Build Mode

Why Elite Athletes are Swapping Gala Nights for Scalable Software Charitable giving is broken. For decades, the industry relied on golf tournaments, silent auctions, and high-dollar galas. These events demand months of planning, consume massive operational overhead, and shut out everyday donors. When the pandemic hit in 2020, this fragile model collapsed overnight. Enter Kyle Rudolph, a 12-year NFL veteran, and Jon Walburg, a veteran sales leader. Together with NHL player Jason Zucker, they recognized that traditional fundraising could not scale. They built Altru, a professional fundraising platform designed to democratize charitable giving. By replacing elite $10,000 golf outings with accessible $10 sweepstakes, they transformed a local charity initiative into a venture-backed startup. Their journey on the TechCrunch podcast Build Mode, hosted by Isabelle Johannessen, offers a raw look at founder-market fit, early scaling mistakes, and the power of strategic networks. The Failure of the Ten Thousand Dollar Ticket Before launching their tech startup, the co-founders ran a charity called Athletes for Minnesota Kids. The premise was simple: partner with professional athletes to raise money using traditional methods. Their marquee event was an exclusive golf tournament costing $10,000 per foursome. While the event successfully raised $130,000 in its first year, it revealed glaring systemic issues. The planning process felt like a grueling full-time job. It required six months of intensive coordination, project management, and high-friction sales. When the team set a goal to raise $200,000 the following year, the 2020 pandemic forced them to cancel everything. Revenue dropped to zero. This crisis forced a radical realization. It is exponentially easier to convince 10,000 regular people to give $10 than to secure one donor willing to write a $10,000 check. Zucker had previously proven this micro-donation concept by raising $1.2 million for a children's hospital through crowdfunding. The team took this concept, sketched a business plan in a Minnesota coffee shop, and launched their web platform six months later. Inside the Hybrid Social Impact Engine Altru operates as a dual-engine machine: a consumer software platform and a licensed professional fundraiser. This structure allows them to sit at the intersection of celebrity influence, high-value sweepstakes, and compliant charitable giving. Raising Money is a Marketing Challenge Most non-profit organizations face a structural paradox. If they spend money on marketing, watchdog groups penalize their efficiency ratings. This restriction stunts their growth. Altru solves this by acting as a third-party, for-profit engine. The platform takes on the marketing risk, builds the digital infrastructure, and distributes the final proceeds to the charities. This setup allows them to acquire donors at scale. According to internal data, over 94% of the platform’s participants are donating to their chosen charity for the very first time. Winners take home sports cars or custom celebrity experiences, while the charities secure a fresh pipeline of highly engaged recurring donors. The Danger of Outsourcing Early Corporate Vision Success came fast, and with it came a dangerous trap. In its first year, Altru secured an official partnership with the National Football League to run 32 simultaneous campaigns for the Walter Payton Man of the Year award. Operating with just two founders and a part-time intern, the team pulled off a massive operational feat, raising half a million dollars. Exhilarated by this early win, the founders made a classic mistake: they scaled their team before nailing their long-term operational model. Believing they lacked the specialized corporate experience to grow a major tech platform, they hired a large, expensive team and stepped back from daily operations. This move led to an immediate identity crisis and a cash drain. The lesson was sharp and immediate: you cannot outsource your core product vision to external hires. The founders had to step back into active leadership, realign the business, and wait for revenue to catch up with their overhead. Democratizing Access to Celebrity Culture The true defensive moat of this model is not just celebrity access; it is regulatory compliance and execution. The company is registered as a professional fundraiser, navigating complex legal requirements across different states. This operational complexity makes it difficult for copycat startups to replicate their success. For celebrities, the platform offers a low-effort, high-impact way to support causes without managing the operational administrative burden of a private foundation. It turns star power into immediate, scalable social impact. Building Your Own Network Without a Super Bowl Ring You do not need a professional sports career to build a high-octane company. The core lesson of founder-market fit is about finding and leaning into your unique, unfair advantage. Every founder possesses specialized knowledge. Whether you are an expert in medical technology, logistics, or software architecture, you must turn that expertise into public influence. Share your insights on digital channels, educate your target market, and actively place yourself in rooms where you are challenged. Your network is your net worth, but it requires deliberate construction. Find your edge, design a scalable solution, and refuse to let traditional models dictate your ceiling.

