Million Dollar Monday
Million Dollar Monday
Beam Impact's Mission to Shift $10 Billion from Brands to Non-Profits
SHOWNOTES
“Customers today are so anxious that they’re not making a big enough impact in their day-to-day lives,” reveals Viveka Hulyalkar. “They would not only switch brands; they would even pay extra for a brand that they believe is more socially responsible.” The Co-Founder and CEO of Beam Impact shares how to turn consumer behaviors into cash to make a tangible impact. Listen to Hulyalkar’s story and valuable advice here.
Chapter Summaries:
1:28 - Introducing Viveka Hulyalkar
6:28 - Motivated by Social Change
9:39 - How to Leverage your Spending Power
16:40 - The Beginning of Beam
20:24 - It's Not Always Smooth Sailing
22:37 - Impactful Advice
Takeaways:
- And that was really the light switch moment for me, that business can be such a powerful tool to accelerate innovation. And the scale of an organization you can build really quickly can drive impact of the same scale or even larger, so much faster.
- Yep. So many people have ideas, right? They think about it even, but they don't pick up the phone because fear of rejection. And at the end of the day, what's the worst thing that happened, they don't answer the phone; they don't call you back.
- Customers today are so anxious that they're not making a big enough impact in their day-to-day lives, that they would not just switch. They'd even pay more for a brand that they believe is more socially responsible
- I like to reverse engineer goals and make a game plan and continuously revise it rather than throwing the game plan out of the window when things change
- Listen to your customers
- I think younger people are looking to really make a big impact on the world.
- So like you said, we're on a mission to shift $10 billion from brands to high-impact nonprofits, by making the most mission-driven brands in each category win. So the way we're doing that is we are building a platform where you can turn your spending power into direct funding for nonprofits and brands that share your values
Resource Links:
Connect with Viveka Hulyalkar:
LinkedIn | Instagram | Twitter
Connect with Beam Impact:
LinkedIn | Instagram | Website
Hello, and welcome to Million Dollar Monday. I'm your host, Greg Ello, bringing you real successful people with real useful advice for people with big dreams. I understand big dreams. I turned an investment of$200 and a lot of great advice from some really successful people into my big dream proforma that today is a half billion dollar company.
Speaker 2:Oh,
Speaker 3:Well, hello and welcome. I am excited to introduce a brilliant young lady who is seeking to have a massive impact on the world and make it a better place. Now, by impact, I mean massive. I mean 10 billion massive. And she's not just by herself in thinking this, uh, she's been already recognized by Forbes 30 under 30 for the way she thinks and for her idea in this business. I am excited to introduce to you the co-founder and CEO at Beam Impact Vivica, Pollak Vivica, thanks for joining us.
Speaker 4:Thank you so much, Greg. I'm so excited to be here.
Speaker 3:Well, I'm excited to hear your story because how old are you?
Speaker 4:I am 28.
Speaker 3:28. And already thinking about having 10 billion impact. So we're gonna get to that, how you and your idea and, uh, uh, uh, all the believers at Beam Impact can get that done. Let's start though at the beginning, just sort of briefly, you know, talk to us a little bit about your growing up years, your, uh, school years. I know you had a few jobs and internships along the way, but where did you learn your passion for business and more clearly your passion for funding that, not for profits, and really having the kind of massive impact you're seeking to have?
Speaker 4:Thank you so much. Um, definitely. So I'm from Cleveland, Ohio. Oh, uh, proud Midwesterner. And, um, yeah, I, I, growing up, I, one thing that's unique about my experiences, my parents immigrated to the us they from India, and I think, you know, part of my motivation to have a positive social impact is probably informed by that in some way. Mm-hmm.<affirmative>, I was just so aware of the privilege that I had. I always had a consciousness of, um, you know, how much power and how lucky I was to be able to make decisions and have a lot of freedom in the US from a really early age. Also, my parents are like wildly supportive. So anything that I ever expressed interest in doing, they would say, Go do that. You can do that. Why not? So that really made me believe and want to take a lot of action. And I have all kinds of entrepreneurial schemes. I was running from a really early age. I didn't know that's what it was. And along the way, actually, so in high school I started an environmental nonprofit. Um, and you know, at first I started as a student group. And being from Cleveland, you know, the number one way to promote anything is to try to partner with the calves. It is all about LeBron James. So I just called the number I found online and one thing led to another and the NBA actually ended up sponsoring us. And eventually we installed a million dollars worth of solar panels and local schools within a year. And that experience taught me so much. Yeah. I'd never thought it was gonna happen that fast,
Speaker 3:Slow now, slow down. Where'd you get this idea? Install, install solar panels.
