Helping Nonprofits Grow their Giving with Seth Radman of Infinite Giving

When you donate to a nonprofit, what happens to that money before it makes its way to those in need? Endowments, donations, and reserves left sitting idle in a savings account can translate to missed opportunities and dwindling spending power. Nonprofits need savvy tech-enabled investment strategies, especially in a time of rising inflation. 

In this episode of The Digital Footprint, we interview Seth Radman, CoFounder and CTO of Infinite Giving. Seth and his team are on a mission to help nonprofits grow their giving by introducing modern, financial technology. Their platform empowers nonprofits to better invest reserve funds, donations, and endowments with tools, automation, and passive strategies more typically marketed to individual investors.

We speak with Seth about what it's like selling into the nonprofit space, his perspective on work/life balance and countering burnout among entrepreneurs, and more.

Guest-at-a-Glance

💡 Name: Seth Radman

💡 What he does: He's the co-founder and CTO of Infinite Giving.

💡 Company: Infinite Giving

💡 Noteworthy: Seth is a 4x startup founder who has designed, built, and launched over 40 mobile and web apps.

💡 Where to find Seth: LinkedIn

Want to bring a SaaS product to market, quickly?
Book a consultation: https://tyrannosaurustech.com/contact/

Connect with our cohosts Richard Simms & Carlos Gonzalez on Linkedin

Transcript

E661389B_16 - TT - Digital Footprint - Seth Radman

[00:00:00] Seth Radman: We've experienced a lot of challenges like anyone would building a new company, a new business. I think I can probably divide the challenges that we've experienced into two categories. One are like very specifically FinTech related that if you're not building a FinTech company, they're not relevant to you, the others are probably more generic that are relevant to most people.

[00:00:17] Richard Simms: Okay. Hello and welcome to the Digital Footprint, I'm Richard Simms. This podcast is brought to you by Tyrannosaurus Tech, an award-winning technology partner, dedicated to designing and developing high-impact software products. Today, I'm joined by Seth Radman co-founder and CTO of Infinite Giving. Welcome Seth. 

[00:01:11] Seth Radman: Thanks. Glad to be here Richard.

[00:01:13] Richard Simms: Yeah, I've been really looking forward to this conversation. So you and I met probably three or four years ago at this point. And my first memory of you was, you pitching and demoing Crescendo at one of our product hunt meetups when we used to run those back in the day. And I remember being really impressed with the concept and the product. And I play music so I like really, immediately resonated with me. But I remember when you demoed it, I just assumed it was kind of a mocked up demo or essentially like an animated clickable prototype. I did not think that the functionality was real. Very impressive to your credit. It was. And of course, I know you all had a lot of success with that product, and it was acquired by Ultimate Guitar, which is just super cool. And I know you found that success early in your career. So you've been through a lot of exciting adventures in the startup world already. So that's one reason I'm, I'm very excited to have you on the show of course. So today I mostly want to focus on your latest and greatest venture, which is Infinite Giving. So just to jump right in, can you take, you know, a minute or two, introduce yourself and just tell us a little bit about Infinite Giving. That would be great.

[00:02:30] Seth Radman: Yeah, absolutely. Thanks for having me here. Really great to connect with you again. So I went to Georgia Tech, studying Mechanical Engineering. Briefly worked at an aircraft company for a bit, which was a lot of fun and fascinating, but it wasn't really the kind of impact that I wanted to make on humans and building products that they would get to use. So, on the side I learned how to code, and I started building iPhone apps. And I built more and more iPhone apps, and most of them failed. But after a period of about probably three or four years, I'd built 40 iPhone apps. And a lot of these were for customers for consulting, but a few of them were just ideas that I had. And one of them ended up being Crescendo. That once I built Crescendo and some people started liking it, I thought, "Hmm, I'm getting pretty good at this. Maybe I should focus on Crescendo." So I, I did focused on Crescendo, just like you mentioned. We are interactive music training app, kind of like Guitar Hero, but for real instruments. And we grew it to over a million users, got to do some fun things. I got to meet the actual creators of Guitar Hero, we got to Pitch South by Southwest, really fun adventure. And then we were acquired by Ultimate Guitar where I got to see what it was like working out at a company with 300 million monthly active users leading their product strategy and design. So did that. And then as we all know, COVID hit, and the world completely changed. And so I saw an opportunity to create another product to help teachers, and created Upbeat Music App, which is essentially like Zoom, but for musicians. So it help you be able to rehearse and play in real-time without the latency that you have on Zoom. Another thing that happened during COVID in another world that I was unfamiliar with until I started catching up with some other friends of mine was stuff in the world of non-profits. Where during the year of COVID, a lot of nonprofits either went out of business because they didn't have the funds to be able to sustain themselves, or they got more funding than they've ever gotten before from a lot of donors and programs that were going on. At the same time, we have this crazy market with crypto with just the general stock market that I think probably more people became aware of the power of investing over the past 24 months than perhaps the past decade.

[00:04:29] Richard Simms: Yeah. 

