level, like, Hey, I'm, you know, I'm in my thirties and I have a family and I have rent and cars and all this stuff, like, how are we going to pay for all that? Right. And I'm responsible. So it was difficult on a business level and it was really difficult on a personal level at the same time.

And on the personal level, I just, I did a bunch of odd. Jobs, you know, so I was a Islamic school consultant one day a week. There was a year that I spent one weekend every year or every month going to Dubai to do leadership training and educational leadership training. I have another startup, thankfully, that I was able to give myself a little bit of salary from you know, sometimes speaking, engaging, like just whatever it could be, you know, just to get a little cash in.

And I wasn't saving anything, you know, it was just like paying rent. Like that was my goal. Like, can I pay rent? Can I cover my expenses? Because I know the future is bright. If we can get to it, I just need to buy myself some time. Just having

Ahmed Cheema: that vision and believing in yourself enough to essentially put it all on the line and do whatever it takes to make it happen.

That's I think a lot of people see the end product and they don't realize the pressure and the amount of risk that it actually takes to get there. So I appreciate you. What I did want to ask is in the early days you mentioned how you know, up on that first batch of people, you didn't really pay, how did you, I mean, you guys still did pretty, really cool work, right?

And then you, you guys are all, the founders are all pretty you know, you guys could be in corporate gigs making a lot of money, right? And so how did you convince people to join your mission and. Take a pay cut for this cause. Was it tough and like, what are some best practices for people that may be doing you know, in that early phase where they're trying to build something that's bigger than themselves and they just can't find tell people.

Yeah,

Chris Blauvelt: it, it is tough for sure. Right. I remember my co founder and Manny. Who was really intent on recruiting. Amanda Kelaue, she's our chief operating officer. And you know, she was coming out of college and she had another job that was paying her. Which is also a great organization, ISPU, the Institute of Social Policy and Understanding.

And it was kind of like, you know, I was telling her, okay, you know, let's try this with me in, because early on, I didn't even know who she was. So or just getting noticed, I'm like, I can't, I'm not going to guarantee you an equity equity yet. Like, we're going to talk, you know, like, well, let's work together a few months and figure out like, if you like it and then we'll give you something, but I'm not going to pay you.

I'm not going to give you any guaranteed equity up front. But And there's no like security in this job, right. Whereas like ISPU was paying her, giving her benefits, you know there's like a path to you, you know, grow your career within that. And I remember. We had negotiated some ISPU where it's like, okay, three days a week, she would go with them and two days a week.

She'd be with us. So it was like, you know, Monday, Wednesday, Friday, ISPU, Tuesday, Thursday launch good. And then at that time, the director of ISPU is a friend of mine. His name is Farhan Latif. And he's a great mentor for Manny. You know, Farhan was like, this isn't working. It's either all launch good or all ISP or all launch good.

And I was so mad at him because I'm like, well, she's definitely going to choose an ISPU, like, why would she choose launch good? Right. And Hamza, she chose launch. And I think part of the reason when she was really young, Farhan told her, you know, basically, what do you have to lose, you know, and I think this is really important for.

All people in their twenties really to think about is like, what do you have to lose in your twenties? If you take a chance you know, a risk doing a startup or, or working in a startup and like miss out on a few years of salary, what you're going to invest in yourself through experience is way more valuable in the long run than like a couple of years of earning salary somewhere.

And, you know, you'll see that like corporations love to hire people with a few years of experience in a startup, even if it was a failed startup. So you know, there's a few elements to it, but I think one was a lot of people we tracked earlier on were young, like Abdulmanap. A lot of them didn't have a lot to lose on our end.

It required a lot of mentorship. They used to call me and it's not so much now, but my nickname like early on was grandpa Chris, because I was the only person over 30 years old. Like everyone was in their 20 which, you know, it's funny because like being 31, 32 is not really old at all. But you know, on the, on my part that requires patience that requires mentorship.

And you also have to be ready to be told no a lot, you know, founders have to handle rejection well, because it's not just recruiting, like all sorts of people. You know potential partnerships or services, et cetera, you're going to get told no all the time. You're going to lose all the time.

You know, it's kind of like baseball, like if you're hitting 300 that's a good, that's a good average. Right. Right. So yeah, I think, I think that. You know, there's a, a really great mentor of, you know, founders. His name is Paul Graham. You know, Paul Graham,

Ahmed Cheema: I've, I've heard you call him in a video. Yeah.

He's like,

Chris Blauvelt: yeah, he's, he's like one of the founders of Y Combinator. Y Combinator is sort of like the Harvard or MIT of, of startups accelerator programs, and, you know, he, he so you're talking about Airbnb and Stripe and so many huge influential companies, Reddit, et cetera, you know, and, and Paul says.

In all of his years, his decades of, you know, mentoring startup founders, the most important quality in a successful founder is to be relentlessly resourceful. So that means, you know, get what you want with what you've got, you know, so you, you really want a great team and great talent and you don't have money while you, you just got to be resourceful and relentless and, and try and.

Sometimes people are going to say no, sometimes people will say yes, you know, and you just got to, you got to do it. I think I'm also really fortunate that I've never I've never gotten a job with a huge salary, right? Like I was definitely on that path coming out of Michigan as a top graduate of their engineering program and then working at Intel, but I, I quit really early on.