Speaker 4:Um, you know, it was always, it seemed like a horizon thing that probably wouldn't happen while I was in high school. Mm-hmm.<affirmative>. Um, the first project that we had was installing motion sensing light switches in schools in order to reduce energy use when people weren't in the room. And then we started, um, you know, it was always a goal to reduce the school's reliance on fossil fuels. Okay. But we started building solar panels because I figured out that was cheaper than trying to buy them.
Speaker 3:Where does the idea come from to involve the calves and, and call LeBron?
Speaker 4:Honestly, that was like a large part of my consciousness growing up. It's like, you gotta get the cabs involved. It was second nature, Greg. Okay. How did you not call the cabs? So, I found a business development number online. Um, they happened to be having NBA Green Week coming up soon, and they really loved the story that we were building solar panels, these teenagers. So we brought a solar panel to, at the time what was called the queue, and it's been renamed since then. Um, and you know, the, it kept snowballing from there in terms of the support that it generated.
Speaker 3:So at the end of the day, had an idea, wanted to raise some money and you just picked up the phone.
Speaker 4:Yes, exactly. Cold calling. It worked. Yep.
Speaker 3:Yep. So many people have ideas, right? Mm-hmm.<affirmative>, they think about it even, but they don't pick up the phone because fear of rejection. And at the end of the day, what's the worst thing that happened? They don't answer the phone. They don't call you back. Nothing terrible could happen. It's wonderful. All right. So you raised some money here and, and, and I know in college you had some internships.
Speaker 4:I I was involved with a lot of organizations in college. I loved Brown. Um, and I, so I, I started initiatives and joined startups that were supported by Clinton Global Initiative and the government of India. But going into college, I knew I was really motivated by social change. I thought I wanted to work at the un and then I interned there. I interned at a committee of the UN the summer after freshman year and realized it was really bureaucratic, incredibly impactful work, but not the type of impact that necessarily motivated me. I wanted to see the change that I'm making. And that kind of drew me to, then I got a fellowship to expand operations of a nonprofit that I was, uh, helping to lead, uh, that was combating anemia in India the summer after my sophomore year. And that was, I think that was really the light switch moment for me, that business can be such a powerful tool to accelerate innovation. And the scale of an organization you can build really quickly can drive impact of the same scale or even larger so much faster. Right.
Speaker 3:Right. Right. So you got close to working with impactful organizations and impactful people, but you direct weren't directly having enough impact. And, and, and so where does the idea for Beam Impact come from?
Speaker 4:Yeah, definitely. So it all started with that experience with the nba, honestly, and it crystallized a lot later, but I never thought that we would be able to achieve that goal so fast. And what I realized is that brands I already loved Greg were giving so much money to things that mattered to me. And I had zero idea as a consumer somehow, and neither did any of my friends. And then later fast forward, continued to start social initiatives in college, learned that this was what really motivated me mm-hmm.<affirmative> and decided I wanna go work in consulting. I wanna get seasoned as an executive. I wanna start a big impactful company. So I went to McKinsey after college and worked at their office in New York. Um, and while I was at McKinsey, I realized a lot of the same brands that I had interacted with, like the nba, are actively looking for better ways to hang on to young customers because loyalty is broken and the only incentive that's ever used are flash sales. And flash sales are great. I, as a consumer certainly love a flash sale from time to time, but they're super transactional and it can be a race to the bottom in terms of margins, right?
Speaker 3:Sure.