The Art of Targeting the Untargetable Traditional go-to-market playbooks often fail when confronting highly sensitive, guarded, or hyper-specific consumer groups. When standard advertising channels fall short, building a startup requires a shift from standard performance marketing to radical community integration. For companies trying to capture audiences like teenagers or formerly incarcerated individuals, growth is not about viral loops. It is about earning deep, unshakeable trust and turning extreme constraints into a primary competitive edge. Two startups from the TechCrunch Startup Battlefield network demonstrate how to crack these difficult markets. Luna, co-founded by Jas Schembri-Stothart, acts as a digital big sister app for teenage girls navigating adolescence. Meanwhile, Untapped Solutions, founded by Andre Peart, serves as a marketplace and case management platform linking untapped populations—including formerly incarcerated individuals and domestic violence survivors—with corporate employment opportunities. While their end users reside in vastly different worlds, both founders bypassed standard digital marketing to build highly customized, community-first growth engines. Earning Trust Through Lived Experience and Ambassador Networks The Luna Approach: Teen Co-Creators To build a platform that teenagers actually wanted to use, Luna had to overcome a basic structural hurdle: the founders were no longer teenagers. Instead of guessing what would resonate, Jas Schembri-Stothart and her co-founder launched a literal school roadshow across the UK, presenting wireframes directly to students and absorbing blunt feedback. This grew into an organized "ambassador army" split into two distinct factions: product ambassadors who help refine features, and social media ambassadors who create organic, peer-to-peer TikTok content. By letting teenagers drive the narrative, the app achieved viral organic reach that no adult-led campaign could replicate. The Untapped Solutions Approach: Credibility via Shared History For Untapped Solutions, trust is built on personal history. Founder Andre Peart spent six years in New York state prison during his twenties, an experience that directly informs his company's mission. When marketing to individuals re-entering society, having a team with lived experience is the ultimate trust signal. The platform bypasses traditional consumer acquisition by integrating directly with the institutions where these populations already exist, including prisons, hospitals, and shelters. Rather than fighting for individual sign-ups, every organization onboarded brings hundreds of users directly into the ecosystem. Solving the Dual-Audience Puzzle Both startups operate in dual-sided ecosystems where the person utilizing the service is not the one paying for it. For Luna, the users are teenagers, but the paying customers are parents. This forced the team to build two completely isolated marketing funnels. They utilize TikTok for teen engagement, while relying on Meta platforms to reach parents, communicating themes of safety, data privacy, and adolescent support. Similarly, Untapped Solutions must balance the needs of vulnerable job seekers with the business requirements of corporate employers. Andre Peart structures his enterprise pitch around real business value, refusing to position his platform as a charity. To ease employer concerns regarding legal records and transitional hurdles, the platform attaches caseworkers directly to candidate profiles, showing progress and certifications transparently. They win over corporate decision-makers through compelling story-driven email campaigns and case studies highlighting corporate peers already participating in fair-chance hiring. Guerrilla Marketing and Thought Leadership When standard ad networks are too noisy or expensive, alternative distribution channels are vital. Luna embraced guerrilla marketing, famously taking a giant, custom-branded spinning wheel to a Taylor Swift concert in London. Despite being threatened with removal by security, the team interviewed a major influencer on-site, generating viral social content that drove immediate app downloads. Conversely, Untapped Solutions established dominance through educational authority. Instead of paying to attend crowded industry events as general attendees, Andre Peart focused on securing keynote speaking slots. By positioning himself as a leading technical expert in the re-entry space, he established a national re-entry coalition that hosts workshops, ultimately leading to their own dedicated industry conferences. Elevating the Bottom-Up Playbook These strategies prove that the most durable businesses are built by embedding directly into user communities. Whether mobilizing teenagers to run a social media account or building software alongside social workers, success depends on true operational intimacy. Founders who reject generic digital marketing playbooks in favor of deep, boots-on-the-ground engagement can transform their audience-access limitations into an insurmountable competitive moat.