And did teaching and I did a bunch of, you know, and then I basically went into entrepreneurship from there. And you know, I was just interviewing someone for a role within launch good. And currently the guy, he makes around like 400, 000 a year. And in this you know, I want to be discreet in this like, you know, food company that, you know, makes cookies and chocolates and stuff.

Right. And, you know, it's like, It's like, it's so hard for him to, you know, conceptualize like how much his salary would have to come down if you were to join launch good, but you know, part of me wants, I'm like, okay, you know, there's, I'm not going to apologize for that because there's a privilege to the work we do.

You know, this is work that inshallah is not just beneficial for us in this life. It's beneficial for us in the next life. And it's so meaningful. Like I don't see my work as work. Like my job is to help Muslims. Like that's literally is my job is to help Muslims. And I don't, I'm not, you know you know, working for pennies.

Like I'm not have a very comfortable life. I have nothing to complain about. And you know, so yeah, like maybe you don't make 400, 000, but you're also not spending your life, you know, increasing childhood obesity, right? Some chocolates and all that stuff. So like, you know, what do you want to do with your life?

You know, and I think that's a really good way to frame it to people's like thinking, like, what do you really want out of your life? But it is hard. I think when you get down that path and you and your family, it's not just no one's alone in this, right? If you're married, if you have kids, like you may be certain to use to a certain level of lifestyle that you just can't make that jump anymore.

That's unfortunate. You know, it can be real. I think the flip side of the reverse of that is just always live humbly. Always live within your means live. You know, we, what we tend to spend money on is experiences. We don't, you know, like we don't have a BMW or Mercedes in our driveway. Right. But you know, we might do a trip to Turkey and Lebanon for the summer.

Right. So yeah, I'm the, those, I'm just speaking all over the place, but those are a few thoughts that come to mind.

Ahmed Cheema: I want to change topics a little bit here and talk about the, the branding and how you guys. Separated yourselves. There's a couple things I want to talk about one thing that immediately comes to mind.

So talking about so Brian Chesky, co founder of Airbnb, who also went to Y Combinator, he said when he got to Y Combinator, one of the things I told him is like, you need to create a product that 10 people love. Right. And I think you mentioned something like this. You quoted Paul Graham saying, just focus on creating a product that a hundred people love versus a million people like, right.

Cause then they'll go out and you know, promote your business and all that stuff. So what I thought of that, what Airbnb did at the time when they got the device, they went to, they're like, where are your customers at? They're like New York. Like, why are you guys here in San Francisco or whatever it was.

And so they went to New York and they actually offered all their clients to, Hey, we'll come take pictures of your places. Right. And they got to meet the CEOs and all that stuff. And so they got to develop those relationships early on. When I'm thinking about launch good, what I think in the early days.

Similar story is I don't know how Kickstarter Indiegogo, these other places GoFundMe actually manage their accounts. But I remember what was, what I remember from LaunchCode is that there's a campaign manager or I guess, project manager that works with you on your campaign and coaches you from start to finish, right?

Right. And so my question is how deliberate of a choice was this, and I'm sure. It requires a lot of time investment from your team, right? It's easy to a lot of people focus on just, hey, let's build this infrastructure that scales and everyone can use, but then actually allocating a person. Hey, you're in charge of making sure these 5 projects are mentored from start to finish.

Right? Like, how deliberate of a decision was that? And was that. You know, what are the, just want to understand a little bit of the thought process behind that. And do you guys still do

Chris Blauvelt: that by the way? Yeah, it's a lot of good questions there. And I love that example of Brian with Airbnb because you know, that absolutely was an inspiration for us.

Right. And as you said, like he himself. Went into people's apartments, did the photography for them in part because like actually a lot of the photographs, those users are hosts were posting themselves like kind of sucked. Right? And they were like, well, if we can model what a good listing is like.

Other people start to copy it and we thought the same exact thing for launch, right? Like if we can model what a good crowdfunding campaign looks like, then other people will start to copy it. And Hamza, we did find that true. And in the early days, like literally Amani, my co founder and myself coached every single campaign on launching for like the first year and a half.

And then we started bringing fellows in like Abdulmanan and then taught them how to become coaches. And we kept building up this like whole coaching program. And at one point, actually, we retired it. And then we brought it back, but in a different format, we caught business development, which is much more I'd say strategic.

And but it's kind of, you know, more or less, it's still there. You have to do something that differentiates you, especially early on from your competitors. So like, that's definitely not something you'd get from, you know, Kickstarter Indiegogo, GoFundMe, et cetera. And. Yeah. Like what's your value proposition?

Like, why should someone use your company, your platform versus one of the established players out there? And there's always going to be an opportunity when it comes to personalized service. It's not scalable. At least early on, but that's okay. Right? Because one of those other. Kind of aphorisms of Paul Graham is, is do things that don't scale early on, do things that don't scale, you know, it's, it doesn't last forever.

Like, you know, Brian didn't, doesn't still take photographs of people's apartments. Right. But you know what they have done for Airbnb? They've set up a whole network of photographers that if you're listing your place on Airbnb, it's really easy to find a photographer in your location that can do the photographs.

For like, you know, a couple hundred bucks. And this is what they do. Right. And so you'll find those opportunities to scale if you've created something of value. And I think that's, that's what, if there's one thing I've been good at is being able to create something of value and everything else follows from that.