Speaker 4:But yeah, meanwhile, customers today are so anxious that they're not making a big enough impact in their day to day lives that they would not just switch, they'd even pay more for a brand that they believe is more socially responsible. So if you're talking to that side of the same person, it's a completely different dynamic. And meanwhile, I knew from my experience at the NBA that so many brands out there are having an incredible impact, but no one knows. And as it turns out, 89% of customers that they have zero idea if any of the brands that they're buying from are doing anything to have a positive impact on the environment or society.
Speaker 3:So 89% don't know how many of them care.
Speaker 4:You know, 70% would pay more. So that's 70%. Lot of people care. Yeah. Wow.
Speaker 3:So 70% would pay more, but many of them don't know. Maybe don't ask even. Right. But, uh, but would pay more. Exactly. If they, maybe if they were, if they were aware they'd pay more, but they just don't know.
Speaker 4:Exactly. And it's because, you know, what we hear all the time is people say, I know when to stop buying from a brand. I know when to delete the Uber app. I hear when there's a scandal or something bad going on. I don't know how to find brands that are actively doing things that are really good. And the other thing, Greg, that we learned is so many people feel powerless right now. Like we feel like we see these massive issues like climate change and, you know, gun control. And people feel like, What can I personally do? And they're deleting news apps to, in the name of self-preservation because they're so concerned, they feel like they can't do anything. Yeah. Right. It's like, it's what people feel like they have to do. And to me and my co-founder Alex, who's an early engineer at Tinder, we just became obsessed with this problem that people need tools to use their turn their power into direct impact every day. We need to build feedback loops. And the thing is, we do have power. Our spending power really decides who
Speaker 3:Wins spending power. Yes. So, so how does, how does Beam impact take spending power and turn that into impact for the buyer?
Speaker 4:Absolutely. So like you said, we're on a mission to shift 10 billion from brands to high impact non-profits by making the most mission driven brands in each category win. So the way we're doing that is we are building a platform where you can turn your spending power into direct funding for non-profits. Mm-hmm.<affirmative> at brands that share your values. And for brands, it's a stickier way to connect with customers than just constant flash sales. So basically we're building this network of brands, our biggest partners, Ikea, We walk work with lots of fast casual restaurants like dig in, do Toros, um, the Grey Dog in New York. And we're really seeing exponential growth in e-commerce. So direct to consumer brands like Parade, make the label, Ministry of Supply, et cetera. And basically we let you make 1% of what you spend at these brands, go to a nonprofit that you choose from a set of options reflecting what they stand for, Right. With no extra cost.
Speaker 3:Right? Right. So when I first heard that, I thought, Hmm, is that 1% coming from my rebate from the credit card company? Or is it coming outta my pocket? Explain where that comes from. Cuz the answer is no. I don't anybody think that it does zero cost to the end user consumer. It's brilliant how you fund this. It is brilliant how not only gets funded, but how also you make money. Can you explain that?
Speaker 4:Thank you so much. Absolutely. So these brands are donating to the non-profits directly. 1% of what you are spending anyway. And a way of thinking about it is it is a higher return, lower cost version of a 10% off win back discount because customers want to make a bigger impact. When I choose my nonprofit, I can track my impact towards goals. I can see like funding the removal of a thousand pounds of plastic from the ocean that gets customers excited. They come back more often, they refer their friends at a higher rate because they want a larger percentage of the, what they spend to go to brands that support what they believe in. So we're able to drive much stickier, higher quality loyalty than traditional solutions on the market. And brands pay us a subscription fee for the increases in sales that we drive. So it's guaranteed to be ROI positive for brands. A combined cost of what they're donating and what they're paying us will be less than the additional sales that they see. And for customers, it is a way to tangibly use our collective spending power and make sure that brands that are walking the walk for social issues, actually investing in racial equity, not just posting a black tile on Instagram or winning. How
Speaker 3:Long did that kind of take from? I think this is a good idea to say we have a pretty rock solid concept here.
