The Life and Death of a Political Startup | Hacker News Reader

The Life and Death of a Political Startup

poliana.com

Interesting read and sounds like a noble effort. It's a bit of a pivot, but I would think there's a market for better tools for campaigns to target would-be donors. There's clearly demand for anything that is revenue-generating for a campaign, and while I'm not fully versed in your product, I think that smarter access to the data you were tracking could be useful there.

Most serious campaigns, even state level ones, have invested heavily in donor and supporter retention software. But fundraising outside of the painfully repetitive emails, still seems to follow what I found to be rather dated practices. I hosted a campaign event for a Congressional candidate (who ended up winning) and I was shocked at how manual the process was.

Heading into 2016, there sure will be no shortage of campaign dollars (and contracts) up for grabs.

That's a great idea honestly. We hadn't really put in thought as to creating better tools for donors. Of course, this idea would only hold any weight if the donors are of substantial wealth. Being able to tell a donor "here's where to put your money based off of the district's political opinions or sway" would also be incredibly valuable, but is it enough to substantiate paying for a service?

I'd be more surprised if people with large amounts of money didn't already know where they were going to put their hard-earned cash. I'd be equally as surprised if those donors didn't already have connections of their own on the hill, at which point they wouldn't need our service for enlightenment (they'd have their own direct source).

I like the idea though, I would just worry about the ability to generate reliable revenue from this. Perhaps also the issue of ethics I wrote about would come into play here. It somewhat might follow the same path as we did when I talked about selling the data to politicians for use on their campaigns.

>Simply put, our primary goal was to avoid the very same bias that we felt the media had.

I'm not so sure that's what i'd want as a goal. I don't want to live in s a society where there isn't a bias against rape, murder, etc. You have to have biases but ensure they are well founded --based in some kind of set of principles. We don't need to start from the beginning and evolve our line of thought every time we discuss something.

I'm totally okay with someone saying I'm for increasing alcohol taxes because of reasons a, b and c which are based on peer reviewed and internationally accepted studies x y and z. So long as they are open to change were the conclusions to change over time (due to say new studies revealing something different.)

Good post mortem, ironically most startups won't listen because startups by their very nature have "blinders" on.

Thanks Quizz, I completely agree. From my experience that's a lesson that takes going through a few startups to finally break.

Simply genius.

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