And I think a lot of entrepreneurs, they fail to get that core concept. Down is like, they're working on all the, the, the frills and forgetting about that core value. And so like, for example even when you talk about branding. Airbnb actually, if you like the name is horrible to be honest, like about it, like what the heck is Airbnb?

Like, you know, like most people don't know what a bed and breakfast is. They don't know it's felt B and B and it's not even a bed and breakfast air refers to the air mattresses, like, et cetera, right? Like it's a silly name but it doesn't matter. It's like, you know, Google's a silly name. Craigslist is a silly name.

Your brand is what people. Perceive of you, not what you name yourself, right? And that's why like Facebook's talking about rebranding and like choosing a new name. And it's like, that might fool a few people, but people know who you could, you know, put a lipstick on a pig, but it's still a pig, right? Oh your brand is what people see, you know, perceive of you.

It's not what your name is. It's not how your logo looks. It's not the colors like, you know, and I've seen some beautiful websites been built, I've seen like, you know, really clever names, taglines, all that stuff. But if you just, if you're not providing. Value to people, like it's never going to, it's never going to survive and thrive

Ahmed Cheema: for the entrepreneurs out there.

Like, how do you make sure that you're focused on value rather than these fancy taglines? Because I think when people are looking to get into it, they see the nice taglines. They see they're on launch. They're like built in this life for the next. They're like, oh, man, I could, I could come up with something like that, right?

And so they have these you know. Little design pieces and they have these little taglines and they do all the little things, but they don't actually do the work because I think most people don't realize what the work is. Right. If you're in the corporate world, you're doing one little thing, that's your one task, and a lot of times you're just told what to do.

Right. Unless you're like an executive or something like that. Yeah. So how do you actually, I mean like, I guess the question, better question might be how did you develop that mentality? Where is that coming from? Is that just. Something you've always had since I mean, you, you've always been in service.

Right. So is that just from the service that you were doing, or is there something that

Chris Blauvelt: drives that? I'm sure personality plays a role. Like, you know, it's interesting. I, you know, we talked in the preview to this interview. About what your audience is like. You mentioned a lot of people who are kind of like branding themselves and stuff, right?

I've actually never been much into that. I've always actually been quite worried about it. The self branding piece. Although I see it's very valuable, like found, you know, Kind of in the zeitgeist, the world we live today, CEOs are sometimes the most important marketing tool a company has. Like look at Tesla, like they don't even have a market.

Elon Musk tweeting stuff. Right. So I get it. Like I understand conceptually can be very, the brand personal brand can be very valuable. I've always been wary of it myself. And I, I just, my personality, I would rather, like, I don't want to have to convince people that they should use launch good or that we're a good company or invest in us.

Like I hated that. Like I hated trying to pitch investors that like, why you should invest in launch good to me is always obvious. And it's like, if, if I can't. You know, if I have to like beg you to understand, like, I, I, that's, I don't want to do that. That's not what I'm about. So I'm just going to go out and prove it to you.

It's always been my personality. I think the the other part of that, you know, I was really focused from the beginning of building a company and we set metrics ourselves. We always set goals for ourselves. The great thing about data is it, it doesn't lie. Right. So You know, you can, like, I noticed this early on in my entrepreneur shirt, entrepreneurship journey here in Detroit.

Like I'd go to a TEDx Detroit, right? And I'd see certain entrepreneurs speaking on stage and I'm like, man, you know, they're so awesome. I wish I could be like them one day. And then like two years later, I go to TEDx Detroit and it's like the same people. I'm like, you know, and then third year, it's the same people.

I'm like, well, you just keep talking. Like, what's your business? Like, what have you actually done? Like, where's your company? You keep talking about the same idea over and over again, but like, where is it? You know? And meanwhile, like, you know, we go from like, so like 30 to 90 to 180 to 500, 000 revenue and like the company's growing and, you know, we're raising millions of dollars.

So, you know, I try not to get too caught up in the glamour that comes along the way sometimes with awards and, you know, we're really grateful actually to have won some awards, but they can definitely be a distraction and they're not actually a real metric of success. And so I think early on, again, we put those metrics of success, like this is where we want to be in one year and two year and three years and five years, 10 years.

So that's sort of long term planning. We do that every single year and every year we would compare ourselves like, okay. These are the goals we set for ourselves. How did we do right? Where do we fall short? Where do we exceed them? And why? And what does this mean for next year? So, you know, we took that strategy seriously.

Your plans never go as you expect, but it's, it's essential to plan. You know, and there's some good quotes there and it's like escaping me exactly like, but something like that, like, you know you know, planning never goes according to plan, but it's essential.

Ahmed Cheema: I want to change, change the pace a little bit here.

So if we break down like all the touch points that you're you know, target user audience may have with your, your brand, right? LaunchKit, we go from pre purchase in this case, I would say like marketing social media. I think Abdulmanad mentioned, actually, you guys in the beginning, the early days, you guys actually went to conferences and stuff like that.

So do you guys still

Chris Blauvelt: do that? Yeah, we oscillate. We oscillate, you know, so early on, we, you know, and that's another thing, definitely different phase of your business. You need to do different stuff, right? So we went to Isna early on, like in the first couple of years and that was important. I don't think it actually mattered that much in terms of growing the business, but it was important for us.

To really believe in ourselves, because when you go set up a booth and you have to go talk to everybody like, Hey, so I'm like, my name is Chris. I'm the founder of launch. Good. Let me tell you about launch. Good. Like, and you do that 100 times a day to people who are walking by your booth. That's actually a very good activity for yourself.