Speaker 4:Um, and I'll answer that for sure. The other thing I wanna add in, Greg, is we had to validate two different stakeholders. We had to validate demand from businesses, we had to validate demand from users also. Like, is this something that people want? So I basically talked to different businesses, ask them, is this something that you would find valuable? They said yes. And I said, Can we validate that with your customers and they'd find it valuable. So they gave me permission to stand nights and weekends. Students in like coffee shops with an iPad, surveying potential users. We talked to 800 users and we said, Do you feel like you're making enough impact? How would you wanna make a bigger impact? And how socially responsible do you think this company is that you're visiting today? Mm-hmm.<affirmative>, many of these were investing tons of money very intentionally in making an impact. They had no idea. So then we took that back to the brands and said, you know, clearly there is an opportunity to increase awareness. If we built this product, would you use it? And at that point, they were bought in. So that was everything we did in the background that maybe took, um, couple of months of pure just feedback and surveying, et cetera. Um, and then we built a very, very, by we, I mean I at that point got a kid from Brown, paid him 300 bucks to build a super, super minimal mvp. And this is, I think, a big piece of advice. So many people wanna put like a really sexy product out in the market. It's not worth investing in if it doesn't work. You don't know if it works until we put something bad out there. As Reid Hoffman says, If you're not embarrassed by it, it's too late. So super minimal, minimal viable product. Um, and then I stood in coffee shops and got people to download it. It had four buttons. Uh, it was an app. It had four buttons for non-profits, and then a number representing impact, growing very minimal. We saw people coming back more and more often at the places where we were piloting this and even asking owners of locations outside of our pilots, How come I can't use this here yet? So at that point, this all was on the side of Mackenzie. At that point, these for businesses wanted to expand, and I thought, Okay, I need a cto. I need, you know, I need to be doing this full time. Like I can't support expansion into 30 locations yet. Um, so at that point I started looking for a co-founder. So that process was maybe another two or three months. Um, and then I, well like bothering everybody in my life, like who are the technical people that you know, can I get them on the phone, Tell them what I'm thinking about? We had some validation, which helped de-risk it for a potential co-founder. So, um, like I just wanna know who they know, who could be a good fit. And passing just an email blur along was not gonna do it. I needed to get on the phone and convince them to believe, to tell that someone else, like who's an incredible engineer. Like, hey, this person is really worth talking to. Right, Right. So eventually talked to 60 people. Wow. That eventually found my co-founder, my co-founder soulmate Alex, who is brilliant. She was an early engineer at Tinder, also on the strategy committee with them as they scaled and really knew so much and incredible instincts around building habit, forming products, but more importantly, wanted to build a massive company that could fundamentally change people's lives and make the world better. And we had a very similar view of leadership of, you know, we didn't wanna just start a company and turn it over for a quick exit, which no shame in that game either. Um, we wanted to build something big together and we started contracting on the side to test the waters since it's such a foundational relationship. And we did that for three months. She invested her equity at Tinder during that time. And also we realized like, Hey, this seems really, really strong. So we both flew to San Francisco. She was in Los Angeles, I was in New York at the time, Met in person in San Francisco. There was an investor related thing happening at the time, um, and decided to make it official. And she quit her job, moved to New York, stayed on my couch for a while, and that's when we, that was the end of that was the very beginning of 2018. We incorporated the company. So that's everything up to incorporation.
Speaker 3:All right. So, and, and the first idea came along to do this 2017. So about a year, all, all told almost mm-hmm.<affirmative> from the idea to proving it out, to finding a partner and then having this partner agree to come and work with you. And, alright, so it's 2018, you've got a partner. Did you raise money before you started doing what, what were the pieces, parts that happened next? You've got a partner now, What do you do?
Speaker 4:That is a great question also. So we, because my co-founder and I, Alex and I had a vision of building a really big company. We were very delusion sensitive. We didn't wanna give up a large share of the equity and friends and family angele seed. Right. Um, so what we decided to do is we did a couple things. We decided that we would quit our jobs and we had enough money saved to bootstrap until we could raise an institutional round. Um, so what that meant is I had to figure out how long will it take us to raise an institutional round? What do you need to do? So before I quit my job to go back in time a bit, I started talking to investors through friends of friends, cold emailed alumni of my college, et cetera, and said, If I were to turn this into a company, what would you need to see from us to invest? And I also had figured out, you know, benchmarks in New York at the time were for a SaaS company, five to 7 million was the standard valuation range. And I said, Okay, what about the median of this range? What were the, what are the, the benchmarks you'd need to see from me? And they told me very tactically, you'd need to have X clients, y users, um, and then you could achieve that. And then I thought, Okay, so maybe this will take us nine months to achieve, so that means I need to save up this much money before I quit my job. Um, and we both had that conversation, Alex and I, So we bootstrapped, we did it, we did what they told us to do, and then we were able to raise around
Speaker 3:In the, Have you had just one round?