[00:04:30] Seth Radman: So as a result, we've got into the situation where as individuals, there's a lot of great tools to help us with personal investments, right? There's wealth advisors at banks, there's tools that we can use, like Wealthfront and Betterment that are robo-advisors that automate stuff for us. And it's fairly simple to do this through our traditional financial institutions. The reason we started Infinite Giving is to help nonprofits be able to have the same access of tools, to be able to help them grow their giving user using modern financial technology. And so the average nonprofit could easily have a couple million dollars saved up in their bank account. And a lot of the time it's just sitting in their savings account, which we know do not earn a good interest rate. And so what Infinite Giving does is it's a automated robo-advisor investment tool that nonprofits can use to grow their giving and invest their funds in low-risk, low-cost ETFs over time so that they can earn closer to a market return over time, instead of just seen the power of their dollar decreased due to inflation. Yeah, that's probably a high-level of the path that I've been on. And mostly focused a lot in the music and technology space and then met a, kind of reconnected with Karen Houghton who's our CEO at Infinite Giving and just fell in love with the mission and felt like the timing was absolutely perfect and decided to make the jump into the FinTech space. And here I am.

[00:05:47] Richard Simms: Very cool. Yeah, that all makes a lot of sense. And I have to think that with COVID to your point, stars aligned a little bit there. Maybe again, one of the unexpected positives of the whole pandemic, some of the work that you're doing with Infinite Giving. And then of course now, and I think you all alluded to this on your website, as you should, with inflation really going up is that much more problematic to kind of leave that money sitting idle. So, hopefully that's all helping you all build a lot of momentum. You touched on one of the things that I was going to ask about because I know you're working with Karen, which is great. She has an amazing reputation and you're kind of more in like the Atlanta ventures scene, which is obviously a really vibrant place. What's that been like? I mean, my impression, from a distance is that, startups you've done in the past have been kind of more with one of your buddies from Georgia Tech or something like, now you're kind of have some really serious advisers in the mix and stuff, which is really great. I'm just curious what it's been like, kind of coming into that different eco system? 

[00:06:51] Seth Radman: Yeah, that's a great question. It's been so much fun working with Karen. She's a blast to work with. And she has a really cool background that she was a director for a nonprofit for a while. So she understands our space really well. And she grew Atlanta Tech Village from the ground up. So she's been around all these tech companies and knows the power of technology to automate stuff. And then on top of that, since she's been around all these successful startups, her network is incredible and is help open so many doors for us. But you're right, that the previous companies I've done I've been mostly bootstrapped. Right. Maybe we took a round or two of funding, but definitely didn't go the see series A, series B, series C route. And that is the route that we're headed on right now with Infinite Giving. And just a FinTech in general typically requires a little more capital upfront because there's a lot more expenses and costs involved with compliance and legal stuff and banks and payments. These things are expensive. So the venture out is, is very different. There's obviously some positives, some negatives. Right. You, you lose a little bit of control, but you gain a stronger network and funds to be able to move more quickly. So far it's been really amazing and fantastic being able to be close with people like David Lightburn and David Cummings who have collectively launched companies worth billions of dollars and being able to hop on calls with them very quickly. It's definitely helped me personally grow, just to understand what it takes strategically to build a, a large successful FinTech company.

[00:08:10] Richard Simms: For sure. I'm sure that's an awesome learning experience. And then, that group understands kind of how to apply that gas when you're going into growth mode. So, that is all, uh, stuff that I don't pretend for a second to be an expert on. So I'm sure, I'm sure it's great to kind of be thrown into. 

[00:08:27] Seth Radman: I'm not an expert yet either. I'm still, I'm still learning.

[00:08:30] Richard Simms: Yeah, I love it. All right. Cool. So, let's get into the weeds a little bit more about how Infinite Giving operates. So, you know, I've been exploring the site. I think it's a great concept. It's easy to understand. How's it work currently, as far as let's say, a new prophet wants to get onboarded. How's it work now? Where do you all aspire for that to be in the future as you expand the product? Just curious what it's like kind of behind the scenes and behind the login a little bit. 

[00:08:57] Seth Radman: Yeah. Great question. So right now, if you're a nonprofit and you want to invest your funds, you typically have to go to a big bank. You're going to fill out PDF forms, send sensitive information back and forth over email. It'll take maybe four to six weeks. And then after that happens, a lot of the time you can't even see a dashboard or web portal. You have to physically call someone every time you want to get an update on your balance, or see where things are, make a transfer. And so, especially for younger people who are starting to move into leadership roles and nonprofits, we want to be able to see, and everyone of all ages, I think a lot of them want to be able to go on the internet, log in, just like your personal account and see where your funds are and see performance and see your money. And so what we've done is, we've simplified all of that to a 10-minute new account process that happens completely online where you submit all your information and we do all this magical automation in the background to open your account. And, I think the biggest challenge of that is making it seem very simple and seamless to a user. But in the backend, we have a wild spin of all the things. That we have an anti-money laundering policy to make sure that you're not trying to launder money through a nonprofit that is tax exempt. We have to verify that you are tax exempt. We have to go through compliance records to conform, to identity theft and protection programs. We have strict requirements with FINRA and SEC, based on the type of investment grade bonds and assets and securities we're allowed to offer to our customers. So, I think customers probably see maybe 5 to 10% of all of the work we do in their dashboard. And, you know, the 15 to 20 screens that they see. But simply put, once they're inside the product, they go through a brief questionnaire where we try to understand more about the customer's goals. We ask questions about their time horizon. Is it something short-term, medium-term, long-term, there are the quiddity needs. If they need to take money out, how long can they wait to avoid having a loss if the market's gone down a little bit. And then we also see what existing infrastructure they have in place, that a lot of boards for nonprofits already have an investment policy statement that says explicitly how they're supposed to invest funds. But at the end of the day, they go through, we understand some information about them. And then our algorithm analyzes this information and makes a recommendation that we have five portfolios total, and we have another five coming that are in the ESG side or environmental social and governance to, for people who want to invest more responsibly or ethically. And simply put our algorithm recommends a portfolio that they select, they click it, and it's really that simple. And they transfer in their first initial deposit and then they're done. We automate their investment. We keep them up to date with new perspectives and information on their account. And it's really, really dramatically simple compared to how it is with big banks right now.

