227 | Unlocking Generosity at Unprecedented Levels with Vance Roush
Our guest on the pod this week is Vance Roush. Vance is the Founder at Overflow, a platform that creates an opportunity for non-profits to access a larger funding pool through stock donations.
Resources mentioned in this episode are:
One of the Biggest Non-Profit Fundraising Trends in 2022 - Interview with Vance Roush
Imperfect show notes via Otter.ai
SPEAKERS
Paul Zelizer, Vance Roush
Paul Zelizer 00:01
Hi, this is Paul Zelizer, and welcome to the Awarepreneurs podcast. This podcast is all about the intersection, three things, conscious business, social impact, and awareness practices. Each episode, I do a deep dive interview with a thought leader in this intersection. Someone who has market tested experience, and is already transforming any law. Before I introduced to these guests dinner topic, upon request, you could go over to Apple podcasts or whatever app you're listening to this show on, hit the subscribe button, do rating and review. It helps tremendously. Thanks so much for considering. Today, I am thrilled to introduce you to Vance Roush. And our topic is Unlocking Generosity at unprecedented Levels. Vance is the founder of Overflow, a platform that creates an opportunity for nonprofits to access a larger funding pool through stock donations. Vance, welcome to the show.
Vance Roush 01:00
Thanks, Paul. It's so great to be here. I appreciate it.
Paul Zelizer 01:03
I don't think we've ever had anybody on the show who's as passionate about generosity as you are. So this is gonna be a good conversation.
Vance Roush 01:10
I can't wait. I'm super passionate about generosity.
Paul Zelizer 01:13
So we're called to wear printers. And one of the ways we like to get to know people Vance is to ask you about a wellness or resiliency practice that you personally use to resource yourself for this important work.
Vance Roush 01:24
Yeah, I need to share and go with prayer. We'll probably dive into it. But I do come from a faith background. I actually am a pastor, as well. And so I can't start the day opening up email or Instagram has to be first and foremost prayer. My morning routine is probably the most important to me. After prayer, it's coffee, coffee pretty quickly after that, and then it's off to the races with getting the kids ready. But that morning ritual and routine is super important for me and my wellness.
Paul Zelizer 02:01
Oh, cool. I had no idea. You're a pastor, I did a bunch of homework, and that didn't come up. So how cool is that? Yeah, yeah. You like to start with your social networking with what's larger than you are as opposed to your social networking on Instagram?
Vance Roush 02:15
Oh, I like the way you put it that well done. I've never put it that way. But that's a really good way to put it. I I agree. And it's just, it's it's centering, right? I think the way you start your day sets a trajectory for the day. And so if you start your day with email, you you likely will start your day with anxiety. And so I'm a big believer in starting your day with peace and gratitude. And, and those practices really set a better trajectory for the day.
Paul Zelizer 02:46
So let's talk a little bit about your origin story. You did some training and wound up at a company, a tech company that, you know, most people listening to this podcast probably would have heard of doctors a little bit about, you know, the origins of your career, and then, like how you pivoted from a large tech, that, you know, most of us would be familiar to like generosity is what I want to do with my life.
Vance Roush 03:15
That's a really good question. So pi, I went to the University of Washington, and I study business there. So information technology, as well as marketing. And at that time, Google and their recruiting team just started kind of infiltrating our business school. And I got connected to one of the recruiters there. And one thing led to another. And I was one of the first recruits from the University of Washington on the business side, to be recruited at Google. That was around 2010. And so that was about a little over a decade ago. And that's where I started my career at Google. You know, from a big tech standpoint, probably one of the better companies that you can land at. They were, you know, ironically enough, in my perspective, very generous. I mean, they pioneered the whole, you know, free food concept and a lot of the amenities and the benefits and the perks that many companies now view as maybe table stakes. But at the time, it was very, very impactful to me, and it was a great culture of autonomy, and really trusting and empowering their employees. So that's where I started my career. But if you are an entrepreneur, you know, we're talking about aware printers, if you're an entrepreneur, I think that when you land at a big tech company, no matter how empowering they are, you will always have this itch inside of you to want to start something from the ground up. I think that's just the blessing the curse of an entrepreneur is that driving inside to be able to see something from from nothing, to materializing into something and so when an opportunity came shortly after I joined Google, maybe just a year or two, after being there, I had this opportunity to join a growth stage startup called Adara in Palo Alto, where I would be the first product hire. And that was very attractive to me, because they were in a stage where the company was still forming, the product was still forming. And that's really what launched my curiosity. And now my passion, specifically for entrepreneurship, early stage startup, and really that growth phase of a startup life.