Speaker 4:Yes. So we raised 1.7 million, 1.7 at the beginning of Covid. Our investors put in another 500 K for obvious reasons. Those are rocky time.
Speaker 3:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Awesome. It's really exciting. And so by what measure would you say you, where are you at today? Whether it's measured as users or however you measure the size of your, of of Beam impact today?
Speaker 4:Yeah, so we have 80 partners now. Um, we have, uh, we're not disclosing exact user numbers at the moment, but we, I get it. Have close to, well, we have tens of thousands of users. Okay. And, you know, lots of people actively turning their spending power into tangible funding for nonprofits. And we're growing really fast double digit growth month over month every month.
Speaker 3:That's exciting. Thank you. Very exciting. And, uh, and, and I do believe that you can have a 10 billion impact because at the end of the day, sellers truly in their hearts wanna do good. They're probably already doing good. So why not do it, uh, in, in partnership with the customers anyhow. Right. Customers especially, I think younger people are looking to really make a big impact on the world. And so it's just kind of a win-win win. The customer wins, the retailer, the seller wins, and of course, Beam impact wins. So it's really exciting. So you're on your way, you're a young lady, but with a brilliant future and clearly gonna have a massive impact on our world. Uh, tell me what one or two things you think you did wrong along the way or not as well as you could have that you would do better? And then we'll get to the last question.
Speaker 4:Yeah, absolutely. What a question. Um, I think the first thing that comes to mind is hiring. And that definitely is, we've hired amazing people. I don't mean hiring full stop. It was definitely an iterative process to understand the right profile for this company and the specific role as well as how our, over the course of our company's evolution, I talked to so many CEOs, I talked to our investors, What's the profile of the right person? They would say, Get someone who's marketed to, who you're trying to market to, et cetera. Got very tactical advice, got excited about people from, you know, name brand companies that's like, they had worked this incredible company, They were really senior, et cetera. Those people weren't necessarily the scrappiest. Um, and they didn't know what to do in the absence of resources, uh, abundant resources rather. And then, you know, there was a learning process of finding the right person who was really, really motivated, excited, and scrappy. Fundamentally very smart people who may or may not have a ton of crystallized specialized expertise in the functional area of focus, but they could figure it out because they have grit, um, et cetera. So there were a lot of learnings along the way there in terms of what the right profile looks like. And also those are the people in the company who have had longevity over the shift in focus from the native app to the integration.
Speaker 3:Got it, got it. Got it. And it makes, it makes, it makes a lot of sense. So did your gut tell you that maybe with the advice you were getting about hiring wasn't quite right? Um, or did it just kind of take doing it the way you were advised to find out it wasn't quite right?
Speaker 4:Um, yeah, I think, like, I think I, I've talked to most, most founders I know have experienced this. I'd love to hear if you experienced this in your journey, Greg. Um, we, it was a matter of just understanding what the right person looks like and over time, because as someone, you know, we are creating a category defining product and absolutely there aren't exact analogs out there. So we had to think about what are the characteristics that we think would translate the best.
Speaker 3:Right, Right, right. Well, thanks for your honesty and transparency on that answer. Yeah. And so finally, what three big pieces of advice would you share for our listeners who are aspiring entrepreneurs, early state entrepreneurs, or maybe even further along?