Right. And learning to speak about what, who you are, what you believe in. You know, what you stand for as a company, et cetera. Then we stopped going because it was just like, we, we get, you know, for the, the scale we were at, you know, maybe it's no, we'd pick up two or three campaigns, for example, and then early on, that would mean a lot.

Like, you know, maybe we only have two or three campaigns a month. So if you can get two or three, you just doubled it in a month. Right. You know, now, for example, we have in a month, maybe 200 or 300 campaigns. So picking up an extra. You know, handful is not really going to make a difference. But it does matter for some of the networking.

Like, I'll, I'll go to these conferences to go meet with you know, some of our VIP partners, like Sheikh Omar Suleiman, or Imam Khalidi, et cetera. Right. Not necessarily for the booth aspect. I think my team wants to try a booth again, this at Mass ICNA this year in Chicago. And I was like, you know, go for it if you want, but we make them set these things called OKRs.

Have you heard of OKRs before? They stand for objectives and key results. So it's a, it actually is an old, it comes from Intel. John Doerr, very famous early employer of Intel then wrote a book about called measure what matters and Google adopted it and then Google's growing their, their whole system is, you know, based on OKRs and then because Google grew so big, like it's just, it's very common across all Silicon Valley.

So you set an objective, like our objective is to grow the launch good brand. At Mass ICNA, and then how do you know you achieve the objective? Because it's actually pretty vague. And so you set key results and those key results are all measurable. So you say, okay, we want to, interact with 1, 000, you know, people and we want to get 15 campaigns created.

We want to have 12 VIP meetings and we want to do this. And if we, if we check off all of our key results, then we would have, you know, de facto hit our objective. So we use that system within launch good. And we just started using it this past year. Actually, it's been really good. Although we put our own twist on it, we call it IKR instead of OKR.

Where the, can you guess what the IKR is? Yeah. Intentions. So what's your intention? Your intentions are defined your actions are defined by intention. So what's your intention and then set your key results around those. And so we'll see, you know, we are going back to a physical event. I do find generally speaking though, as a digital company, it's much more valuable for us to spend our time improving the product and thinking about scalable marketing paths than it is to.

You know, go to conferences, but that's, that's for the scale that we're at now, not necessarily for the scale when we started, I think

Ahmed Cheema: 1 thing that you brought up that I certainly was not thinking of is just using that as a networking platform. Right? And so I think 1 thing that. We've realized doing this podcast is how tough it is to actually get the word out and how important it is to have the right network.

Like we were able to, you know, we were able to get you on the podcast because, you know, we're familiar with you. We have that connection. But a lot of times we don't actually maintain like in the corporate world. I'm not maintaining relationships with people that are, you know, once we're, we're done, we're done.

Right. And so I think how important is it to have that network? And how do you actually maintain your relationships? So that when, you know, when time comes, you're ready to

Chris Blauvelt: act. Yeah. I'm a huge believer in networking. So, you know, there's that old adage, your net worth, your network is your net worth.

And I love that. You'll find like, you can't do this alone. That's really true for startups for any company, like you cannot do it alone. And this isn't just about networking with, you know, celebrity figures like Iman, Momar, Suleiman, for example, right? This is also goes to. Networking with other startup founders so that when you come across a problem, you know what to do or networking with people in your industry so that when you need to hire somebody, now you have some leads.

It includes networking like within Detroit. And I don't know if Abdulman and told you about it, but you know, we work in this coworking space, the green garage and you know, what the founder of the green garage, Tom Brennan is. The mentor for was an early mentor for a Manny and another kind of early partner in the green garage.

His name is Bob wines is one of my mentors who I still go to today, years later, right. And without Tom and without Bob. You know, aren't Muslim launch could probably wouldn't exist today, right? Because there's just been some huge problems we've come across and launch good. And they're the ones that helped us solve them.

So your network is really, really valuable. It's not just because of, you know, driving business. It actually, you know, building a business has tons of its own challenges. And so you need a network to be able to tap into to really, you know, overcome those challenges. And by the way, your network is like a muscle.

Right. So the more you work it, the stronger gets, the more you can do with it. And if you start to neglect it, then the muscle withers and you're not as strong anymore. So like, what's the best way to, you know, kind of maintain your network is you have to stay in touch with people. You have to, you know, and it's hard because we have a lot going on all the time.

And that's where events do come in handy where it's like, okay, at least once a year, I'm going to go, you know, see these folks. I, you know, I don't love Facebook actually, like I kind of. Never go to Facebook unless I'm posting something because people follow me. And so if I post something, they donate, which is very generous of them.

But as a social media platform, I don't use it. But every morning I get an email from Facebook of like, whose friends are having a birthday today. You get that email. I

Ahmed Cheema: I'm not on Facebook. Like use

Chris Blauvelt: it. Okay. No, I get an email every morning from Facebook saying, Oh, these are the people whose birth birthday it is today.

And I'll just send them like a quick WhatsApp message. Like, Hey, happy birthday. And just simple things like that can make a really big difference. Looking

Ahmed Cheema: at my own, just kind of careers. Like I know I should be keeping in touch with these people that have provided value to me and mentored me and taught me.