[00:11:30] Richard Simms: Okay. Awesome. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. So, it kind of answered one of the questions I had, which is, it sounds like you all mostly aspire to be very self service. And then my question there is just, yeah, how do you view the balance of the product with kind of what's traditionally the more human side of financial advisement or whatever the appropriate money management term would be? 

[00:11:56] Seth Radman: Yeah, that's a great question. A lot of people, I think, are comfortable with the human, right? We're used to that. That's the traditional approach. There's research that shows, it's called Modern Portfolio Theory that shows that 90% of wealth advisors actually cannot outperform the market over about a five-year period of time. And more people are becoming aware of that, that having passive investment engines, well emotionally it may not feel as comfortable, statistically are more likely to result in better returns than a wealth advisor. And so, a lot of the time we think, "Hmm, non-profits that have let's say less than $20 million in assets, are they really getting the top 10% best wealth advisors in the entire country, or those people is hanging up, those people are hanging out on the Harvard endowment board. Right. Helping them manage those funds. And some people are getting lucky, but at the end of the day we're following algorithms and mathematical theories that have been in place for decades. Right. Even though we're a new company, the algorithms that we're following are not new. And those are have been awhile for awhile, we've just modernized and automated them. But on the other side, we do have humans too. Right. We're a registered investment advisor with SEC. We have investment advisor representatives on our team, and if our customers want some extra human detention and some physical help to make a decision, all they have to do is book a, book a call with us and we'll help you to hop on a call with them. So most, everything is automated, but we do have people too, because not every decision can be made by a computer.

[00:13:19] Richard Simms: Yeah, that's great. And I think you're dead on that a lot of folks are increasingly aware of more passive investment strategies that are tried and true that you can feel very comfortable in. And I think to your point, as more younger people are moving into leadership in nonprofits, they're going to be much more comfortable with that kind of workflow. So that makes a lot of sense. One question I had. So we all know, I think that unfortunately nonprofits are often not leveraging technology to the extent they could be. This is obviously part of what you all are trying to address, but that reality presents challenges too. What's it been like trying to get nonprofits to buy in to utilizing a platform like this? And you know, how has it just been in the nonprofit space as compared to most of your previous experience where you were working with, let's say, young musicians that were like very eager to experiment with new technology? It's a much different landscape. So I'm curious what that's been like for you so far.

[00:14:23] Seth Radman: Yeah, that's a great question. The sales process is definitely very different. Right. It's more B2B instead of previously I'd done more B2C stuff, and they're non-profits which kind of behave like larger corporations. Sometimes they have a board, executive directors. So overall, interacting with these non-profits is extremely pleasant. I mean, the people who work there are, they're not for giant paychecks. Right. But because of the impact that they want to make and the work that they do is so fulfilling to them and has just an incredible impact on the people around them, based on the mission that they're trying to fulfill. I think overall people are generally very excited and receptive about what we're doing. Right. They realize, "Oh, you're right. My money's just sitting in a savings account." And just last year you would have lost roughly, inflation is typically around like 2 to 4%. Last year it was bordering on 4 to 6%. Right. So just right there, if you had a $100,000 . The same amount of money is there, but you lost $4,000 to $6,000 of spending power that over time you're just going to keep losing more. And we've all seen the charts of what a $100 can get you 40 years ago compared to what can get you now. So overall, I think, most people we talked to are very excited. Most people seem to get it right away. The biggest challenge is really just the board. Right? That you have to be very patient that sometimes these nonprofits have quarterly board meetings. And so we may talk to someone on January 10th. And they may say, "This is awesome. I know people are going to love this. My next board meeting is for two and a half months." Right. And so from a business perspective, it definitely impacts our sales velocity. And the way we solve that is just by getting more non-profits at the top of the funnel, which we've padded with. Now that we started with probably 10 or 15 nonprofits in our pipeline, the beginning of the year, and now we're up to pass the 100. And sure, obviously we're not going to have a 100% close rate. But the thinking is in three to six months, there'll be having their board meetings. A lot of these people on board. So, overall I've definitely had to live by mindset that I'm, I'm very impatient on a daily basis. I want to work very hard on it. The current day I have to get as much done as I can, but longer-term I've developed a greater sense of patients knowing that once we do get these customers, they ideally stick with us for quite a long time because people don't change banks very often.

