quite.flutter.ly

God helps those who help themselves.

 — Benjamin Franklin

It's been exactly a month since I first had my Big Idea, and nearly 3 weeks since my last update.  Some strange and wonderful things have happened since then.  My vision for flutter.ly has also become more focused—it has even begun taking on a life of it's own.  It seems that the further I refine my ideas, the more magnetic the concept becomes, and the more like-minded people are drawn to it.  And curiously enough, they are individuals who can help and who want to help, and who appear in my life at the exact right time.  It is hard for me to attribute these events to chance, and I find myself increasingly inclined to believe in divine providence.*

Several people I've met in my recent travels (and several books I've read, including The E-Myth Revisited, recommended by one such person) have changed everything.  I decided to take the advice of the friend I mentioned in my last post.  I would start small, with a single cause, and grow flutter.ly organically from that experience, developing a template for a reproducible process along the way.  And while I found some worthy causes to pursue, something was still bugging me.  How could I monetize this cause without a large, advertisement-friendly userbase?  I could not afford to subsidize this business for the amount of time it would take to get 100,000 people to start using it.

Then, by chance, I bumped into a guy who mentioned he was starting an ecommerce site to match artists with non-profits, helping them sell their stuff online, giving part of the proceeds to the non-profit and keeping a percentage as a transaction fee.  Boom.  Monetization problem, solved.  The best part is that he pointed out that people are much more likely to buy something for a cause then to simply give money to it, because you're not just meeting their altruistic needs but their material desires as well. 

Now I just had to sell stuff and give a significant portion of the proceeds to a cause.  All I needed now was a partner with a product to sell, and a non-profit to partner with.  It took a while for the dots to connect in my mind, but it turned out I already knew such a person, and she already had a cause in mind.  So I approached her with this idea about two weeks ago.  We agreed right then and there to work together, and we're incorporating in July as a Nevada Corporation (more on that in a future post).

Since we are still in stealth mode, I will not reveal any details of our joint venture until we're closer to our product launch, currently scheduled for mid-to-late-September.  Until then, in upcoming posts, I will share some of the amazing things I've learned from finding and harnessing a magnetic idea, as well as a few ideas I have about the future of socially responsible entrepreneurship and how it fits into my goals for flutter.ly.

- Pete

* I have previously read that the secret to success lies in something called the Forrest Gump principle.  It really doesn't matter how smart, how rich, or how well connected you are when it comes to getting what you want from life.  Success flows directly from desire and persistence, and when you know exactly what you want and you take decisive action to get it, the universe has a way of providing everything else you need along the way.  My recent experiences have validated this belief for me, even if my rational mind does not want to believe it.  One thing is for sure: the older I get, the weirder life seems.  Thankfully it's a cool kind of weird rather than the awkward variety.

The time to nurse an idea is at the time of its birth.  Every minute it lives gives it a better chance of surviving.

 — Napoleon Hill

Exactly ten days ago, I had my original inspiration for this project.  Since then, I have chosen a name, bought a domain, designed a logo, put up a site with a contact form and a customized posterous blog (love that posterous, BTW) and set up a twitter feed.  All in my spare time, too—it's amazing how much one can get done while in the throes of inspiration.

Now comes the part I've always found to be the hardest: narrowing the focus for this project so I can proceed quickly and without getting lost in the possibilities.

Yesterday I had a terrific meeting with a friend from several jobs ago, a guy with loads of startup experience and some keen insight on the ingredients of a successful web application.  I can't thank him enough for the increased focus and confidence I took away from that conversation, and I'll be talking more about the decisions I made yesterday in future posts.  In the meantime, I have fine-tuned the wording on the what is flutter.ly? page to better reflect my current thinking what flutter.ly will be.

I will also share here one other recent insight.  Last week I read a terrific article titled A Social Solution, Without Going the Nonprofit Route that really challenged my notions about non-profit vs. for-profit models for socially progressive organizations.  The article suggests that while there are advantages to both models, an organization can accomplish more in less time with a for-profit model.  That relatively simple notion had a deep impact on me, and the more I think about it, the more I see flutter.ly as a way to lend some of that "for-profit juice" to organizations that choose to the non-profit route.

- Pete

CBS Sunday Morning reported this morning that the amount of oil that has spilled into the gulf over these last few weeks is equivalent to the amount of energy the United States uses in about an hour.  That's a shocking testament to our dependency on oil. 