Paul Zelizer 05:35
And somewhere along the way, you just kind of raise your hand and you're gonna go in the direction of starting your own startup. It's called overflow. And it's about nonprofits and getting more resources into the hands of nonprofits to do more good work in the world. How did that come on your radar? When did y'all launch?
Vance Roush 05:54
Yeah, yeah. So we launched July 2020. So a year and some change now. And the the origin story behind that is actually very connected to the thing I referenced just a few moments ago, as my life as a pastor. So simultaneous to Google, simultaneous to my technology career, overall, my wife and I co founded a church in Palo Alto in the Silicon Valley called Vive, my wife and I alongside an Australian pastor, we, we launched this church in 2012, with seven people in a living room since then, we've grown to over 4000 people across 10 locations around the world. And the reason why I say that is because overflow is really an inspiration of the generous community that we've built, you know, of those 4000 members. 1000 of those members are active recurring donors, to our church. And our church is used as a charitable vehicle to partner with local nonprofits, in the cities that we serve. So I've seen I've had the privilege to see over the past almost decade now 10s of millions of dollars raised by average, normal everyday people that really care about their community and want to serve their community. And I've been just so inspired generosity has been a theme in my life in my wife's life, in our marriage. And when I saw other people with kind of a like mindedness, I just got so captivated with this idea of generosity. There's this biblical proverb, it says, In Proverbs 1124, the world of a generous gets larger and larger. And I think that's such a powerful principle, whatever you subscribe to whatever you believe in, I think most people are unified around the fact that there is intrinsic value when you give, when you give, oftentimes, people don't actually expect anything in return. That's true generosity, right. And so when you give you continue to give because you realize you're connecting yourself to something beyond yourself. And when I saw hundreds now 1000s of people subscribed to that type of lifestyle, I got so inspired and I wanted to build a company around it simultaneous to this first principle that I was really passionate about. I realized just a couple years ago that there was people within our community that wanted to donate in a different way that I had never experienced before. Specifically, people would come up to me, because I'm now the treasurer on the board for our church, and they say, Hey, Vance, I would love to donate some stock. They are employees at Facebook, Google, even the construction worker in my church, they would say, I would love to donate some of stock from my ETF from my stock portfolio. And at the time, just a few years ago, Paul, I didn't know how to do that. So I went to Fidelity, one of the brokerage accounts in my city. And and I opened an entity brokerage account. And then I gave the instructions to the members in our church and I said, Okay, I opened up a brokerage account. Here's the instructions. Go ahead. You can you can donate stock now. But when I gave those instructions, I didn't see any buddy give. And so I was very curious as to what's going on. And so I asked one of my friends that was in the small dozen that had asked to give this when I said, Hey, you mentioned you were going to give some Facebook stock, but I haven't seen it hit the account, you know, are you still intending to do that? And what he said to me was the epiphany moment, he said, Vance, I'm gonna do it. It's just when I went to Charles Schwab, they asked me to download a form, fill it out physically, and then fax it in. And that's when I realized, Paul, when you ask a millennial fax in anything, it's just not going to happen.
Paul Zelizer 09:54
That slows it all down. Yeah, exactly.
Vance Roush 09:56
Exactly. And so that's that that was a realization that All people actually have an intent to be generous, they want to be generous, they want to live this life that that I talked about the world of the generous gets larger and larger. But when you introduce obstacle friction, when you introduce any sort of manual work, it stops that intent from going into action. And that's what overflow is about, can we create a platform that empowers nonprofits, local communities, like churches, as well as universities, to be able to really unlock unprecedented amounts of generosity, and so far, we've been able to see that come to fruition.
Paul Zelizer 10:35
So there's so much and what you just said, I want to unpack for our listeners or listeners, you know, I have a what I like to call advance my spiritual highlighter, right? So imagine a big orange highlighter. And I want to circle a couple things you said, so that our listeners who are looking at how to grow your impact and grow your ability to make the world a better place, learn from my advanced just sets a couple things I want to circle. Number one is the way you talk about generosity. Notice listeners, how much passion there is, and I would use the word and I wonder if you would agree with that, like this is one of your premier core values, like yes, everything that is now known as overflow is got this foundation of generosity is like baked into the DNA of every single thing you've done with overflow. Is that a fair way to describe it?