[00:16:31] Richard Simms: Yeah. Yeah. That's great. And that makes a lot of sense. And we do a good bit of work with nonprofits and I love it. And I empathize similarly, 'cause there's just a different mechanics of getting decisions made, and how funds are set aside or what they're categorized for. And we're often trying to navigate that ourselves. So I'm right there with you. But it's also very relationship oriented. So put in those steps and build trust and rapport, and like you said, it'll come around. You know, a lot of what you're describing at a high-level it's not rocket science. I think most of us are exposed to basic investment strategies. What type of index funds are available. Obviously, inflation, just some of these concepts, but. And you're a sharp guy, so I'm sure you know a heck of a lot more than that, but you're not coming from a finance background obviously. You know, have you just kind of learned this stuff on the fly? To what extent are you relying on some of the other folks on the team that have deep expertise there? Just curious what it's been like navigating into that finance world. 

[00:17:36] Seth Radman: Yeah, that's a great question. So, I think I've gone from being, at first I was super intimidated, overwhelmed. 'Cause you're right, I don't come from a finance background and here I am trying to be the CTO of a FinTech company that not only is trying to be fast, but as VC backed and has pretty aggressive goals to be able to hit our next round of funding, and serve our well. So I think the best thing that's happened for me is some of the advisors we have in our team. That I think there's probably two or three advisors who have personally managed billions and billions of assets just themselves. And those people have helped distill the market and how money works into a few simple concepts that guide most of what we do. Because you're right, at the end of the day, what we're doing is not complicated. We're not day trading. We're not trying to do advanced technical analysis on cryptocurrencies to figure out when to buy and sell. Instead we're making very intentional decisions based on longer term periods of time for customers. And so typically, obviously this is not financial advice, but generally a phrase would come in, I like to say, is time in the market usually beats timing in the market. Right? And that this is a longer term investment that people are making. So overall, I've listened to a lot of advisers, red lots of books, taken some online courses, and obviously learned a lot from Karen who is our, you know, certified with a Series 65 for us to be able to operate this business. But I'd say the biggest thing has been having some advisors who are wealth advisors and financial advisors and wealth managers who have been doing this for 15 or 20 years. And the game is the same, we're just using technology to automate what people have been doing manually for a long time.

[00:19:15] Richard Simms: Yeah. Awesome. Okay. That's great. So I want to come back to Infinite Giving obviously. But I want to pivot a bit to a different topic that I think is especially important and could be very beneficial for our listeners. So, founder mental health, how important it is to balance the startup founder lifestyle and the myths that exist there with a truly sustainable lifestyle? Right. I see you post a lot about this on LinkedIn, and I really appreciate it. You hopefully notice I give you a lot of likes, but so do a lot people, so I'm sure I lost in the mix. But I really appreciate it. I mean, you've obviously been a founder multiple times. It seems like you've kind of experienced the full gamut of emotions and lifestyles on that. And again, I, I empathize because I am constantly torn about how much time I should be putting in, how much I should be burning the candle at both ends? Like, is that the only way to succeed? Feeling guilty when you're not working at that capacity. So it's really refreshing for me to see someone kind of call BS on a lot of that hype sometimes. So yeah, I mean, I know you started your first business really young. My impression is you came out of the gate just 110% all the time and then wised up a little bit. But yeah, tell me a little bit more about how your perspective on all of that has evolved over the years?