But it's like. They're busy. I'm sure I'm busy. And it's just like, it's, it's tough. So,

Chris Blauvelt: well, this is also, I'd say quality over quantity. There's a lot of people I'm not in touch with anymore that, you know, maybe we're really good friends with me in college. Right. Or played some role when I was an engineer or a teacher in film for films, a really good one.

And I still have that loose connection, but is it going to really help me much anymore? And can I really help them much anymore? Probably not. Right. So your network is also always evolving. So there are people like now, you know, we had a, an issue had, I was facing a business issue the other day and I was fortunate that I got a, I was able to call product 30.

He's the founder of edible arrangements because he's one of my mentors. Right. And I've gone to him a lot for the last couple of years and you know, that's a pretty like amazing mentor to be able to have and tap into. And so, you know, you have to evolve your network as well to align with, you know, what are your needs?

And you know, what are you working on and building at the time? Yeah,

Ahmed Cheema: that's a really good way to look at it. You guys recently shifted to a model where. The service fees are no longer included in the actual you know checkout and people can choose to pay what they want to pay. I think the, like, charity water is something that comes to mind when they have, they have like a whole separate admin org and, you know, their money goes directly to the organizations, you know.

What I guess what I'm really curious about is like, did you guys see an impact to the bottom line in a negative way or a positive way? Or is it, has it been the same? And then what's the feedback then from the people that are you know, actually making the purchases.

Chris Blauvelt: Yeah. You know, it, it's it was something I dreamt up five years ago.

I was like, man, it'd be amazing if we switched this model. Right. And at that time it was like very scary for. My co founders, because they were thinking like, well, what if no one leaves us a tip? Right. And then go find me, went to that model and just giving and a bunch of like mainstream platforms and they've done just fine.

So we, like, they kind of proved it out for us. So then we built it. And there's a whole nother kind of A slew of problems that we went through where Stripe off board, like our payment process were off boarded. So we built it for Stripe, then Stripe kicked us off. We built it for WePay, then WePay kicked us off.

We built it for another company. So like every time we like got this new payment system ready, our payment provider would like off board us. And we had to like. You know, kind of ignore it and, and just survive. So finally, you know, how many, we have a very stable partnership now with our payment processor.

And we built it and we released it right before Ramadan. And for the most part, it's about the same, you know, I think before we used to take 5 percent of every donation, now it's a tip they can leave as little, as much as they want. The average is a little less than 5%, like around four and a half percent.

That might sound like not a lot for people listening, but that's actually 10 percent less overall revenue from those fees. But you know, I'm so glad and I have no regrets on that. You know, one thing we noticed is that younger people tend to be bigger tips, like over 5 percent on average.

It's a lot of our uncles and aunties and I think you know this like they're just like They're very price sensitive, right even like the two percent You know, if they can avoid a one and a half processing, whatever, half, half percent processing of your credit card, they'll like write a checkout, right?

Like, and I was young people are like, can I just Apple pay? Like, I, you know, like, I don't want to, like, I don't even remember how to write a check anymore. Right. So you know, I think the future is going to be fine for us. And also it's just changed the conversation so much, you know, I do believe it's really important for, you know, good work to be sustainable.

And this is how we are able to make our work sustainable and invest in and make it so much better. I don't want to have to make that argument every time. Some people get it. Some people don't, it goes back to that earlier thing. Like, I just rather just do my work. I don't want to have to convince people.

So the nice thing about tips is now I don't have to convince people like. Oh, you should use launch kit. It's okay. There's a 5 percent fee. And here are the reasons why I can submit. It's free. You can use launch kit. We ask the donors as they come in, if they want to leave as a tip. Great. If not, no problem.

And to each their own, you know, so let's just focus on the work. Let's focus on getting your funding going and getting your project to life. And, you know, forget about the fees coming

Ahmed Cheema: off that sustainability pieces that, you know, for Muslims, we generally give one month of the year. Right. And I mean, I think you had a tweet about this a little while back to about like, you know, how you guys for peak for you guys is Ramadan, right?

Where things just go crazy. And so, you know, you guys have, you guys have Russell week, you guys have the challenge of Friday givers. How are you guys thinking about? Yeah. Making charity and making, giving something that happens year round. And you know, what are just some of the thought processes and how are you guys coming up with these different campaigns to keep your donors engaged?

Because I think for me, at least, I like, I would love to give more, but it's like, you know, you need someone there. And I think launched, launched it as a great job of reminding you, Hey. This is coming up, you know, this is an opportunity to give again. So yeah, just how are you thinking through

Chris Blauvelt: that? Yeah, that's a great point.

Yeah. You, you want to kind of even out the curve, right? So I think most companies like, you know, Oz or charities, this is how they're like curve looks like it's like Ramadan and the rest of the year. And actually, even if you talk to the biggest charities today, like Islamic relief and stuff 20 years ago, all they did was Ramadan fundraising.

Like they never hardly focused on anything outside of Ramadan, maybe. When it was came to you know, the head job, but that was it. And now realize, no, there's opportunities throughout the year and you should, you know, try to create those opportunities. Try to have consistent fundraising. There's a good spiritual element to it.

You know, where the Apostle Sam said that the best deeds are those done consistently, even if they're few. And, but it has to be authentic. You know, you can't, you can't just like, invent things out of, you know, thin air. So like four weeks, you know, of course is tied to the prophet of sun. And so we think about like, how can we you know, leverage the example of the prophet of Assam and encourage good deeds.

