Anthony Pisapia

When we landed in Philly, one of the first things we did was a needs assessment of the community.  We got funders together, we held forums.  It was a huge boon for us later on.  We generated tons of great data to use in proposals and in designing our services.

Now, if you ask anyone if they want something for free they’ll say yes, so we took it one step further.  We asked the community how much they could pay for our services and how much they had budgeted for technology in general.  This might be surprising to some, but the answer was not zero.

Nonprofits had a budget to pay for our services.  It was a small budget.  It was unattractive to for-profits, but it wasn’t zero.

So how many other verticals are there for which needy people (or organizations) have a budget?  No matter how low, is there a budget there?  If there is, think about what you would have to do to design a product for that budget.

Very powerful nonprofits can be built through earned revenue.   Ask yourself, does it need to be free?