tommaitland

+1 on B Corp certification being better than a “social enterprise”. I’ve seen so many companies call themselves social enterprises with little evidence of impact, which really amounts to a new form of greenwashing. B Corp helps solve that

No haven’t raised yet (haven’t needed to), but have spoken to VCs. Being a bcorp hasn’t ever been mentioned as an issue.

There isn’t much around to govern social enterprises, so we don’t have much of a framework.

We report impact regularly internally (it’s in dashboards the whole team has access to) and through the B-Corp certification we get assessed in detail every few years. Our staff hold us to account, more than our customers or the law.

For us we found a mechanism where benefit and profit are aligned, and I think most good social enterprises have done the same. That’s to say that the more impact we have, the healthier we are on classic business metrics.

I think it’s certainly an extra thing to consider and just focusing on profit is maybe easier in the short term, but I think profit without purpose quickly leads a company directionless and staff demoralised.

I co-founded Raisely, we’re a social enterprise. Impact is baked into our constitution, we report on it before profit, we restrict who can use our SaaS and we’re a bcorp. I wouldn’t call it “riding a wave” or just “talk” - it’s just genuine global citizenship.

Always happy to chat if you’re interested! tom [at] raisely.com

Also thanks for the heads up I’ll have a look at what’s causing that.

I had the same dilemma and eventually teamed up with a few others to start a non-profit technology company, to serve other charities. The industry often gets the edge of commercial tools not built for their needs, or ones that haven’t been updated in years.

For example Blackbaud is the market leader in non-profit software, they just launched the cloud version of their CRM product. You literally Citrix into a VM and screen share with a remote machine via your browser. It’s that bad.

We’re combatting that. Raisely (raisely.com) is our first product. It gives charities great fundraising tools, for free. This year for every $1 we spend building or supporting Raisely, a charity raises $38. It’s a huge ROI.

We can’t get VC funding though, so if engineering is your thing and this sounds appealing - we’d love the help.

Thanks everyone, some useful thoughts there. The "ultra low cost" comment was just recognising that the value of the tech here would be compared to the staff expense of building it yourself. It would just be saving some precious dev time, but not enough to charge $1000s for it.

I think it's a fair point though that only a small percentage of customers actually use webhooks, so the value is further constrained by that.

If you see reports of screen recording I’d avoid that company completely. I’ve never heard of it as common practice for remote jobs and more something that has come out of Upwork.

The best remote jobs focus on output not time anyway, and everything else is to facilitate that so they’re best suited to independently motivated people.

Pay seems comparable to local jobs, unless I guess you’re getting US/Bay Area salaries and you don’t live there.