It's also the kind of visceral message that the excellent marketing book Made To Stick says can have a psychologically meaningful impact on an audience because it is both visual and shocking.  Presenting a message in this manner can actually change people's behavior, as opposed to talking about millions or billions or barrels of oil, which means very little to most people. 

There may be a seed of opportunity hidden inside this disaster.  If enough of us begin to understand how big and urgent of a problem our dependency on oil is, maybe we can begin to do something about it.  So let's get the word out to all Americans.

- Pete

PS I was able to verify CBS's claim.  According to the US Department of Energy, the US consumed an average of 19.7 million barrels of oil per day in 2009.  That works out to about 821,000 barrels, or 34 million gallons per hour (BTW: picture 9,400 one gallon milk jugs filled with thick, gooey crude oil—that's how much oil we collectively consume in one second).  34 million gallons of oil spilled is more or less in-line with SkyTruth's estimate of 39 million gallons, however bear in mind that this estimate is from May 24th—nearly two weeks ago.

This is a timely piece of news.  I was just discussing the possibility of developing a white-label version of flutter.ly to sell as a service to political campaigns with a friend of mine who is an aide for a state-level campaign in Connecticut.

- Pete

Today Google is releasing new tools for politicians using YouTube and Google. The YouTube You Choose 2010 Campaign Toolkit and the Google Campaign Toolkit are both designed to help political candidates better deliver their messages to their audiences.

Via Mashable

Yesterday my Mom suggested some other potential applications for flutter.ly that I posted below.  I especially like #1 because having a built-in fundraising app would be super useful, and #3 because there is a lot of misinformation out there that's preventing people from voting with their wallets. 

She also mentioned the timeliness of an alternative to Facebook.  Thanks Mom!

- Pete

True social change has never started with politics, but with idealists like Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King and Nelson Mandela, who single-handedly changed their culture through inspirational leadership. Although politics plays an important role in institutionalizing change, social change does not begin with politics, it begins with movements started by the courageous minority. It is always good to remember that politics follows social change, it never leads. If we could collectively harness the energy that today's younger generation is wasting on a broken political system, we could truly change the world in a very short period of time.

Imagine if the founding fathers had access to the internet.  How many more people could have participated in the revolution?  How many lives could have been spared through a more effective means of communication and organization?  This is a timely question because the fourth great American crisis is nearly upon us.  If you don't know this already, you can probably feel it. 

But a reasonable mind should always need convincing, so here are some facts that may be new to you (thanks to William Strauss and Neil Howe, authors of The Fourth Turning, for introducing me to this idea):

The Revolutionary War ended in 1783.  The Civil War ended in 1865.  World War II ended in 1945.  These extraordinary events are as natural as winter in Massachusetts or seasonal wildfires in California, and they end almost exactly 80 years apart.  So we know that we can expect the current crisis to end in 2025.  Unfortunately they don't seem to start on a set schedule, but we so know the next one is almost here because these events are always proceeded by economic turmoil.

We know, however, that there is a seed of opportunity in every crisis.  An opportunity for change.  An opportunity to remold our culture to better reflect our inherent ideals.  An opportunity for miraculous transformation.

[NOTE: A revised version of this post has been moved to a permanent page. The original version appears below.]

Flutter.ly is a concept for a social network built for practical-minded idealists who have a vision of a world that is more fair and just than the one we inhabit.  But it is not going to be just another social network.  It will also be a project management and crowd-sourcing system for The People, designed to attract and marshal the resources of other like-minded leaders and volunteers who have pledged units of their time for various causes.  Flutter.ly will match these volunteers to projects based on their stated interests and geographic location.  It will also organize and focus their efforts to leverage the resources they have.  Think Facebook mashed up with MeetUp.com mashed up with 37 Signals' Backpack (a popular project management app that's really easy to use).

A flutter.ly project could be very local in scope; for example a group of flutter.ly users can band together to save a local business from getting evicted by a large developer (as has happened in my town of Newburyport, MA recently).  Flutter.ly will offer an array of ready-made tools like customizable electronic petitions, email campaigns and meetup location coordination.  A project could also be national in scope; for example a widespread movement to have Americans pledge not to eat inhumanely raised meat (make it a point to watch Food, Inc. if you haven't already), and in the process build a geolocation enabled database of stores and farms that sell ethically sourced meat.

Please sign up for our mailing list on this page, and if you think you can help please shoot me an email.

- Pete