Vance Roush 11:30
It's a great way to put it. Yeah, I would agree. Cool. So knowing
Paul Zelizer 11:33
your core values, big suggestion I have listeners is don't have 27 in them, right? Try to try to like get really crests and three or four core values that really help people understand what you're doing, like we already understand a good deal of what Vance is doing through this one core value. And when people have social enterprises, and it takes them 57 hours to tell the story of what is the route, we lose people, right, you can tell it's so crisply advanced, because even in today's title, right? Unlocking generosity at unprecedented levels, you've already got our attention. And your core value of generosity is helping you tell a really crisp, really compelling story in minutes. So notice, listeners, if you want your social enterprise to have positive impact, that's a really good skill to develop. Right. And number two, what I hear you saying that think is really, really interesting is that this idea came from listening, you knew you wanted to help have more generosity and unlock more generosity. And it was through listening to people you wanted to help, in this case, some folks who are in your network through the church, and you're saying, Okay, look at that I never really thought about somebody wanting to donate stock. And we're gonna talk about, you know, how much is out there and what this means for social enterprises and nonprofits when they when people do this. But you heard Ooh, there's something here I never thought about right now they have to go through these forms. And it's there's a lot of friction there. And so what you did through the process of listening is see a very specific friction point that people who wanted to be generous, had to go through processes that, you know, weren't aligned for them. And that was getting in the way and you said, Ooh, if I could do something about that, then I bet good things would come out of that both for the nonprofits and the people that they serve, but also the people who want to be generous, but it's just it's a lot of work and a lot of friction is sort of not in their psychology. Is that fair to say? That's,
Vance Roush 13:41
that's exactly right. Yeah, listening and having that mindset of wanting to serve them.
Paul Zelizer 13:46
Beautiful. So talk to us a little bit about like, you've done a lot of research. And we talked about it before we hit record, like this friction point, this difference of giving cash, which is how most nonprofits tend to think I ran a nonprofit for seven and a half years, I was the executive director, I know what it's like to go out and seek donations, right? Most of our listeners have a sense of like nonprofits seeking cash donations. What's the like economy of, you know, stocks? And you've also thought a lot about crypto as well, like when we start to bring that to the table? What are we talking about what this might mean for nonprofits and social enterprises?
Vance Roush 14:24
It's a game changer, Paul, if the game changer for the early adopters that have subscribed to overflow and are using it, and I'll tell you why. So it's interesting that for most organizations, the donors, especially the biggest supporters of a nonprofit organization, they actually have 90% of their wealth in non cash assets. But typically, as a nonprofit, we exclusively ask them for cash assets. The reason I know this is because if we look at any of our websites, the donate button goes to connecting to their debit card, credit card or bank account through ACH or wire. And so that is the single biggest missed opportunity. Number one, we are inherently saying, Please, Mr. donor, Mrs. supporter, can you please get out of your leftovers because we all know that what's in our checking account has other demands, it has school fees, it has rent payments, it has food expenses in there. And so typically, when you're thinking about getting out of your checkbook or your checking account, or your bank account, you're already thinking about giving out of my leftover, right, but when you flip the script, and when you allow them to connect directly to their portfolio, allow them to directly connect to their stock portfolio, or especially the next generation in next to their crypto wallet, you're inherently signaling to them that they can give not out of their leftover, but their overflow, right, hence, our our name. And so psychologically, that's what's happening. What we're seeing through the platform today, and just over a year, is that the average donation through cash in America through a platform like PayPal, is $128. The average donation through the overflow platform today is $6,030. People are inherently 47x more generous, when they are able to connect through their portfolio and give frictionlessly from that, versus their checking or savings account. And so that's massive. That's kind of a a micro example. Some macro research that we've done, is very interesting. So the publicly traded stock market, specifically in America is $47 trillion. In the past year, the cryptocurrency market has grown to nearly $2 trillion. So there's nearly $50 trillion of opportunity, that if you're not making it easy for your donors and supporters to be able to give from you're obviously completely missing out.
Paul Zelizer 17:14
47x
Vance Roush 17:17
think 47x Or x for
Paul Zelizer 17:20
good, right? 43. Good
Vance Roush 17:21
for impact. Yes. Wow.