And then giving Tuesdays already really popular holiday among, it's not a Muslim holiday, it's like a just general nonprofit holiday after Thanksgiving end of year fundraising. There's kind of all these ebbs and flows. I think what's interesting for us and what we're excited to get into is to create niches, like fundraising niches throughout the year.

So we have a very important like global earth summit coming up at the beginning of November, and we're partnering with Greenpeace. And inshallah, we're going to be encouraging some green campaigns, right? And then there are different, you know, times of year, like in February, we, we have black history month, so we, the whole month we're encouraging, you know, supporting campaigns within the African American community in America.

In the summertime, you know, Malaysia actually has this day of independence. So we have something called jump launch good. And we had this whole thing around crowdfunding campaigns in Malaysia. And like, you're not going to hear about in America because there isn't a pertain to you, but you know, that, that exists throughout the world.

There's so many different, you know, kind of heritage months or days, special days national holidays that we can tie fundraising to. And so. You know, it's kind of like, it's not Ramadan, but it's little pieces of fundraising here and there all the time. And then I think the other thing that's even more important is just really being ready for the moment when the moment arrives.

So we call these like internally, we call them flash campaigns. They're, you know, something usually, unfortunately something horrible happens. And the community is grieving and they're looking for a way to express their condolences to show solidarity. Frankly, a lot of them at this point even expect, you know, a crowdfunding campaign.

So I remember like after the Christchurch shooting in New Zealand a few years ago, immediately some like, you know, major imams started messaging me like, is there a, is there a launch campaign out for this? Like we can share with people because you know, what else can we do? You know, we can make our prayers of course for, for them.

You know, there's something very consoling in being able to send a donation to somebody or to community that's grieving to really show them. Like you put you in your money where your mouth is like, you really care for that. And so we're always looking for that, you know, where are we needed and being able to really give our most to those communities in that moment of need.

And so as an example, like anytime there's something happens in the community like say someone passes away and God forbid, of course, like we wish none of this happened, but it's the reality. It's just the nature of life. So let's say a father dies in a car crash and he's the sole provider of a family and he leaves behind a wife and young children, you know, that community may come to us and say, you know, we need help fundraising for this family.

We take that very seriously, you know, so, you know, we're going to send an email blast out to our users in that region. We're going to try to connect to influencers and see, you know, pro bono, would they be willing to support this? We'll reach out to some of our top donors in the community. We say, Hey, this, you know, really.

Urgent campaign came in and we thought you might be interested in support it. And, you know, because of those types of efforts, Hamdullah were able to drive a lot of donations to very valuable and important campaigns. Like an example of that is brother Omari Gray. You know, he recently a year, about a year and a half ago, he almost, this amazing brother in Virginia.

Did you get to see, you know about him or you, did you see that video? I haven't seen it. You haven't heard about this at all?

Ahmed Cheema: So this is, I got to check it out after this is the

Chris Blauvelt: biggest launch good campaign on it for an individual in our history. So it was during black history month last year. Right after the George Floyd murder and he's an amazing brother.

He's a convert. He's deeply beloved in the Virginia community. He decided to kind of leave the corporate rat race and start an organic farm on Halal organic farm. In the rural area of Virginia. And he was doing an early morning milk delivery run. And you know, these, oh yeah, I remember this, right.

And he got an accident. He, he. Head on collision with a semi truck and, you know, he was on life support. Doctor said, you know, he's not going to make it. He had some enormous, I think 11 children. I am a huge family. I've nine or 11, 20, a huge family. And so the community created a launch good. It ended up raising over a million dollars, MashaAllah.

And you know, and then it's also a miracle because they took him off life support. And he lived the whole night, the whole night without any life support. SubhanAllah, he survived. And I don't know if you've had the experience of, you know, taking someone off life support. We had to do it with my father in law, Allah Ya Arhamu.

You know. Within a second, you know, the body stop functioning the heart stop like within a second, you know, in media and to think that someone would live the whole night off life support is just a miracle. Subhanallah. And so they put him back on life support. You know, he's, they said he'd never walk again.

Subhanallah. Now he's able to stand and he's taking steps like he's walking again. So we made this whole documentary. It's like, it's really incredible. And I encourage people to walk it, watch it. It's only like seven minutes, but you know, that's the example of like what I feel our job is in the community, you know?

And So that, that, I think, yeah, there's all those nice holidays and opportunities to create fundraising, but ultimately I think the most important thing for Launchgood is to be there for the community in its in whatever moment of needs there are.

Ahmed Cheema: I think you mentioned just a bunch of stuff there that we could dive into.

I, I mean, how are you actually. Are able to find at the global scale scale. You have this giant startup that you are now operating in Malaysia us was 150 countries. Yeah. And so you're also creating these movements in these niche environments. And I think there's a lot to dive in there. I know we don't have too much time.

I want to be mindful of your time. 1 thing. I didn't want to make sure I ask because this is 1 of the main things that main of the van discuss. I think you'd be very disappointed. I didn't ask was when launch code was started. He was telling me that the vision was more of like a Kickstarter where yes, you did have your charity, but it was more for funding, creative ideas.

Now going to the website. Now there is still that creative section. I see it, but it's like primarily

Chris Blauvelt: charity work, right? Yeah. So

Ahmed Cheema: is, is that a shift that happened,

By your doing, or is that just what ended up happening? And you guys just ran with it. And I guess, I think there's a lot of lessons here in.

