ScaleGrowth for Communities

After working with numerous impact-driven startups in Silicon Valley, one thing Anna learned is - the most impactful way to bring innovations globally at scale is through communities, such as The Elevate Prize.

From this experience, Anna decided to build the ScaleGrowth community platform to help and empower community leaders through technology, data-science, and out-of-box tools, to achieve greater good and elevate humanity at scale.

Anna co-founded ScaleGrowth after 10+ years of working startups as a hands-on head of growth, having led many to successful growth or exits in the field of sustainability, smart power, and mission-driven marketplaces.

Prior to ScaleGrowth, Anna also founded Ysquared.io to provide growth as a service for clients ranging from tech startups such as the next unicorn noodle.ai, to Fortune 500 such as Apple. Her expertise lies in implementing growth practices proven by the most successful ventures through a scalable framework for her customers.

Communities are the cornerstone for elevating humanity at a global scale. In this digital age, more communities are brought online for the possibilities of being connected everywhere, at any time. 

Yet, according to Gartner, "70% of the online community fails". Fostering successful communities is hard. It takes dedication, collaboration, expertise, resources, and time to bring people together and achieve great impact.

ScaleGrowth is on a mission to empower leaders to create better communities. We have a cloud-based technology platform that provides the end-to-end solutions, out-of-the-box tools, data-science engines, and resources for community leaders to quickly build safe inclusive virtual homes (digital hubs) for their members to connect, engage, share, and interact.

What's missing is a training ground led by world-class community leaders to incubate the next generation of incredible individuals to carry on and amplify the impact. ScaleGrowth Incubator for Community leaders is our project.

We humans are social beings. We are most comfortable when we’re connected, being heard, feeling seen, sharing emotions and stories, and led by leaders to keep us safe and together. This is often achieved by having communities. In our digital age, (especially during the Covid) more and more communities are shifting online.

70% communities were short-lived due to the lack of commitment, dedicated time, budget, expertise (in both business & technology), resources, leadership, a long term vision, and the ability to track and measure progress and impacts. Consequently, the lack of strong and impactful communities left hundreds of millions of us solitary, feeling isolated, disconnected, and alone.

ScaleGrowth is on a mission to solve this problem by building a community platform that provides a single comprehensive offering of technology, out-of-the-box app and digital experiences toolkit, data-science engine, resources, expertise, mentorship, and a playground to incubate the next generation of great leaders to build better communities.

We'd like to offer this platform free of charge for mission-driven leaders from under-privileged communities to help them make their impact. By empowering communities and community leaders, we are elevate humanity at a global scale.

ScaleGrowth is on a mission to empowering community leaders to build better communities, and through this, elevate humanity at a global scale.

We have a cloud-based platform that provides end-to-end technology solutions, out-of-the-box digital experiences, data-science engines, and resources for community leaders to quickly build safe and inclusive virtual homes (digital hubs) for their members to connect, engage, share and interact.

One important component to bring ScaleGrowth impactful is a training ground led by world-class community leaders to incubate the next generation of incredible individuals that can carry on and amplify the impacts made by communities. The ScaleGrowth Incubator for Community leaders is the project which we'd be honored to gain The Elevate Prize's support.

Through this project, we aim to achieve the followings:

• Use ScaleGrowth platform to build the Incubator for Community Leaders training ground.
• Provide ScaleGrowth Platform for mission-driven leaders around the world to launch and grow their communities for FREE
• Launch a mentoring program to bring world-class community leaders to share their experience, expertise, and provide guidance
• Connect mission-driven leaders from under-privileged communities with mentors and role models from the most successful communities across all fields
• Create evergreen content and training materials based on proven best practices

ScaleGrowth Incubator for Community Leaders serves mission-driven community leaders from around the world and their members directly.

Building and growing successful communities is hard. It takes dedication, collaboration, expertise (in both business and technologies), resourced, and time to bring people together and achieve great impacts.