Paul Zelizer 17:25
I'm so glad to be telling this story, man. Thanks for sharing it with us. Yes. So that that's sort of like at a top level. I think our listener be like, oh, when he's talking about unlocking generosity at unprecedented levels, he's talking about I'm pressing. Like, oh, this is very, okay, I got it. Now, like get a little more granular does, like, how does this work? Like, how do you transfer if I have, you know, stock in some sort of, you know, index bond, or I've got crypto and I wanted to go to my favorite nonprofit, and they sign up for overflow, like walk us through the process.
Vance Roush 18:03
Yeah. So if your favorite nonprofit is already working with overflow, when you go to their donate page, what you will see is a donate stock with overflow or donate crypto, right button on their website, you'll click on that button. And then you're immediately prompted to connect your brokerage account or your crypto wallet directly to our application. Many people, especially the younger generation, they are so used to this because of FinTech, right. And they do this all day long on many, many different apps. And so that connection is known familiar and seamless. And once it's connected, then we show you all the stocks that you are holding. And we actually direct you to what is potentially going to be the most tax efficient way to give because when you give stock held for at least a year, and you give from the appreciated gains, what you're inherently doing is you're donating away your capital gains tax liability, which is very interesting, right? So instead of let's say you had $10,000 in gains and Apple, instead of having to liquidate that and take a 40 to 50% penalty and only get 5000 of that to be able to donate to your favorite nonprofit or cause or organization you can give all 10,000 to the nonprofit organization because when that actually transfers to the organization because the organization is a 501 C three tax exempt organization when they sell it as opposed to you. They are not subject to any capital gains tax, and so they get the full 10,000 And you get to as a donor and as a supporter, take that as a $10,000 charitable tax deduction. It is a win win situation for both donor and the nonprofit organization. And so simply, when you use our app, you select which stock or set of stocks that you want to give. And it literally takes under a minute, to be able to fill out the rest of the information, click Send, and then we take care of the rest. It's kind of like Ach, where from there, it'll take two to three business days to resolve with the nonprofit when the nonprofit receives it, the nonprofit will then send you a charitable acknowledgement letter, like any other gift that you would give them.
Paul Zelizer 20:33
Wow. So not only are you helping nonprofits get more resources, but you're also helping the donor given the most effective and efficient way. And you're like guiding them what that is in an individualized way of all the things you could give to this nonprofit, if you were to give this this particular donation would be tax optimized for your unique situation.
Vance Roush 20:56
Exactly. Exactly. Wow.
Paul Zelizer 20:59
Wow. That's, that's awesome. Wow. So you've grown pretty quickly, like this is all like happened in the past 1516 months, right. And I was just reading, like, in addition to like building this fabulous black barn, you've been getting quite a response, for instance, you got a $10 million series, a, you know, investment in overflow, like talk to us a little bit about the growth and like, who's built like, what's your team look like? Now? What was it like to get that kind of funding? And who like, Who's excited about this?
Vance Roush 21:36
Yes, we are, we are very blessed and privileged to be able to get that investment. But, you know, just to encourage people out there, it wasn't easy, right? Before that investment came many rejections. Right. And it wasn't until I realized that rejection is not your failure, right? Rejection can actually be used as insight, when I realized that it gave me the fuel to continue the fundraising journey and to clarify, and to better explain that the vision and the mission behind overflow the mission being to inspire the world to give. And so when I had this realization, I changed my posture. And this, it will actually help social impact entrepreneurs and fundraisers, right, is I changed my posture. Instead of trying to convince investors, I realized I need to teach investors, I am the subject matter expert in this space. Nobody spends more time than me in the space that I'm trying to innovate in. And so when I came with that educational mindset, and that Invitational mindset, which is not, please, you know, invest in us, but let me give you an opportunity to invest in us because we are changing the world. It changed the whole dynamic. And I encourage you, if you're raising for a nonprofit, or if you're cultivating a community, like a church or trying to get more resources for your educational institution, that is the posture that is attractive to people that people want to get behind. Since then, though, I've been able to attract investment from some of the top investors in the world, people that have invested behind companies like Airbnb, and Venmo, mint.com TurboTax, these leaders in financial technology they call FinTech are now backing overflow leaders in software, like Salesforce, they are now backing overflow. And I would say one of the reasons why is because of my mentality shift. But the other reason why is because people actually do fundamentally believe in the premise of generosity, especially with COVID. And everything that has gone down in the past 24 months, people saw the need for each other people saw the importance of increasing our empathy. And one of the best ways to increase in your empathy and to be aware, right is to give when you financially give to something you're inherently more aware, you're going to pay attention, because it costs you something. And so people and investors, some of the brightest minds in the world started understanding that and getting