Bellwether Investment Memo

Bellwether is building an AI powered platform for grassroots organizers to mobilize their communities more effectively.

Over the last few election cycles, the drivers of American politics have significantly pivoted from institutional backers to independent networks of organizers. Since 2016 the number of grassroots organizations (formal and otherwise) have increased exponentially, despite receiving just 2% of all philanthropic grants.

These organizers have no comprehensive platform which aids them in their work, leaving them with a scattered array of management tools which meet their needs in piecemeal: Google Sheets, Constant Contact, Mailchimp, Change.org, Vote411, etc.

Bellwether is building a broad tech ecosystem which caters to the unique needs of these community organizers. We are building a robust database of political intelligence in addition to features like email campaigns, event management and petition facilitation. Our product covers the broad needs of the organizer without unnecessarily complex features which would increase the cost and learning curve for our users.

Bellwether is designed to replace anywhere from 3-7 platforms for community organizers at a fixed monthly fee. Our initial offering is $30/month with room for this to transition as we continue to analyze our active user base. Our preliminary conversations with our target user base enforce that this pricing is a reasonable starting point.

With funding and diligent leadership, Bellwether will become the industry standard platform for community organizers to mobilize their networks.

Take the example of organizers encouraging constituents to write letters to their representatives. Prior to Bellwether, an organizer would have sent an email suggesting example copy for said letter and directed their constituents towards resources where they could look up their representative information.

These pain points predictably lead to significant drop-offs and lack of engagement among the constituents. With Bellwether, the organizer can draft example copy and sent it via our portal to their constituents where they can send it to their elected representative with one click.

Our political intelligence database automatically queries representative information based on the users address and issue type to route their letter to the appropriate office and educate the user in one step. Our initial testing demonstrates this to be a major advantage over other platforms.

Since our inception in October, we have raised approximately $140,000 from angel investors with an average investment of $15,000. This was facilitated using SAFEs with a CAP of $3.5MM and no discount.

We retained Kim Hicks, a product expert with 10 years experience leading development at Viacom and Disney. She has been instrumental in leading us from concept to wireframe to demo to MVP. We have hundreds of pages of documentation validating our market and product concept, with a near equal amount in wireframes and user flows. Intentionally, we built our MVP with the same level of care typically shown to much more established product teams.

It's helpful context to understand that Bellwether has two types of users. Our primary user, the organizer, builds campaigns, manages flows, and pays to access our SAAS platform. Our secondary user, the constituent, is the person who engages with the campaign the organizer builds.

We're now simultaneously testing and polishing our MVP with an initial cohort of organizers. The feedback has been overwhelmingly supportive. We intend to have a total active user base of 20,000 by Q1 2024.

By design, community organizers are quite conspicuous with both their work and their contact information. This makes them easy leads to acquire. Our initial go-to-market strategy (GTM) is driven primarily by direct cold outreach to these individuals. Our expectation is that these organizers will organically bring their constituents onto the platform.

This GTM will evolve quite significantly through its early stages and we look forward to deepening our strategic analysis as our sample size increases.

In the early stages of product ideation we identified 9 potential personas whom would be strong Bellwether users. We then had dozens of meetings with folks whom matched these personas in order to test our preliminary analysis and determine the strongest segment to target with our initial go-to-market strategy. We concluded that our initial target user-base will be women aged 30-50 living in suburban and rural America. This is further substantiated by reporting and research from the American Communities Project. We are confident in this strategy.

These organizers are typically semi-professional without access to institutional resources that a larger organization may be privy to.  Considering many of these organizers engage politically second to their day jobs, they typically have no back office and limited to no external funding. Their needs differ substantially from those of a more robust 501(c)(3) or NGO. They use the tools they know but are actively interested in adopting new technology which would remediate any pain points from their work. They have been a fundamental part of our design process.

In 2020, over 155 million voters went to the polls in the United States and the average community organizer whom we target reached approximately 225 individuals. Extrapolated across, this gives us around 680,000 community organizers. With our price set at $30, this is an ARR potential of $250MM without expanding into any other segments.

This market analysis is the benchmark we're using for our initial go-to-market strategy, but is overly conservative for a variety of reasons. The largest is that our calculations assume that the individuals whom are being organized have absolutely no monetizable value which, of course, is false. It also assumes that there is no legitimate community organizing occurring in the other half of the American population that does not vote – also false. Furthermore, these numbers are limited to the American market and they are limited to political organizing – both of which we intend to expand beyond.

While our product Today is designed for political organizers, there are significant synergies between the needs of our initial user target and other groups: PTAs, neighborhood associations, co-op boards, etc. If we incorporate the 370,000 homeowners associations and 180,000 PTAs within the United States into our user acquisition strategy our market becomes substantially larger (ARR potential $442MM) without any material change to our product offering.

In the market Today, we've classified our competitors into two primary categories: specialty enterprise CRMs and political intelligence tools.

Specialty enterprise CRMs are designed for much more institutional organizations with monthly pricing in the mid-thousands. These are both too expensive and impractically complex for the independent organizer.

Political intelligence tools are designed to provide acute insights, which are quite helpful to the independent organizer, but don't provide any engagement tools. We feel they can be more synergistic with our growth strategy than competitive.

We are a team of LGBTQ+ and women founders who understand first hand the importance of local community organizing. Max Feber is an acquired founder, Shark Tank Alum, and Babson graduate. Kim Hicks is a product expert with over 10 years between Disney and Viacom leading product development and strategy. We have a handful of contractors who assist in technical development and design, as well.

It’s often said in the world of startups that good leadership with a bad idea will always beat out bad leadership with a great idea. We're fortunate for our competency in both.

We've raised $140,000 of angel funding to date and are actively raising a pre-seed round with a target of $1.5MM.

We’ve begun organically engaging community organizers via social media and encouraging them to create and share movements. With funding, we will significantly accelerate these efforts and complement the already powerful network of folks mobilizing via social media.

We intend to build a team of GTM leaders in Q1 of 2024 to position Bellwether as the defining platform of community organizing.

We are confident that Bellwether is solving a significant need for community organizers and have the full intention of leading this venture to a substantial exit. Join us, and help change how people change the world.

Best,

Max Feber and Kimberly Hicks

Founders