Speaker 4:Mm.<affirmative>. Um, number one, I think this gets said all the time, but it is so true. Who your co-founder is, is everything. Um, honestly, so many, and I've seen, I have friends and peers who found co-founders through proximity. Like they had overlapping friend groups, they were roommates, et cetera. And they didn't necessarily have to do the level of diligence that I had to do to find a co-founder. And at first, at the time, I was like, Oh, that's so lucky that they have a built-in co-founder right there. But I think we were so lucky that we went through this rigorous, somewhat formal process to make sure we were fundamentally aligned and have very similar values. And that has been the most impactful thing. Like going through 95% revenue loss and coming back within a period of 11 months was massive. Revenue growth is a hard thing to do. And my co-founder Alex, is amazing. And I think our relationship is the bedrock of how we've gotten through so many challenges together. And they should have, you should have complimentary skill sets with your co-founder. You don't want redundancy of skill, in my view, in the co-founder suite because then you're, you know, creating risk by splitting up equity, uh, a ton with people who do the same things as you and agreed. Yeah. Yeah. I think that there's also benefit in having people who have some areas of overlap in work style and some fundamentally different ways of thinking. So that's like extremely tactical. But my co-founder and I both are very, we're if, if you're, you subscribe to M B T I, we're both Jays in a big way. We're very organized. We love lists, we love documenting processes, and I think we actually got lucky in that regard. If one of us loved that the other one didn't, there could be a lot of friction.
Speaker 3:All right, so pick your co-founder wisely. What's
Speaker 4:Next? Um, two, listen to your customers. Mm-hmm.<affirmative>, like they have the best idea, like, and watch the data. And like for instance, we watched this new integration and we assumed, you know, the results would vary a little bit from our native app, but we assumed that the key value propositions would be directionally consistent getting cus seeing customers spend more and come back more often. Okay. One thing that's emerged that we never expected is we're dramatically increasing conversion rate. So the number of people who start a transaction who finish it. And that's because our customers told us, Hey, our site conversion rate has gone way up. We think maybe this has to do with Beam. Can we run a test? And then we got, we got continued to get feedback from them around how, what else, what are your other pain points? What are you seeing from working with us? So our product has evolved mm-hmm.<affirmative> in a way that we never expected it to, and our customers have had a ton of wisdom on that journey.
Speaker 3:So listen, listen to the customers and you, would you consider both the retailers, the sellers or whoever a customer and also the users of the, So you kinda have almost two customer sets.
Speaker 4:A hundred percent. Another example of that is on the user side. So we call them customers and users. I got it. Okay. Thanks. Yeah. So our users, uh, we were very fortunate to have one of our clients fund focus groups for us. Uh, they got a third party market research firm to talk to cost$40,000. We never would've been able to afford that at that stage. Um, but talked to hundreds of people who used our product and one thing that kept coming up was, we want to, it's great that I can see my impact. I wanna understand what I'm a part of with the entire customer community. Interesting. So that's, we built features around that. So now you have a direct visualization. I personally with my purchase, remove 10 pounds of plastic from the ocean. The entire community is 70% of the way to something much bigger. Number three, um, I think this is again really tactical, but like reverse engineer goals and just make a game plan and continuously revise it rather than throwing the game plan out of the window when things change. So our general strategy, which I think has worked really well, is figuring out what do I need to get to the next step? Like at the very beginning it was, you know, you need a technical co-founder, X clients, Y users. So then I figured out how to do those things and then we did that together. Um, and then in every step of the process, you can do that again. Like, what is the next milestone? What state can I put in the ground? Get advice from experts in the field, people with more experience than you around what success looks like. In one year. You should have X pretty much anyone, you, you should be able to find someone who can tell you that you can cold email people for advice. Um, and then once you have that plan, break it down by month, then you can break it down by week. Things are inherently going to change. They will not go according to plan, but that means that you have to revise the plan again. So many people just drop the plan at that point. But yeah, continue to update it.
Speaker 3:Brilliant. Thanks for sharing The one thing that you might do different, thank you for sharing three pieces of advice. Thank you for sharing your enthusiasm and your brilliant idea to have a massive impact on our world. I'm confident that you're on your way to great things with your business and truly great things for lots of not-for-profits and having a massive impact on our world. Thanks for your time.
Speaker 4:Thank you so much, Greg. Thanks for having me.
Speaker 3:For sure.
Speaker 4:Bye.