really excited about it. So they invested this, this good chunk of money into our company. And we've used that to hire some of the best talent in the world. We've hired some of the best engineers from companies like Workday, and LinkedIn and Facebook. And we've hired some of the best business minds to come around this company that is serving the social impact space. That is one aspect that I am probably most excited about with overflow is in many social impact entrepreneurs that are listening to this or maybe in that zero to one phase of start Their organization would understand that we are working, you know, against this false dichotomy or this false perception, you know, around terms like charity, and that paints the social impact space in a very limited light. And so a lot of people think that, you know, the brightest minds don't go there, or if the brightest minds are going there, it's because they need to sacrifice everything live on ramen. And and they can't also do well, what that does is it doesn't create this attractional atmosphere around this space, it creates a very limited mind set around this space, which, which is not attractive to certain types of people. And so we want to change that perception, we think that some of the most talented people are in the social impact space. And we're gonna continue to attract the most talented minds that could go to companies like Google, but are going to choose this space, because there's so much growth trajectory, and so much impact that could be had. And so that's what we're doing with the capital. Right now, the team is 27 People distributed across the globe, we are a product of the pandemic, so we don't have a centrally located office. But that's allowed us to attract some very, very talented people are in some very, very cool cities, all around the world. I have friends all over the globe, now, building this company with me.
Paul Zelizer 26:29
Beautiful. So again, I just want to highlight how much I agree what you're saying, Vance, very skillful, also very new social impact entrepreneur, in the, you know, doing incredible work recently disclosed to me that when she posted a position, this was a social media and marketing oriented position, she got 140 applicants from around the world. Wow, we're in the midst of what many, you know, companies and people and leaders are calling the great resignation, where people are leaving at unprecedented levels, right. And I just want to highlight like when we have a good position with a reasonable rate of pay, like not living on ramen, nonprofit thinking, like exactly like their be broken, you know, struggled to put gas in the car kind of salaries, you know, have a decent roof over your head, good quality food, health insurance, etc. And we provide meaning and purpose, you get 140 applicants like she shut it down, she couldn't take any more, they couldn't vet anybody on the right side. And then these were awesome candidates, I would just want to add, yeah. So I just want to highlight what you're saying people are looking for meaning and purpose in their work at a rate we have never seen before. So if you're a company that wants talent, and hasn't yet kind of like really dove deep into how what you're doing provides very significant tangible impact in making the world a better place, you're going to have a much easier time attracting and retaining talent, I feel very confident in saying that. And if you're losing talent, you might want to check in with your core values and think about how can you be more focused on impact and purpose? Otherwise, you're just gonna be like, uh, let me Why don't you pay me to get up to speed and then I'm gonna go take my talents to somebody who's doing purpose. That's just how it works right now in the economy of, you know, employees and labor right now. So that's right. I wholeheartedly appreciate what you're doing. And I'm not surprised you're attracting great people. Thank you. So let's do this. Let's take a quick break here a word from our sponsor when we come back. And so I want to hear like how overflow actually works, your revenue streams, who tends to hire you, etc. First a word from our sponsor. Give a business that's about making the world a better place. And you want it to grow both in terms of impact, helping more people and income providing a good quality of life for you and your team. If so, I'd like to talk to you a little bit about some research. One of the things we find out is whether you're trying to like work on your physical health get fitter, whether you want to stop smoking, almost any human endeavor is most effective if we have what researchers call social support. In other words, we're plugged in to a group of people who are also working on some similar goals and we're sharing the highs and lows today I was really successful about blank or today with a really hard day. It didn't go so well. That's what social support be. But we're printers has a wonderful and very affordable mechanism for social support in our aware printers community. It's a group of hundreds of very dedicated, very generous and very wise social entrepreneurs who share the ups and downs. that can be in very tangible ways. Can you take a look at the latest sales page for my newest product or services? Can we type pricing? I need a new website, I need a logo. I need a lawyer who understands these kind of businesses. So if you could use some support could check out the AWARE printers community, you can find out more head aware printers.com forward slash community. And thank you to everybody in the AWARE printers, community sponsors this podcast. So fans in the second part of the show, we like to talk about putting on our social entrepreneur glasses. So help us get a little more granular. Okay, you got these 27 people, you went from like zero to 5000 miles an hour? 16 months? That's right. That's pretty significant growth, like, give us like, what were some of the, like, benchmarks of like, you know, how long did it take to build the product? Like, when did people first start using it? And how many users do you have? Like, right here right now?