[00:20:43] Seth Radman: Yeah, your, your assessment is pretty spot on. So I, I started my first company when I was 20 years old, in college. And at that time, the only guiding post I had about how to run a startup is what I read online. I didn't really know any friends who were doing startups. All I could see was blog posts from Michael at Y Combinator. I have TechCrunch articles, and you can see Techstars companies that are going on to do great things. And, from everything I had heard and read, if you want to have a successful startup, you get to have two hobbies. One is your startup, and one is something else. That something else could be sleep. It could be eating healthy. It could be exercise. It could be hanging out with friends. And so, in retrospect, I realized now that's a really awful mindset and that's just going to make things really tough in life. And there's still a debate, right? There's some people who think that you have to be working 80 hours a week to be successful. Like Elon Musk can only sleep 4 hours a day. There's other people who think that that's just not sustainable and that life is meant to be a little more balanced for you to be able to enjoy what you're doing. And so throughout college I worked most of the mindset of like, "I'm just going to power through and work super hard and put in tons of time." And, I did make a lot of good progress with my business, but there were pretty significant costs. Right? Like a lot of friendships and relationships I had were difficult to maintain or just kind of fell off. I didn't really keep up any hobbies that I had. Like, I really loved playing saxophone. And for, probably about 4 years on college, I touch my saxophone maybe once. I was in marching band, which was fun, but it wasn't the same as, you know, practicing on my own to improve. Really didn't do any hobbies like ultimate Frisbee or rock climbing, which are two things that I really enjoy. So, I really only focused on grades and my startup. My sleep lacked, I wasn't eating healthy, wasn't exercising well. And so like most people, I feel like a lot of people dive in like this and they hit a breaking point that, I hit a breaking point where, usually came around final exams, right. That it's already very stressful time, especially at a college like Georgia Tech, which is very fast paced, it can be overwhelming at times. I'll never forget. I think it was either sophomore, or junior year. Final exams using came. And I was trying to hit some deliverables for a new app we were building for a client. And, we've probably experienced this at some point where you're just up and it's 1 in the morning and you just realize that you're just not going to be able to, you're not gonna be able to do it, whatever you're trying to accomplish. That maybe you've, you're in over your head and it was just too much. And pretty much just had like a massive panic attack and was like, "All right, I can't do this. I'm done with start-ups. This is too much. Maybe I'll try it again later." And that lasted about a week. But for a week, I was like, "I'm not doing start-ups ever again. Too much. It's just not worth it." And luckily someone convinced me to go see a therapist and talk with someone to get some help, because a lot of people are just like, feeling stressed for different reasons. And especially with COVID right now, I imagine more people are experiencing depression and anxiety than ever before. So to kind of summarize the next several years, I realized that I was kind of defining my definition of success based on what I saw other people doing. And I thought that meant for me to be successful, I had to put in 80 hours a week and after six or seven years my startup had to have 2000 employees and they can get acquired for a billion dollars. That's what I thought it meant to be successful. And it turns out that, a lot of the people who accomplish that often are the most depressed people. Right? Like I know a lot of founders and, I'm not saying this is always true, but a lot of the time, the bigger the company they have, not always, but I've seen a decent correlation with the more depression anxiety that they experienced personally. Not that you can necessarily draw any conclusions from that but it's a fact worth stating, or rather an observation worth stating. So anyways, my my opinion has shifted over time that I went through that phase. And then of course I did get back up and then I built Crescendo. And then after Crescendo was acquired, I had another problem where I felt like my baby was taken away from me. And I was really depressed for probably six or nine months after Crescendo was acquired, because I didn't expect us to get acquired. And that was kind of the big goal. So I thought, "What do I do next?" I felt pretty lost. Do I go work for another company? Do I go build another startup? You know, I had accomplished one of the goals in life that I expected to take 20 or 30 years really quickly. And obviously we had an early exit, right. We were only around for probably 3 or 4 or 5 years before we were acquired. But it still put me in a position of uncertainty about what to do. So, through that over time I've kind of adopted a new mindset that obviously there's definitely sacrifices you're going to make to build your startup, but I've started to reevaluate my priorities in life. Like, for example, I don't have to be working 80 hours a week to be effective. Instead, I can focus more on what activities are going to make the biggest impact for my business. Because when I look back at the days in college, sure, I spent 80 hours per week on my startup, but probably 20 or 30 of those hours actually move the needle forward. Right. That I, I've gotten better at focusing about what activities are necessary. Like improving my business cards, spending 3 hours on that probably not going to move my business forward as much as hopping on the phone and talking with the customer. Right. But it's one of those first initial easy steps that is exciting when you're starting a new business. So, overall my perspective now is that I, I really put my mental health before everything else, even if that means that my startup could be in jeopardy of going downhill. I know that if I'm not at a good place mentally, physically, emotionally, I certainly can't be there for the rest of my team, my employees, and I definitely can't be there to serve my customers. So I, I've definitely dialed back where I'm working in closer to 40 to 60 hours a week now. And I also don't have kids. Right. And so if I had a family and kids, I'd probably dialed that back down even more, my priorities would change. But I've definitely got more balance in life now where I'm, I'm now a very strong believer of the mindset of finding a balanced way to do something sustainable so that you can enjoy what you're doing. And sure, there's going to be lows, there's going to be highs, but that's why you have sleep and eating healthy and exercise and other hobbies and friends to be able to help you get through the tough times.

[00:26:34] Richard Simms: Yeah, for sure. I think it's all great points. And I think it's good that you've kind of been through both ends of it and have a good sense of what the balance is. I mean, I've certainly had to go through that too. And even in my entrepreneurial career, I haven't been doing Uber growth focused product startups, which I think is even a whole other animal as far as what comes along with that, the kind of pressure, the success stories that you see, and still for me, yes. Like I've really had to get out of that mindset that if I'm not working all the time, I'm doing something wrong. I have certainly hit breaking points at times that have forced me to do a reset. And then, yeah, I think as you get older and you do have, you know, a family and kids, which I have, it's like, it's not an option anymore, which is largely good. It's good. And it just forces you to kind of get into something that is a little bit more of a balance. So yeah, I mean, I definitely commend you for putting that stuff out there 'Cause I think that people need to see that. You know, there are those that just love back grind and like that's not wrong. But I think for most of us definitely, including me, that is not sustainable. It's not healthy. And it doesn't lead to good work. And to your point, I mean, the last thing is, as you said, in those amazing scenarios where someone finds great success and sells their business. Like, that is a happy ending, but life goes on and we have human nature. So like you don't just live happily ever after. There's anxiety and turmoil about what's next and finding purpose. So, we're never going to change like the growth mentality of the startup world. That's a good thing. That's what it's about. But I think there is something to be said for like succeeding in 3 years versus 5 years versus 7 years, just enjoy the journey. And more often it's a much longer timeline for a real success story. So anyways, I'm curious like, how do you try to structure your workdays and then your nights and weekends at this point, so that it doesn't get too out of those, those boundaries that you're trying to place, you know? 