And how you guys approach this for people that are actually trying to serve their audience as well. So

Chris Blauvelt: yeah, it's and every startup has to go through it, you know, they might call it pivot or something else, but you have to adjust your vision and your business model according to what actually people want, you know, so if we're going to go to Airbnb, like what was their initial vision was people could get air mattresses.

And host people in their apartments when there are conferences and events in their city, right? Which is totally different than Airbnb's model today, right? Like, I'm not like, Oh, I want to go to ISNA in Houston and find an air mattress and like someone's, you know, guest bedroom. I'm not, that's not how you use it.

You're like, let me go to Airbnb. And rent an apartment for the weekend. Right. So you, you definitely have to just, I think early on, we really were invested in that vision of a creative platform, more like Kickstarter because I came from the film industry. You know, Dr. Omar Abdullah has this article that really impacted me at the time called Islam and the cultural imperative.

And just highlight how important it is that Muslims become leaders within culture creation, right? The movies, the TV shows we watch, the music that we listen to, you know, the things that really kind of define culture. Muslims should be leaders. Be at the lead of not consuming what others without our values are generating.

And so I was a big believer in that, but you know, early on and people were like, Oh, can I put a charity campaign? I was like, yeah, go ahead. You know, add a charity campaign and like they do really well and the creative stuff are like pulling teeth. And after a while we realized like, you know, this is this is what our community wants from us, you know, and we have to adjust our vision accordingly.

Now, because we've been able to build ourselves up. We're able to still achieve that creative vision, you know, so it's just maybe not as much as we planned to initially, but as an example, we work with you know, an amazing friend and entrepreneur, Mohammed Farris, a productive Muslim. He created something called the Baraka journal early this year.

It's, it's, it's actually right over there. It's incredible. And he had a campaign. He was hoping to raise, I think, 30, 000 this February. And he raised a hundred over a hundred thousand dollars through launch. And we got him a marketing package. We sent a newsletter out for him and like, we were able to generate ourselves about 50, 000 from our donors.

So, you know, Hamdallah, I think because we went with what the community wants from us, we're still able to achieve. When that initial vision, but you know, any company is going to have to go through this, that you might have, you know, your initial vision and it builds and it builds and builds. I like to give the example of Facebook, like early on Mark Zuckerberg had an interview with like MSNBC or somebody.

And, you know, they're asking about, you know, what's, what is Facebook and what's your vision for Facebook. And he's like, you know, my vision is that every college campus in America on Facebook, you know, and it's funny, like at the time it seemed very ambitious. Because he was just in the Ivy League schools, you know, but like it's really funny in hindsight Because Facebook is like way bigger than, you know, a few million college students, you know, it's like billions of people all around the world.

And, you know, I think, you know, founders have to give themselves you know, flexibility or forgiveness that, you know, maybe you're, you don't have your vision all flushed out or right from the start. You can build your vision and the more success you have, the more confidence it gives you. Building that vision.

You know, I remember early on when I went to the Silicon Valley you know, Muslims, I met with, he's a really great one. His name is Osama Badeer and he's an investor in Indiegogo and PayPal. Created his own startup very successful. Mashallah. And he met he's nice enough to meet me in like right away.

He starts off like so is this a billion dollar idea? I'm like like I'm stuttering right? He's like Chris, you know, I know three people today already that certain they have a billion dollar idea. And if you don't believe in yourself, I can't believe in it for you, but I couldn't believe in it because I was like, Hey, we'd raised a hundred thousand dollars.

And you're asking me, is this a billion dollar idea? Like it just, the, the gap seemed so far now, I think, you know, if I was to ask you at least, do you think launch could will fundraise a billion dollars worth of campaigns? What do you think of that? Easy. Of course. Easy. Like we're at, we're at a quarter billion.

Like. Two, two more years, probably. Inshallah. Right. So I don't mean, yeah, Inshallah. I really mean that because you never know what's going to happen, but the point is the more success you have, the more confidence it gives you in what you're doing, and then from there you can build a more confident vision of what the company.

Could become

Ahmed Cheema: what you kind of highlighted. There's that understanding the actual need of your user trumps your vision and what you wanted to do. And by focusing on your user, you will have that opportunity to dabble in what you wanted to do. But you need to focus with making those 100 people love your product and creating that service for that.

I love that. Yeah. So last thing, and I think this is a really good thing to end on. And then of course, I do want to give you a little bit of time to make sure people know where to find launch good and find you. But last question I had for you, it's clear, like it's evident that you are very well versed in startups performance management.

Well, you know, just talking to you, it's clear that you've studied this stuff extensively, right? You have the case studies offhand, right? So how important is it as a leader, as someone who's steering the ship to have that education, the continuous learning piece for themselves and what are some best practices that you have for making sure that you are that continuous learner?

Chris Blauvelt: You know, it's a good question. I'd say generally it's, it's very important. It's, there's going to be phases for it. So early on, I was consuming a lot. You also kind of have a lot of time early on because your business is small and like, it's just barely growing. Like I said, maybe we have two or three campaigns a month.

So, you know, early on Y Combinator had a release online, this program they did in Stanford called how to start a startup is right as we were launching the company. So Imani, Omar, Omar is my other, we need to talk about, but Omar Hamid is our third co founder. So I made it. Omar and I would all sit down and watch these lectures together as they were coming out.