Vance Roush 31:00
Yeah, really? Good question. So, you know, while we officially launched in July 2020, we raised a pre seed round, so angel investors, right and April 2020, so that we could start a private beta. And so pretty much from April to June, we started with just a handful of customers, really, you know, doing product discovery, and really understanding what they needed, what did they need in terms of how to integrate into their website? What do they need in terms of the information they wanted to see in the backend. And so before kind of going public and putting ourselves out there, we wanted to make sure that we were building the right product, so that we were confident that when people started approaching us, we could scale quickly, and we can serve them well. And so that was about kind of the journey of the the beta phase. But once we felt comfortable with the product, we then officially launched July 2020, again, with a handful of customers that are already been using us for a few months, so that we could have some testimonials on the websites and referrals and things like that. But we we posted on all this different social media channels. My team, you know, just continued to share the word within their networks and our networks were very generous and re sharing it and spreading the word and then we grew pretty quickly. So from July 2020, to today, we now serve over 150 organizations. And specifically, these organizations are larger nonprofit. So we're focused today. And you know, we're going to continue to expand. But today we're focused on organizations that do a million dollars in annual donations or above, some of our organizations do over 100 million in annual donation value. And the reason why we're focused on a million dollar organizations and above is because the business model is a subscription fee, plus a processing fee. The processing fee is standard. It's the same processing fees that you might see with, you know, a company like PayPal or stripe. But the subscription fee really enables the nonprofit organization. And not only put a button on a website, but to really integrate a platform and a culture within their community, that's going to move the needle, if you just simply put a button that says donate stock on the website, it's not going to move the needle of what it needs to be coupled with. And what we offer is a dedicated account manager that has best practices that can work in a dedicated fashion with their head of fundraising at the organization or with the CEO or founder themselves, and really roll it out to the supporter base in a personalized and effective way. And so that's partly what the subscription goes towards, alongside the robust platform that we built. And so that business model has fared very well for us. And our goal is to get to 1000 not nonprofits and in the, in the immediate future. And so we're on our way there. And if we can serve 1000 of the most exciting social impact entrepreneurs out there, that would be you know, the next milestone for us and, and allow us to think about what's next after that.
Paul Zelizer 34:22
So again, listeners just notice from, you know, working in a beta mode, 250 organizations, each of them at a million dollars or more, some of them up to $100 million per year in fundraising in let's call it a year and a half, right? Pretty significant when you get the language that I wanted to highlight what I would save answers it sounds like you all got product market fit. Yeah, fine term, right. You spend some time in that early beta phase, understanding people's needs not rushing. To get big, but really spending time to understand who you wanted to help what their needs were and then building a product that really served those needs. The technical name, which is not like this is one of my like rants, which is not well tended to in the social enterprise space is this product market fit that's much more commonly discussed in a more tech audience and less focused on in the impact audience. And I want to change that partially because the kind of, you know, ability to help that you all have seen is because you took that time to really find out what your audience needs and how to really reduce the friction points. And then it grows quite robustly on its own without a lot of muscle. Is that a fair assessment? Man?
Vance Roush 35:46
That's right. That's right, you nailed it, product market fit is is definitely a goal, it's really difficult to get product market fit, it's a lot of listening, like we talked about earlier, it's a lot of iterating. Right? It's a lot of, you know, conviction being driven by your convictions, and not just building, you know, everything that the customer thinks that they want, but to align your convictions with the ultimate vision of what the company is trying to achieve. So you input all these different factors. And you you try to get to product market fit. And the best way I can describe it is one, you achieve product market fit, you just know, you just know it, people just start having lightbulb moments, a lot quicker, people start saying things I need, they start saying things like I need this yesterday, right. And so that's kind of the sensation that happens is that you're not just pushing it on people anymore. They're pulling it from you. And that's when you know, you've achieved product market fit
Paul Zelizer 36:53
to that founder who's not quite there yet. Right, they got a great idea. They have core values, they have a passion for what they're doing. And it's not quite that experience of like, man, like, get this live now or like, get us into your next round, you've got 10 people you're working with, make sure we're in the next round, because we really need this right. If there's a founder who's not quite experiencing, okay, listening, that's part of it. But any other advice to help somebody find that product market fit, where people are literally kind of clamoring at your door for your thing, instead of you trying to like, help them see that this is a really, really good thing. And this will help a lot of people, but they're not really getting it and they're busy. And you're like getting exhausted? What would you say to a founder who's not quite there yet, in terms of product market
Vance Roush 37:42
fit? Yeah, it's a great question, Paul, I think we're going to be able to help a lot of people here that the one point of advice I could give, is that most people I realized that I have the proclivity to do this, too, is is we focus on the solution too much. We're so obsessed with the solution, you know, what, what are going to be the features? What is it going to look like? You know, with all the bells and whistles, if you don't have product market fit, you should not be focusing on the solution, you should be obsessed with the problem. The person that knows a problem, the deepest is going to inherently create the right solution, they're going to have the intuitiveness of how to create the perfect solution. But first a prerequisite to creating that perfect solution is understanding the problem at a very, very, very deep level. And so yeah, listening is part of it. But it also asking the right questions, also talking to the right people. And when you can fully fully understand the problem and how layered it is and how deep it goes. You will actually create a big moat around your business, because most people are not willing to actually do that work.