[00:28:46] Seth Radman: Yeah, that's a great question. I definitely have gotten better about imposing structure. Because, as a startup founder, one of the greatest things, but also scariest things is that when I look forward to my next week, a lot of the time that week starts from my calendar's completely empty. Right. I'm not at a corporate job where maybe I have schedule meetings that I have to go to every week, or if I do they're meetings that I have requested for my team. So there's a lot of blank space. I do have a few things that I've learned. Like for example, one of them is, I actually feel every single time in my calendar for the next day. That doesn't mean I have to be doing productive work. Sometimes I'll block out two hours that says, ""Do nothing." Right. But I've tried to be more intentional in how I spend my time. But anyways, you asked about kind of structure. So luckily, working for my own startup is pretty flexible schedule. So I think the summary of my day is, I spend a lot of the mornings kind of heads down in deep work where I'm, notifications are off, do not disturb is on. And you can't get in touch with me unless you're like a family, friend, or my co-founder and you call me. And then of course I'll answer, but I found that if I can get 2 or 3 hours of deep work with no interruptions, that's for me the equivalent of maybe an 8-hour day with interruptions. And so, usually I focus my mornings on deep work, getting output, and then my afternoons are more on collaborations. So it'll be meetings with my teammates, with others, partners that we have, with customers, maybe with investors. And then evenings I like to generally keep open. No, I wouldn't say that my, uh, social life was thriving before COVID. But obviously during COVID has been impacted a bit, but I've gotten better about. I'm more of an introverted person, but I've gotten better about being intentional to ask friends to meet up for dinner or to play ultimate Frisbee or go rock climbing and do some of the things that I'm passionate about. Or just hang out with my wife and chill and watch TV, which I used to think was like the worst thing to do. Just sit on your butt and watch TV. But now I think that it's a decent way to recharge at the end of the day, to be able to keep things sustainable. So, and then one other big difference, big change that I made. And I'm really grateful that we have Karen, she is a fantastic leader with great work-life balance and culture at Infinite Giving. Where, I don't think we've ever had. Maybe except for one time right before our initial product launch. I don't think we've ever had scheduled meetings on weekends. Right. That, there's a lot of other startups that I've run personally and that I've been at, where you're expected to be working at least 4 to 6 hours on Saturday and Sunday to keep things up. And it's really nice to be able to have the time off to spend with family, friends, with my cat, to go outside, to explore, to hike, to do to whatever. Sometimes I will do some work on weekends if I feel like it. But they used to be something where for me the weekends we're like, cool heads down, I'm cranking out code and building product. And now that's my recharging time, to make sure that I'm caught up in everything from the previous week, and I have good intentions and goals and structures set for the next week. So, it's been an iterative process to work on kind of what balanced structure makes sense for me, but I feel like I've finally gotten to a good place now. And as COVID hopefully gets better, I imagine that will only get better for everyone too.

[00:31:49] Richard Simms: Yeah, yeah. That's great. And I know for me, yeah, it's been, uh, evolution too. And then some of it too is just kind of, for me, filtering out a lot of like the startup news and stuff. Even though I want to be tuned in. So I try to be, but, you know, I think it, it glamorizes a lot of exceptional cases that are not very real-world or puts too much emphasis on fundraising and stuff. It's tough to reconcile that. Like sometimes it gets in my head that I'm, "Oh my gosh, I should be doing something much bigger, this", you know, and it's all, all relative. So, 

[00:32:26] Seth Radman: That gets to me too. It's what I call success theater. 

[00:32:29] Richard Simms: Right, right. 

[00:32:30] Seth Radman: I like to frame that where, you're right. I think, if TechCrunch is covering an article that your startup raise 2 million seed funding, they should be covering an article that you reduce churn, or that you improve retention by 90% over the past month, or that you decreased your CAC by 12%. That should be a headline in a business. But you're right. It's a heuristic that we know things are clearly newsworthy when they were raised or an acquisition or a strategic hire. But I think that, Richard waking up to a bootstrap company that is profitable, having a team around him that enjoy what they're doing every day and happy customers, that's probably one of the best highlight headlines you can have. That unfortunately is not glamorized, but is likely one of the happiest ways you can live life.

[00:33:12] Richard Simms: Yeah. Well, I appreciate that. And it comes with its own stressors, but yeah, a 100% like exactly, for us it's a pretty good lifestyle. they're Very, very low pressure compared to a lot of the other startup world. So, okay, cool. So we started this podcast primarily, so it could be a resource for folks who are in the process of, or considering launching a new software product. You've obviously started several businesses. You know how hard it can be to get something off the ground. Going back to Infinite Giving, what are some of the biggest challenges you all have faced so far? And have you overcome them, or how are you working to overcome them? 

