A grad school project turned tech startup is the story of Motivote, the nonpartisan platform founded with the goal of helping organizations move their networks toward civic action. Rachel Konowitz and co-founder Jess Riegel began work on it as grad students at NYU in 2017.
“This was intended to be a 10-page business case for a product that could increase voter turnout, but as we continued to work on it we realized [it had legs],” Konowitz told C&E.
By the summer of 2018, Motivote had launched an early stage platform. The biggest lesson Konowitz and her team learned in the early part of that process: Taking the time to fully understand your market will pay dividends.
Before you build anything, Konowitz advised, it’s important to spend enough time talking to the people you want to be your customers and to cast as wide a net as possible in that process. Just because you and your co-founders think it’s a great fit for the market, doesn’t mean it actually is. So taking that time to validate the idea before even starting to raise money (and well before launching) will hopefully provide founders and eventual investors with some much needed confidence.
“I’d encourage you to raise as little money as possible before you launch the product,” said Konowitz. “Bootstrap it as much as you can, because then you’re really able to iterate, see what works, and really test and make sure it’s a product that’s fulfilling needs instead of just trying to meet the needs of your investors in making money right away.”
When it comes to the search for investors, the pool is much thinner for political tech startups and likely always will be. But, Konowitz noted, in the current environment prospective founders will find a larger number of funders with a newfound interest in investing in “work that does good.”
“People are much more interested in getting engaged, even if it isn’t their core business,” said Konowitz. “We’re seeing an increase in that area of interest from future-of-work type investors, or folks who are interested beyond, ‘we just do social impact.’”
Check out the full interview above to hear how the platform’s founders conceptualized the user journey and the longer-term vision for Motivote.
Campaigns & Elections
