Every argument clarity score on this site is built from rows on this page. Each
question and answer was assessed with names hidden, the host's own answers included, on
four things from 1 to 5:
directness (does it answer the question asked), coherence (do the ideas follow),
precision (concrete details and clear references), compression (says a lot per word). The weighted
mix (30/30/25/15) is the exchange score. A person's published score averages their exchange
scores on raw tape only, at least 8 of them, shrunk toward the cohort mean.
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Answered produced feed
D 5 · C 5 · P 5 · Cm 5 5.00
Q Makes good sense. Now give me, now that we understand kind of pricing and what you do, give me some of the backstory here. So what was launch year?
A Launch year as a tech company was 2011. Initial launch was actually a charity pub crawl in San Diego for the American Cancer Society because my mom had battled breast cancer, uh, through growing up and we, we wanted to do something good and sort of our frustration through the process of trying to give to the ACS. I love them now. Um, don't, don't get me wrong. Um, it, it inspired us to basically do all sorts of Fundraising events in San Diego and bring young people into the fold. And eventually we sort of discovered this gap with these nonprofits we were working with that their technology was really, uh, you know, outdated and not modern. And we decided to, I like to say naively, ambitiously throw our hat in the ring and build a platform that would help them basically modernize and reach new supporters.
AI assessment note: “Launch year as a tech company was 2011.”
Answered produced feed
D 5 · C 5 · P 5 · Cm 4 4.85
Q That is so funny. Ok, so, 2011, pub crawl, uh, Will Ferrell, uh, fast forward to today, have you bootstrapped this or have you decided to raise capital?
A Yeah, so we bootstrapped it for a while. Um, to be honest, uh, the venture community wouldn't, wouldn't touch us in the early days. You know, they were a little bit hesitant about the social good space, um, and the crossover between doing good and actually a business opportunity. Um, so we, you know, we were first bootstrapped it and then we brought in angel money. Um, and we eventually scaled from there, but we've raised fifty three million to date. Uh, the first five million was all from angel investors, uh, mainly, you know, rich, um, you know, successful businessmen who were also philanthropists. One of our early, uh, angel investors actually cold called us because his foundation after he had retired started using classy. Uh, and he's like, what is this thing? You know? And he called us up. He's like, you guys looking for angel of money.
AI assessment note: “we bootstrapped it for a while... we've raised fifty three million to date”
Answered produced feed
D 5 · C 5 · P 5 · Cm 4 4.85
Q Yep. Marketing, sales, content, et cetera. Yep. Uh, interesting. Now, are you spending, uh, obviously you have a big content team that you said it's almost a small media agency. Are you doing any pay, just direct paid spend?
A We are. Yeah. And, and, you know, we've, we've, we started with almost zero paid spend, and we started to ramp that up. And the strategy is interesting because it's, we find that less people will just click on an ad and just go right into a trial or something like that. So we've really had to be, Be, um, methodical about how we track attribution across all the content. Uh, we just implemented a tool called full circle, which has been really awesome for illuminating how people digest and read our content, not only one contact, but across multiple contacts within an account or an organization. So at one point we, for one of these larger organizations, we actually realized that 41 unique people are reading our content at one time. We never really had the visibility to see that from the same company.
AI assessment note: “We are. Yeah. And, and, you know, we've, we've, we started with almost zero paid spend”
Answered produced feed
D 5 · C 5 · P 4 · Cm 4 4.60
Q Yep. Can you, You said you look at runway a little differently. Can you tell me more about that for other people that might have a SAS plus transaction fee business model?
A Sure. Yeah. So it's, it's, um, it's taken us a while to refine this, but ARR is pretty straightforward in terms of subscription because it's basically the, the, all the subscription you have in your book of business for the, for the four to 12 months for transactions is a little bit different and it can get hairy when you're trying to predict what's going to happen over the next 1218 months in terms of runway. So we use the trailing 12 months to stay pretty conservative and we, we look Customer. So by size, so smaller organizations will transact less, less than the platform and their transaction fee dynamics is a little bit different. So we know approximately what the revenue will be from that sized organization. And we do that by segment essentially, but we use a trailing 12 month average so that we stay conservative and we put that on top of the subscription base. So that becomes our, our total revenue run rate.
AI assessment note: “we use a trailing 12 month average so that we stay conservative”
Answered produced feed
D 5 · C 4 · P 5 · Cm 4 4.55
Q Were you able to use this kind of initial seed of an idea to save your mom or did she pass?
A No, uh, she's still with us today. Uh, she's been in remission for probably 1520 years. Um, and, What we realized when we were living with my friends in, in, uh, Mission Beach here in San Diego is that everyone in the house had been affected by it, and unfortunately my, uh, best friend Pete's dad had passed away from, from brain cancer, but he, he was the one that actually came up with the Stay Classy name, which was our original name, and that came from the Anchorman in the movie, which happened to be playing in our apartment when we were trying to name the original pub crawl, and then we dropped the Stay because we didn't, we didn't like, uh, the fifty million, uh, Classy and so now we're classy, but it all stemmed from Ron Burgundy and Will Ferrell.
AI assessment note: “she's still with us today. Uh, she's been in remission”
Partly produced feed
D 3 · C 4 · P 3 · Cm 4 3.45
Q Got it. And what is the Salvation Army? Are these folks that sign up to use you on average? What do they pay per month for the platform?
A It depends on the size of the organization. So we have pricing, uh, per, uh, Organization type or revenue size. So a really small organization, say a volunteer led local charity can come on and actually use the platform with no subscription fee and only a transaction. And then larger organizations will pay more upfront in subscription and less on transaction because they're doing more volume through the platform. So similar to Shopify as an example, but it all comes down to cost of fundraising and ROI. So we have the cost of fundraising and the ROI. We have sort of guideposts for each type of Plan that we present based on the amount of online fundraising that the organization does to try to bring that cost of fundraising down so that more, more of the funding and donations goes to the programs.
AI assessment note: “It depends on the size of the organization. So we have pricing, uh, per,”