[00:33:50] Seth Radman: Yeah, that's a great question. We've experienced a lot of challenges. Like anyone would building a new company, a new business. I think I can probably divide the challenges that we've experienced into two categories. One are like very specifically FinTech related that if you're not building a FinTech company, they're not relevant to you. The others are probably more generic that are relevant to most people. I'll briefly mention the FinTech ones, but then I'll spend more time on the ones that are probably applicable to most people. So I think that the FinTech ones are really very heavy-tech integrations with payment providers and custodians, having a very thorough compliance review process, having to satisfy requirements by SEC and FINRA, and just having to have all the legal boxes checked off with everything. That, used to be in the BDC role, build an iPhone app, I'd think about the idea one day, I build it the next day and then on the third day someone would pay for it. And now, now it's more like, "I'll design it in a day. We'll build it in a week. And then it'll take three months for our attorneys and legal team to figure out how we can do it." Like right now, we're trying to figure out how we can launch crypto donations for nonprofits. And that's just a huge space of lots of unknowns and regulations. So anyways, but aside from that, the business challenges, I think one of them is just customer development. That, if you are building a new product and like, let's say you're building a mobile app, I think a lot of people focus way too much on the technology and the product at first. And what I think you should be focusing on is talking to customers. Right. That technology is typically a fairly solvable problem if you have a skilled development team and you have clear requirements and a good designer. It's not an unknown, you can build that product assuming that technology is there. And it can be a great product. But that doesn't mean that customers will like your product, but that it will help solve a problem for them. And so, even after I've been doing all these startups, the first step is always talking to customers. And so what Karen and I did, or Karen started and brought me in halfway through, is I think we talked to over a hundred nonprofits before we wrote a single line of code, to make sure that we were building the right product. Because one of the, one of the worst things you can do, which I have done many, many times is build a product that no one wants to use. And that's called a, that's called an expensive hobby. And it's totally fine to have that hobby, but that's not a business unfortunately. But I think some of the challenges initially were trying to interpret what our customer said versus what they actually mean. 'Cause a lot of people accidentally lie when they're talking about products. Like they might say, "Oh, I would definitely use this", to be polite. But then when you go ahead and release the product, they're not there because they didn't actually want it. And so you really have to understand not what people say, but what they mean when they say it, and how they respond emotionally to things. Right now one of the biggest things that we're experiencing, that we experienced growing was hiring. I know obviously the state of the world right now, hiring is very, very difficult. We were lucky to get a great engineer on board, Connor Ford, who had previously done a couple of startups himself and is just a fantastic software engineer. And Arvin Poddar, who is our intern from Georgia Tech, who is just a stellar front-end developer. So I think trying to move on an aggressive timeline was that. And then another big challenge we faced is, like a lot of people, we had a billion things we wanted to do in our product. Right. And we wanted to get all those things out in version 1. But you just can't do everything in the first version. Or I should say you can do everything in the first version, but it'll take you years before you launch. And that's a pretty risky move to make. So the other challenge was figuring out, out of all the things we wanted to do, what are the one or two features or three features that we're gonna include in the MVP, in the first version of our product that are absolutely critical to providing value to our customers. It was a difficult process to figure out what we're going to shave off of our product and what we're going to keep in there. And it felt very bare bones at first. But it was the right product that we needed to start getting feedback from people. But overall, I've definitely grown a lot that the, if I think back to the first app that I ever made, I designed it all in Microsoft PowerPoint. I talked to zero customers. I spent over 9 months building it. And then I think it had a total of 20 downloads after it was finally approved after being rejected, probably 7 times from the app store. So I've definitely learned to, learned a thing or two. But if I could give one piece of advice to people building the product it would be, talk to customers more and make sure to hire great people who you want to be working with for a long period of time.

[00:37:55] Richard Simms: Awesome. Yeah that's great advice and everything that you're saying rings true to me, of course. And it's often advice that we give to folks that are coming to us, thinking about building out some type of MVP. And I appreciate that you have that perspective. I think some of that of course, you've just learned along the way, but you also just have like a broader kind of maturity and business perspective because a lot of engineers, as, you know, love them, they just want to build. And that's great. But to your point, you know, you don't want to over-engineer right out of the gate and you certainly don't want to build something that folks aren't going to want to use, or aren't going to want to pay for or whatever it is that you need to build a sustainable business. So there's a lot of showing restraint there that is really in your own best interest. So what about some of the biggest wins so far with Infinite Giving? I know you all are still relatively early in the journey, but is there anything that stands out in your mind?

