As Incubators Court Tech Startups, Entrepreneurs Are Finding Alternatives to Fuel Growth

A compliance startup is the latest to offer political technology entrepreneurs a growth strategy that doesn’t rely on funding from campaign industry incubators. 

Joshua Bartley, co-founder of Campaign Deputy, said his almost-five-year-old company is ahead of schedule on its growth and is now looking to hire talent to help it expand its compliance offerings. 

Campaign Deputy, which is based in Louisville, Ky., and works with clients on the left, was able to hit this target without the help of incubators like Higher Ground Labs or New Media Ventures (NMV), the former of which has funded several of the startups that garnered headline-generating exits in the last two years. HGL recently opened the application window for its accelerator program.  

“Some of the board members of these incubators, we felt it was a little bit of a conflict of interest if we were to join them,” Bartley told C&E. 

Instead, Bartley and co-founder Justin Thurman opted to bootstrap the company. “We didn’t even start with the cloud because we knew we’d quickly run out of cash flow if we started that route. We took $1,000, bought some servers, put them in a data center, and that’s where we started,” Bartley said. “I know friends, acquaintances who’ve gone that route [with an incubator] and it’s worked really well for them. I think it’s just kind of a case-by-case basis.” 

He added: “There are a lot of needs in the political space from the technology side that don’t conflict with a lot of the exiting incumbent providers. Incubators are the sort of thing that are great for [startups targeting those needs.”

With congressional pricing starting at $400 a month, Campaign Deputy has found backers with firms like Grassroots Analytics promoting its compliance services to clients, in part, because of the low cost. Still, Bartley said that awareness is an obstacle for his company to expand its client base. “We’re not marketers, so getting the message out is one part that is tough. It’s also hard to market to the political consultants group because they just kind of gloss over those ads, and don’t see them.”

Bartley noted the company hasn’t grown entirely without assistance. After Campaign Deputy launched in July 2017, it was accepted into the Microsoft BizSpark, now called m12.vc, and AWS Activate programs. Since there were no local incubator offices in Louisville, the company only received free Microsoft licenses and $1,000 AWS credits to start, according to Bartley. 

Other political technology entrepreneurs have also touted the offerings of non-political incubators. For instance, Ari Trujillo-Wesler and Emily Del Beccaro, co-founders of OpenField, wrote in a recent piece for C&E: “[T]here are more investors in this space than you might think. A16Z of Lyft, AirBNB, and Coinbase fame has funded political tech while big names like Reid Hoffman (LinkedIn), Pierre Omidyar (eBay), Marc Benioff (Salesforce) and Sean Parker (Napster and Facebook) among others have also gotten in on the game.”

Funding aside, Bartley encouraged other entrepreneurs to launch with a minimum viable product (MVP) and get feedback from local practitioners who adopt it. 

“Those people can be your best allies and also provide tremendous feedback to you that you may not get someone who doesn’t know you or who is a little nervous in providing that feedback to see how you can take it,” he said.