Monday, June 3, 2019
Pledgeling's James Citron: Every Business Should Be A Social Enterprise
For this morning's interview, with caught up with serial entrepreneur James Citron, the founder of Pledgeling (www.pledgeling.com), a startup which enables any business to help connect their business with social causes. Citron previously founded and sold Mogreet, a developer of mobile marketing software, among other ventures.
What is Pledgeling?
James Citron: We firmly believe most successful businesses of the future will be the ones with the most social impact. If you see all of the examples, like Salesforce, Warby Parker, the companies that do good outperform all of their peers. Pledgeling has built a technology platform that makes it super easy to integrate charity into their customer experience, and, as we say, grow through giving. These days, we actually have 4,000 brands who are actually giving back through Pledgeling today.
How did you decide to get into this as a company?
James Citron: This is actually my third startup. A few things happened to me personally. In October of 2014, my wife and I were about to have our first child, and I am thinking to myself, I am going to take a month off and be a great dad. As a serial entrepreneur, oftentimes I wasn't around. I'm thinking I'm going to have this life changing moment. However, as it happened, we went into due diligence and got a term sheet to sell the company on my month off. I'm thinking, this is crazy. One interesting thing happened to me during that month off, when I was ending up instead in due diligence to sell the company, is this nonprofit crisis text line launched on our platform. We were sending billions of text messages at the time at the company. The crisis text line was literally sending messages using our platform to save lives. I saw how a company I was able to create and scale was able to save lives. I personally got fixated on this notion of can technology actually do good? Can you actually build a business that harnesses for-profit business models to do good for the world? And we see it every day since we set out to do that.
Did you get funding this time around for the new company?
James Citron: Yes, we're venture backed. Some great LA investors like Bonfire are in the deal, actually as Double M before they became Bonfire Ventures. We have some other venture investors, one is Social Impact Partners. We've raised a couple of million bucks and business is going great.
Where are you now in terms of scaling and stage?
James Citron: We're really in growth stage at this point. We're hiring new folks constantly. We're thinking a lot about how do we expand from just 4,000 businesses to become the Mailchip of social impact. We want to figure out how to get 100,000 companies to integrate our tool and do good. Another important thing, is we are proving the ROI of impact. So, when you integrate our platform, how does that drive long term value? We are able to show a 33 percent lift in lifetime value by adding social good into a business. We're tracking that and we continue to prove that, we think we can really scale that, both horizontally with the number of customers, as well as the net social impact. A fascinating stat: two years ago, we were sending tens of thousands of dollars to nonprofits, the beneficiaries of the technology platform we built. Now, we are sending out a million dollars to thousands of nonprofits a month. We see in the near future that could be 10x, taking tens of thousands of micro-donations a day.
As a serial entrepreneur, what is the biggest lesson you've learned in creating a successful startup?
James Citron: There are a few things. Talk to everyone about your idea. People are always scared about sharing their idea, afraid that someone will do it. Execution is the hardest thing. Trust your instints. Your instincts are 95 percent of the time, great. For all the first time CEOs, build a group of other CEOs you can trust, because you can't talk about your problems often times with your investors or your board,. Being a CEO is a tough thing. You need to find other CEOs who you can share best practices with and who you can confide in to figure out the next stage of growth in your company.
With your last startup, was there ever time you ever thought – oh, this is not going to happen?
James Citron: I think the life of an entrepreneur is every day—oh my God, we're going to either go public or we're not going to be in business. The challenge and amazing journey of being an entrepreneur is you go through these amazing cycles, at every stage, from pre-product, pre-revenue, pre-everything to even at my last company with a few hundred people, there are new and exciting challenges at every stage.
The last thing, is for every single LA-based company, we have huge problems that you guys know about, homelessness, plastics in the ocean, and other issues. I don't think there's another city in the US which is as committed to helping the local tech community, from PledgeLA, to what our company does. We can help any entrepreneur figure out –how can I actually do good. Think about how do we align with causes which can benefit the local community, let's put LA at the center of the social enterprise movement.
Thanks, and good luck!