The project will provide community leaders the technologies, tools, resources, expertise, mentorship, and a training ground form them to builder better communities while providing maximum value for the members across the world, especially for those under privileged communities. 

A platform is only successful when those who use it are far more successful.

ScaleGrowth is a platform that will help community leaders to builder better communities. 

We are not solving just one problem - we are building a platform that has the potential to help millions of communities through empowering their community leaders.

When community leaders are equipped with the right technology, tools, experience, expertise and resources, they will be the driving force of solving the most difficult problems of our world. We aim to make their journey easier by giving them the tools they need.

After working with numerous impact-driven startups in Silicon Valley, one thing I learned is that, the most impactful way to bring innovations globally at scale is through communities.

My co-founder and myself started by building a platform that connects world-class advisors with awesome startups. When we took our platform to onboard accelerators and VC firms around the world, they asked us if they can use our platform to manage their own communities, and this got us to rethink our platform and pivot it to become a SaaS (software-as-a-service) platform to service more and more communities.

We already built out the technology, tools, and our custom AI engine, but we also realize that technology alone is not enough to build awesome communities. The human experience is key to this mission, and that's what we must incorporate to complete the platform - a training ground to cultivate amazing leaders for the future communities.

I deeply believe that by empowering communities and community leaders, we are elevate humanity at a global scale. And building a platform is one of the most effective way to achieve that.

Both myself and my co-founder were fortunate enough to have many doors open for us via our experiences working in Silicon Valley, and the network that comes with that. However, I still remember the time when I first made the plunge into my area of passion – growth – from a completely different industry with no help or support, and how hard it was. Yet there are so many people in the world who are starting from an even more difficult place, due to the sheer lottery of where they were born We would love to give back to the world by helping those less privileged then us find the support network they need to succeed.

Yes we are well-positioned to deliver this project. We already have the existing ScaleGrowth platform as the tech foundation for this project, and necessary tools to readily solve any challenges. 

My team and I also have extensive experience working with other community leaders around the world to build and grow their communities through ScaleGrowth platform, and most of experiences lies in the startup ecosystem. This both creates a unique opportunity to transplant best practices that lead to success to other industries, as well as access to mentors and role models from top tier organizations who use our platform.

Personally, I have experiences working with impact-driven startups from various industries. This greatly helps my ability to work closely with different communities and understand their needs and challenges.

Additionally, my co-founder Victor has been a CTO / CPO of several listed and high-growth companies in the technology space, and has a tremendous depth of experience building highly-successful community-driven platforms including Yelp, Indiegogo, and Redbubble. He also brings Data Science and Product expertise which is critical to create impactful community platforms.

We were engaged with the RMIT University [Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology] in Melbourne, Australia, starting work on a big new technical project when Covid-19 hit. For personal & family reasons, we made the decision to move back home to the United States.

Within a week, we had to completely reimagine the entire program for this project from scratch to be remote on a short notice – and we did this while booking 7 different flights with the airlines cancelling 6 of them, packing our life up, and driving up to Sydney to fly from there. Despite this, we successfully designed the new communication channels and daily cadence to ensure the program continuity. At the end, it turned out to be an extremely successful project.

As a result, our entire team has taken advantage of this situation to learn how to work better remotely. We are now globally distributed, and have successfully enabled ourselves to work on projects worldwide much more efficiently.

A good leader is being the support for everyone else around you. And very often, it's how you make others feel that makes the difference. And I try to practice this everyday.

A recently example - in the midst of COVID, we hired a full time employee to join our team. It was a tough decision, however, this note from our new hire completed changed my perspective:

"What I love about my job at ScaleGrowth is that I am able to direct my passion for design and user experience to take ownership of and shape the frontend. As a female in Information Technology that has struggled to fit into any sort of label or stereotype, it is refreshing that my opinion is important and I am not made to fit into any sort of box within my role.” Tracy expressed.

https://www.linkedin.com/feed/... 

"At the end of the day people won't remember what you said or did, they will remember how you made them feel." Maya Angelou

ScaleGrowth is a platform that will help community leaders to builder better communities. And a platform is only successful when those who use it is far more successful.