Paul Zelizer 39:04
And you said talking to the right people Manthan I want to highlight that. So to get really good information on your product market fit. You want to dive pretty deep with a certain kind of person like sitting over here, given what you've told us so far, I'm going to say you now have 150 organizations, each one is a million dollars plus and found fundraising per year. The people who run those kinds of organizations, you spend some time with those folks, right? You're running around every different kind of nonprofit never you really zeroed in on here's a place where we can really make a difference now down the road. My guess is you could offer overflow to a nonprofit that didn't have that kind of fundraising and they get a lot of value out of it, but you were at it for people who had a certain degree of scale. in the nonprofit world, and my hunch is you really tried to understand what was happening in this space with those kinds of people. Is that a fair assessment?
Vance Roush 40:11
That's perfect? Yeah, you really need to try and discover quickly, the target you want to serve first, you can't serve everybody in the beginning. So for example, you know, I have talked to a few organizations that are under a million under that scale. And they just have a completely different set of features, and a completely different set of willingness to pay, right, or even just the ability that pay, you know, for certain types of business models. And so that's when we serve that space is just going to have to look, you know, different for that space. And so we decided, instead of trying to be mediocre, to all different segments, let's be really excellent first to a target segment. And then that then gives us the right to expand to other segments. And so you nailed it, it's, it's really trying to identify quickly, what target do I want to serve, we even think about it on a categorical level, right? Currently, we do really, really well with churches, we do really, really well with nonprofits that have more of a modern bent towards them. And we can typically tell that by looking at their website. And we do really well with universities. And so even just on a categorical level, those are the categories we're currently focused on as well. And so there's a lot of ways where you can continue to narrow down your focus so that I would rather have 100, passionate people, passionate customers on overflow than 10,000, mediocre, you know, apathetic customers with overflow, because I can do a lot more with 100 Passionate people than I can with 10,000, apathetic people.
Paul Zelizer 42:02
You alluded to this, but I wanted to tease this out a little bit. And you talked about how you part of what sets overflow apart. And and I think anybody who's built something or develop something that's innovative find themselves in this situation, it wouldn't be enough to just throw up a button and say, Now you can donate stock to this university, or this church or this innovative nonprofit. There's some education that needs to happen. Talk to us about that part of the process, like you built this thing that people are like, wow, that's kind of cool. But as a donor, I might not be used to that. And if somebody doesn't help me understand why this is a good thing and how it works, I'm less likely to hit that button. So you've built in some, yeah, some education and some orientation into what you're doing. And I think our listeners would really like to understand better, what does that look like?
Vance Roush 42:55
That's right, we are in the first innings of people wanting to or even knowing about giving from non cash assets. And so what that means is that a lot of education is required. And so we do dedicate our customers. With account management, we actually call it customer success. And a customer success team member is there with you every single step of the way, as you activate, integrate and roll out our solution to your supporters. And so what that practically looks like is that we prepare templated emails that have fared really well with other customers. And we provide that to new fundraiser, fundraisers that are activating on our platform, we actually do a masterclass in non cash assets where we sit with the fundraiser or the pastor or the nonprofit leader. And we teach them on all the tax advantages. We teach them how to communicate about stocks and crypto, we actually give them a little lesson about the stock and crypto space overall, just so that they can feel like they communicated from an educated and informed perspective. And then we make ourselves available to support big events. Many nonprofits actually get a lot of their fundraising, their capital, in in catalytic events like vision dollars, or dinners and things like that. And we make ourselves available to be on call and to be responsive to support those types of events. So that as big donors actually realize about this way to give and they want to give large sums. We don't just leave it to just the technology platform. But we have a dedicated human being on the other side ready to answer your questions in real time. These are the components that make all the difference with an organization having the confidence and the ability to be successful in somebody
Paul Zelizer 44:59
got to think seriously about giving a 47x larger donation, it makes sense to me, you'd want somebody who knows what they're talking about.