[00:38:51] Seth Radman: Yeah, definitely. I mean, just launching our product on time was a massive win. That, I think Karen first shared the idea with me, I think in April of 2021, and then around May or so is when we hired our first engineer. And then we started coding in June. Right. So here we are a team of non-FinTech experts and we started building our product in June. And we released it on October 1st. Which is just unheard of in the FinTech world, that in that period of time we built a whole integration with our custodian, which they expected to take 6 months with 3 senior-level engineers. And we had 2 senior engineers. We got a certified as a registered investment advisor and Karen passed her Series 65, which again, that's a pretty thorough examination that is supposed to take months and months of studying time. And we got all of our boxes checked off from compliance. To be able to satisfy all the SEC needs and FINRA needs so that we could be a legitimate company. So that was probably a big one, just launching ,because I mean so many FinTech companies, they failed to even get their product out because it's just very complicated in the space. And then anytime I hear from a customer and they say that it's improved their life, that's what the game is about for me. That some people, they want to change the whole world. They want to do big things. For me, I'd like to improve 10 or 15 minutes a day in someone's life and help make their day just a little bit easier. 'Cause there could be a lot of stuff that's stressful in their life, but at least I know that while they're using a product that I've built, I have a decent amount of control to make sure that they have a good experience by being very intentional and thoughtful about how he designed it. And so, I mean, obviously we've had big wins, like our first customer. Right? Because until you build it, you don't actually know for sure if anyone's going to use your product. For all, you know, you just wasted 3 to 6 months building something. But our first customer is exciting, and then probably the most exciting thing so far has been when we've had customers email us saying, "Hey, someone just sent us a stock donation." We had no idea how they were going to do it, but then they use Infinite Giving. They thought he was going to take him 2 or 3 hours. It only took 5 minutes and they loved it. And we got an extra $50,000 donation from them that they can write off on their tax return that wasn't going to happen otherwise. That's money that could easily cover a person's salary. They could hire a whole another employee for a year with a nonprofit, or they could deploy those funds to amplify the impact they're making. There's definitely been a few big milestones that we've had so far, but we really have this day zero mentality that we're very early stage. We're brand new. We've had some cool successes along the way, but we're just getting started and we have a lot of work to do still.

[00:41:18] Richard Simms: That's awesome. Yeah, I mean, I'm sure hearing that kind of feedback is super encouraging. And then, you know, what I think is great about the concept, and you're being very modest, but of course, hopefully you're giving folks a good experience just using the product, but you're enabling them to, as you said, amplify their impact. So I think that you and the rest of the team, I am sure, are already getting and will continue to get a lot of warm feelings about really empowering these non-profits. And it is really a win, win, win situation, in my opinion, because really no one's benefiting from that capital sitting idle and not being put to use to help more people. So, I love it. I think that's great. So other question I had there, and kind of the last question I think, and then we'll, we'll start to wind down. What does success look like for Infinite Giving in your mind 1 year from now, 5 from now? Like how do you think kind of the bigger vision of all of this as you grow the product and get more adoption?

[00:42:25] Seth Radman: Yeah, that's a great question. So I think our goal is really to build this financial operating system for nonprofits. That, there's a lot of tools that exist right now to accept cast donations. That's fairly solved problem. There's really beautiful landing page builders, and it's easy to accept donations. We're seeing more and more people, individuals start to invest in alternative assets. That could be cryptocurrencies. It could be a wine. Right? It could be stock. And I always found it a little ironic that most of the world's wealth is held in these alternative assets like stock. Yet non-profits are still only asking primarily for cash donors. Right. And so what we're working on now is to make it easier for people to donate endowments for making it easy for people to donate crypto, stocks. Although alternative assets, we actually had our first nonprofit contact us a couple days ago saying, "Hey, I have a donor who wants to donate an NFT to me. How do I do that?" Right. They have no idea what a wallet is and how to get started, set a Coinbase account. That's just too much for them. Right? So the goal is for us to be this kind of alternative asset management software for non-profits, for them to be able to manage other donations that aren't cash, and eventually cash too. And then beyond that, I think we can expand to a lot of other problems in the finance space that nonprofits experience. Like nonprofits, it's very difficult to open credit cards not in your name, if you're a nonprofit on your personal name. Managing 401(k)s and 403(b)s for non-profits is also a pain. And so I think once we've kind of gotten an initial customer base hooked on our product and really enjoying it, I think there's ways we can kind of land on that customer and then expand to offer additional services to them. So we're, right now we're laser focused exclusively on 501(c)(3) is on non-profit organizations. And that's a pretty broad reach, there's 1.4 million non-profits in the US. Right. So currently we have six customers. Our seventh is coming on in a couple of days, or maybe a couple of weeks. So, beyond that, we're really going to be amping up our sales team. We just brought on RJ who's our Director of Development, business development to really help us get some more inbound and increase our customer base because we've gotten a signal from people that they want this, and they like it, it's very helpful. And now we just got to figure out how to reach more of them.

[00:44:39] Richard Simms: Awesome. That's great. Well, yeah. It's a big space. And like you said, I'm sure there's a lot of related problems that can be addressed within finance and those in the nonprofit world. So I love it. I'm really excited for you all. Thank you so much for coming on. Seth has been a lot of fun. So before we sign off, where can listeners go to connect with you and to learn more about Infinite Giving?

[00:45:02] Seth Radman: Yeah. Great question. If you want to get in touch with me, I'm pretty active on LinkedIn. So just look me up Seth Radman, and I'd be happy to get in touch with you. If interested in Infinite Giving, just go to our website, infinitegiving.com. There's a nice big contact button in top. If you want to schedule a quick call with us just to learn more and see if we could be a good fit, we'd love to chat.

[00:45:20] Richard Simms: All right. Awesome. And I'll definitely keep my ears open for folks that work at nonprofits that I know. Ask them a little bit about how they're doing it now. Awesome. Well, thanks again. It's been great having you on the Digital Footprint and, appreciate it Seth. Talk to you later. 

[00:45:35] Seth Radman: Thanks for having me Richard. I'll see ya.