On a platform level, ScaleGrowth is not solving just one problem - by building a platform, we have the potential to help millions of communities to solve millions of other problems through empowering their community leaders.

When community leaders are equipped with the right technology, tools, experience, expertise and resources, they will be driving force to solving the most difficult problems of our world.

On the technology level, we are the first Self-service Community Platform that comes with out-of-the box machine learning and AI engine to supercharge members interactions and engagements.

Our theory of change is in ripple effect, and the ScaleGrowth platform has the ripple effect.

Empowering others to drive change creates an incredibly powerful leverage of impact, as well as helps inspire further leadership and change that was unimaginable at the origin.

This is what our platform is all about.

ScaleGrowth is currently serving thousand of users.

Our goal is to serve 10,000 users in one year.

and 5 millions users in 5 years.

One year goals:

• Achieve 10,000 active users milestone
• Launch ScaleGrowth Incubator for Community Leaders
• Continue to improve our product to serve communities and networks in industry verticals other than startup communities

Five year goals:

• Achieve 5 million active users milestone
• ScaleGrowth Incubator for Community Leaders is success and sustainable
• ScaleGrowth is THE go-to platform to launch, grow, manage, engage any community.

1. Lack of Domain Expertise in varies industries: Our current domain of expertise lie in technology and startup ecosystems. We are lacking experiences and expertise in every other industries to provide the knowledge to support their communities. The market barrier is the lack of domain expertise.
2. We are also a bootstrapped startup. With the current COVID environment, fundraising might be challenging which might slow down our growth.
3. Finally, while we are striving to offer our platform as free of charge for mission-driven causes that benefit the humanity, we can only afford to do it to a certain extent, because running said platform is not free. One of the barriers is identifying the most impactful opportunities of giving back through donating platform access in kind.

1. To overcome the barrier of lacking domain expertise, we believe the Incubator for Community Leaders will be instrumental. The Incubator program will bring world-class community leaders from different industries the remove the barriers.
2. We have saving which will give us time to ramp up revenue to be self-sustainable in case fundraise is delayed.
3. We are exploring community proposal submissions for our Giving Back program. And learning a lot from your process! :)

Stone and Chalk

LifeChanger Foundation

CITRIS Foundry

ScaleGrowth for-profit portion will be a subscription model per active users per month. However, through this Incubator for Community Leaders, we plan to offer our platform for under privileged mission-driven communities for FREE.

Longer-term, we hope that the success of our commercial arm helps us fund and support our Incubator for Community Leaders initiative, and lets us expand the offering it provides to more and more people.

ScaleGrowth is for-profit and serving for-profit organization and communities as paid customers. The for-profit revenue will help to fund the Free service for under privileged communities.

We will continue to seek partnerships and sponsorships to fund the Incubator for Community Leaders.

We are bootstrapped startup. Both founders together invested $150,000 to ScaleGrowth so far. We are also generating some revenue already, which is a great directional validation of our business model – however at this point in time, our spend is far greater than our revenue.

We plan to raise a round of convertible note for Seed round.

Expenses for 2020: $126,000 (without the Incubator for Community Leaders Project)

We believe The Elevate Prize is the perfect partner to take ScaleGrowth to as many communities as possible, and together, create our Incubator for Community Leaders as the training ground for the future of community leaders.

The Elevate Prize will immediately help the top three identified barriers:

1. Lack of domain expertise in varies industries - The Elevate Prize's reputation and network will be able to invite world-class community leaders to mentors the next generation individuals, and take ScaleGrowth to enter other industries where we currently are not present.
   
   We also look for guidance to create impactful and resourceful content that will empower community leaders.
   
2. Financially, $300,000 prize will be instrumental to help us focus on development amazing product and serve our users and communities without worrying about fundraising in the next 12 months.
   
3. Helping us identify the highest impact opportunities for our Free offering for cause-driven leaders from under-privileged communities.