In late 2017, Deon Nicholas had a world-class artificial intelligence engine but no real business. Armed with a computer science background and early career stints at tech giants like Meta and Dropbox, Nicholas had been tinkering with natural language processing models. He knew a massive wave of technological innovation was coming. He could feel it in his bones. But as any seasoned investor will tell you, a great technology without a desperate customer is just an expensive hobby. Nicholas found himself staring down the classic founder chasm: he was highly solution-oriented, yet entirely market-blind. He needed a bridge from theory to reality. So, he embarked on a frantic listening tour, using the ultimate growth hack for rejected founders. Every time a venture capitalist told him "no" during early fundraising attempts, Nicholas did not just walk away. He demanded an introduction to an operator in their portfolio. This built a raw, unfiltered network of customer officers, engineering leaders, and support heads. The goal was to poke at deep corporate pain. He realized that the technology itself was merely an unlock. The real battle was identifying who would actually pay to have their hair put out. The Oprah demo and the cold start problem To find his ideal customer, Nicholas and his team built highly targeted, modular demos. For human resources departments, they pitched an internal employee benefit tutor. For sales leaders, they pitched a revenue-enabling assistant. But the real breakthrough happened when they spoke to heads of customer support. The reaction was visceral. Support leaders did not just politely nod; they demanded to know if the technology was real. They wanted to fire their external contractors and hand that budget directly to Nicholas. This was the unmistakable pull of product-market fit. But proving the technology worked on arbitrary data required a touch of theater. Nicholas created what he called the "Oprah demo." The team trained their natural language model specifically on Oprah Winfrey's Wikipedia page. During meetings, they would let prospective clients pick any random topic, load the page, and watch the AI answer highly specific questions in real-time. It was magic. It gave Forethought AI the credibility to sign their first enterprise contracts. They immediately began integrating a bare-bones, text-only AI agent named Agatha directly into customer workflows. Why you must fail seven times to win Most founders believe that if they build a beautiful product, users will magically appear. Nicholas calls this a dangerous delusion. He operates under two fundamental product rules. First, the moment you launch a new product, absolutely nobody will use it. Second, any viable product is within exactly seven iterations of finding market success. This "7-Failure Rule" is designed to strip away founder ego and eliminate anxiety. It forces teams to build for the single player before attempting to design a complex social ecosystem. ``` +-------------------------------------------------------------+ | THE 7-FAILURE RULE | +-------------------------------------------------------------+ | Iteration 1-3: Internal testing & "Oprah Demo" validation | | Iteration 4-5: Paid pilot rollouts with MVP text integrations| | Iteration 6-7: Workflow-embedded UI and scalable deployment | +-------------------------------------------------------------+ ``` By treating early launches as inevitable failures, developers can focus on rapid, cheap experimentation. The objective is to do the absolute bare minimum amount of engineering work required to validate a core thesis. For Forethought AI, this meant shunning complex user interfaces. Instead, they delivered plain-text suggestions to customer service representatives via a private comment block in Zendesk. They simply measured how much of the text the representative copied and edited. If the representative used the text, the value was proven. If they did not, the team iterated. Winning the TechCrunch Disrupt Battlefield By mid-2018, Forethought AI had captured lightning in a bottle. They applied for the TechCrunch Startup Battlefield and won a spot on the stage at TechCrunch Disrupt. While most founders treat the battlefield stage as a public relations crowning moment, Nicholas treated it as a brutal operational forcing function. He set a clear, non-negotiable target for his team. By the time he walked onto that stage, the slide deck had to feature at least five logos of active, paying enterprise pilots. He wanted to prove traction, not just promise a vision. The team obsessed over user workflows, sitting alongside support agents to watch where Agatha broke down. On launch day in September 2018, Nicholas walked onto the stage with six enterprise logos. They did not just present a pitch; they proved a business model. Forethought AI walked away with the Startup Battlefield championship cup, generating a wave of industry hype that they immediately weaponized. The dangerous high of the post-battlefield hype With a fresh trophy in hand, Nicholas strategically engineered investor FOMO. He lined up venture meetings to hit immediately after the Disrupt announcement, sparking a bidding frenzy. Within three weeks, Forethought AI closed a nine-million-dollar Series A round. On paper, it was a massive triumph. In reality, it placed the young company in a highly precarious position. They had raised millions in venture capital with virtually zero recurring revenue. Nicholas warns modern founders against chasing this specific brand of high-valuation rockstardom. It forces a company to aggressively sprint just to grow into its artificial valuation. While the gamble paid off for Forethought AI, the journey of catching up to those Series A metrics was grueling. They had to rebuild their engine as the underlying tech shifted beneath them, eventually raising a Series B and later expanding their executive suite as Nicholas stepped into the chairman role. True company value, Nicholas insists, is measured in customer love and enduring utility, not the size of a seed check.