And that was incredibly powerful. And that's where we got, we learned about Airbnb and their, how they grew. And we learned about Paul Graham and all that stuff. Right. And then, you know, you start going down rabbit holes, you learn who Paul Graham is, then you find his website, you start reading all his essays.

And that takes you to, I don't know, somebody else and you start reading books, et cetera, et cetera. And you listen to podcasts like how I built this. You probably know that one with Guy Raz. Like I used to listen to that religiously. You know, I don't really consume that stuff like I used to anymore, right?

Because now I'm actually building it, right? And if I have a real question, a lot of times I go to in person mentor. But early on, I'd say a lot of the problems and challenges you face as a startup are. Are, you know, a million people have been there before. They're very common and the challenge, you know, like kind of the type of challenges they are.

And so all those podcasts, reading, et cetera, are very, very valuable and people should consume them as you get bigger challenges become very unique. Like. Getting paid off by a payment process because you're a Muslim platform and it's just pure discrimination. Like, how do you deal with that problem? You sue them.

You try to go create a Twitter storm. You, you risk souring potential future relationships with banks because they can see that you're, you complained about Stripe and now they don't, they don't want to work with you. Like, you know, that's complex. No one's actually probably been in the exact situation that we're in and now you have to navigate it, you know, in a totally different way that you can't just go listen to some podcast for it.

So I'd say it evolves. It's really early, early on. It's really important. But that mindset of constantly learning is always going to be there. It's just how you learn is going to, you know, shift, I think, from the vast amount of resources available on the internet to, you know, more in person relationships.

Ahmed Cheema: Hmm. So the more you're doing, the more likely it is you're going to need personalized advice. And that can only come from mentors and not generic

Chris Blauvelt: books. Yeah. And trial and error, frankly, there's no, that's the tough part about when you get bigger is like, there's no right answer or clearly right answer.

There might be a wrong answer, but you probably won't know until you actually like it. And then, you know, you'll find out whether it's like it backfired or not. And I think that's also important for every entrepreneur is, you know, accept failure, be ready, be ready for failure. And every failure is a success as long as you learn from it.

That was a

Ahmed Cheema: great way to end it. Chris, where can people find launch good? And if they want to start a campaign you know, where do they go? And I mentioned launchgood. com and then. If they want to follow you and see follow the journey a little bit more of the founder do you, do you share that stuff on social

Chris Blauvelt: media or, or do you want to keep a log posts written up about it so people can find our blog at launch good.

com slash blog launch good everywhere. Right. So at launch good for Twitter at launch good for Instagram at launch good Facebook, whatever. Right. So we're at launch good everywhere. And then me personally, I'm on Twitter as AR Blauvelt. So AR is for Abdurrahman, my Muslim nickname Blauvelt. You know, people can Google, they can figure out how to spell it.

That's where I'm most active and yeah, we would, you know, the thing that we really, we love to help people. We love, it's our purpose, our mission is just to help you help yourself. Right? So if you have a fundraising campaign you want to do, there's someone in your community you want to help. You know, create a water well for a loved one in memory, et cetera.

Just reach out to me. I'll connect you to my team and we'll get that thing funded. Inshallah.

Ahmed Cheema: Chris, thank you for coming on. Thank you for being so gracious with your time.

One of the really cool features on the LaunchCode website is they have a real time overall tracker. So as I'm recording this, LaunchCode has had over 940. 6, 000 donors, 35. 9, 000 campaigns. And 271. 3 million funded across 150 countries. I personally find this super inspiring because there's no shortage of people that are creating businesses so that they can cash out and make a lot of money.

But what launch good and the team behind launch good has done is create a platform where community can come together to support those in need. And every so often, fun, super cool ideas. Now, as always, I have my key takeaways from this episode. But before we get into that, I want to share a clip with you from our episode with Omar Elias on the non profit Bani.

Chris Blauvelt: When we started doing interviews. On like TV and stuff, we made sure it was both. So we did an interview in like, it was like one in like a small one. It was like care or something. That was in English. And then we did one with, in Urdu completely. And this is some like random network in like Pakistan.

And the goal of that, again, was to relate to both audiences. That we're not, we're present, right? And it's the same thing when a politician runs and like, they're disconnected from their community and the community knows that, they're going to eventually reject. The same thing, if a non profit is rejected by the community trying to help, they can't do it.

If the community, I'm like, hey, like, you need water, he's like, nah, get out of my face. I can't force water, like, I can't take a hose and like, drink my water. It's not gonna work. He's gonna be like, bro, like, I don't want you here. I can't do it. I'm like, miles apart.

Ahmed Cheema: If you enjoyed this discussion with Chris, I am sure you will also enjoy the episode with Omar. Check it out wherever you're listening to this podcast. It is episode number nine. Now here are my key takeaways. Number one, this is something I like to call the founder nuance. If you're a founder, when it comes to external forces, people on the outside looking in, people that really have no involvement in your business and don't really care for you or your business, you have to not take that feedback.

You have to be stubborn with that vision. and stick to your plan. However, when it comes to your actual customers, you have to be willing to pivot over and over again. Refine your vision over and over again until you get to what your customers actually want and need from you. And number two, be relentlessly resourceful.

You have to be able to get what you want with what you've got. And that is all for this episode. If you enjoyed this discussion, please consider leaving a review and sharing with a friend. Thank you so much for listening. We'll see you next week.