Vance Roush 45:08
Example right there, right. And you don't want to, you don't want to just interact with a bot, we're big believers in, in the way that we provide customer service and support. And right now, we've been able to scale a model where people can connect pretty quickly to a human being. And so you don't want to be making a 10s of 1000s of dollar, you know, decision, talking to a robot, right? That's just the industry that we're in, we believe deserves, you know, a deeper level of human interaction.
Paul Zelizer 45:40
So talk to us a little bit like you mentioned, one of your goals, like you're at 150 users. And remember, listeners, these are significant organizations, at least a million fundraising per year, some of them up to 100 million. So so you're at 150. Now, one of your goals is to get 1000. Like, give us a sense, like really think overflow is going?
Vance Roush 46:02
Yeah, I mean, my big, hairy audacious goal, Paul, and we talked a little bit about this offline. So I'm just gonna go ahead and put it online. $450 billion, are donated every single year to 501. C, three organizations, most of that is through individuals. And those individuals are primarily giving through wire ACH checks, or debit credit, you know, that $450 billion is mainly through those channels. What if we really unlocked the scale of people giving from their wealth? What if we could really unlock stock donations, crypto donations, other non cash assets that we're going to be tackling? What if we can actually, you know, go from 450 billion given a year, and the next decade see a trillion dollars given in one year? Apple? Some of these large tech companies, they're valued at a trillion dollars? That's really cool. How cool would it be to be part of a company that helped facilitate giving away the trillion dollars that would unlock so much impact so many more resources? For these incredible organizations, solving some of the most pressing problems that we have? Clean Water should actually not be an issue. We know how to solve clean water, we know how to dig holes and build wells, we know how to, you know, create innovative distribution models for clean water. So why is clean water still a problem? resource? If we had enough resource, we would be able to solve eradicate that problem all together? And that's what we're on a mission to do. Can we unlock unprecedented amounts of generosity? The way we're quantifying that is, can we give away a trillion dollars in one year can overflow be a part of that. And that will translate into many problems being eradicated?
Paul Zelizer 48:04
So inspiring. So Vance, I can hang out and talk to you all day, and you're a busy person, and our listeners are really busy. As we start to wind down, is there something you were hoping to that we would get too in this interview? And we haven't gotten to it? Or is there something you want to leave our listeners with as we start to wind down?
Vance Roush 48:26
Yeah, I think the last thing that I would say is that our mission specifically is to inspire the world to give because we fundamentally believe it's not just about the organization receiving the gift and putting that gift to good use. But it's actually on the donor side to experience what it means to be generous, to experience what it means to sacrifice to experience what it means to release resources. What I've discovered in my life, and a lot of my friends life is that it can be very easy to be encumbered by the next financial goal, right? It could, you could very much be in bondage to this mentality, where money actually becomes the ruler, and the master of your life. The best way to combat greed is generosity. Greedy, people don't give and giving people don't greed. And so when we say we want to inspire the world to give, what that is going to do, we believe is not just solve practical problems in the world, but also solve the problem of the heart. Right? The problem of perspective, the problem of empathy, the problem of just the way that we we approach the people around us, because when you give and release resources, you ultimately become a lot more aware. And so if everybody does that, I believe we do actually build a future for our kids that that we want them to live in.
Paul Zelizer 50:00
such an inspiring story bats. Thank you so much for coming on the show and share about your work. Thanks for having me, Paul. That's all the time we have for today's show. But before you go listeners, just one request we love, love, love listener suggested topics and guests. So if you have an idea for an episode, please go to the AWARE printers website, go to our contact page. And we have three simple criteria, we try to be really transparent. Take a look at that. And if it feels like a fit, please send in your ideas. For now I just want to say thank you so much for listening. Please take really good care in these intense times. And thank you for all the positive impact you are working for in our world.