Despite requiring significant allocations of mental resources, I am not one to really jabber on about my work recently. There is a slight problem in that our main product has not launched yet, so we are keeping rather tight lipped about its features and the visual and programmatic design. Also, since a great deal of my work is technical in nature with occasional forays into business matters, it is not terribly interesting or accessible to the majority of people. As worthy of my time as I find building an API with 200+ endpoints and testing load balanced environments with multiple horizontal server resources...it lacks a certain dinner hour approachability. Still, I think the time has come to at least start pulling back a bit of the curtain.

We are a little over a month away from inviting Portland individuals, companies, and non-profits to help us beta test, and a splash page is already visible at ImpactFlow.com. Just last week I finished setting up a complete staging environment on the amazing Laravel Forge and we are prepping to start our internal testing at the end of next week. The pressure is beginning to build; it is quite exciting (if a bit stressful). So, what is this mysterious ImpactFlow?

ImpactFlow is a marketplace for philanthropy, where individuals and businesses manage their giving like investments to support the causes they care most about.

Nonprofits showcase their projects and get matched to funds from donors they know are interested in the work they are doing.

Philanthropy is a Big Word™ that has quite a bit of weight behind it. At its core, it is a catchall term meaning one is trying to make the world better though some manner of giving, be it money, property, or personal time. Like any product, we are trying to solve a problem. If you are truly serious about having an impact with your giving, it is a messy and inefficient process. Each non-profit has its own website and their specific projects may or may not be on it. How their projects impact the community or world at large may not be readily apparent. Directly investing in specific projects that catch your eye is seldom possible. An individual or company can literally spend months searching for the perfect place to give their money, yet still end up just writing a check to the non-profit as a general donation and only receive monthly emails as a result.

On the flip side, non-profits are always searching for funds and donors. Significant amounts of their budgets are spent researching and applying for grants, contacting donors, and building corporate relationships to insure their projects are funded. Smaller, community-focused non-profits are often overlooked and lose out to more publicly recognizable non-profits. And, if they want to promote how their current projects are doing, they are limited by the capabilities of their website and social media team, if they even have one.

Imagine if you could bring both sides, funders and non-profits, to one place and meet all of those needs. Funders of any size (individuals, groups, corporations) can build their own giving programs to indicate specifically where they want their money to go. Non-Profts have all of their projects online and those projects are instantly matched to existing giving programs. Conversations and collaboration can happen on both sides, and once funded the projects can provide direct reports to their donors on progress and impact.

There is an incredible scope to platform and I cannot discuss the details yet, but that is the seed at the core of it. We want to move beyond giving as it currently stands and allow it to be treated more as a professional investment.

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When I joined the company as a developer at the end of November, I was only the fourth employee and was primarily hired because of my knowledge and experience with the CodeIgniter framework, which I helped build during my time at EllisLab. Two weeks ago I was promoted to VP of Engineering and have finished an expansive API foundation for the entire platform using Laravel. The scope of our work, even at this initial launch phase, is simply mind bending. And our list of future enhancements and features is ambitious to say the least.

To be frank, I took this job because my savings were so depleted after finishing the Pacific Crest Trail that any development position with enough challenge to keep me motivated would have done. Now, after helping to design and build not only the platform but the company itself, I have both an equity and personal investment in its success. There is a real chance that if the platform is successful this might be the last job I ever have. That is a statement I am still surprised to be uttering in public.

The scars of 2012 still haunt me every day. As much as part of me desires to continue the path to becoming a doctor and making the world better that way, I can no longer find the will to plunge into that level of financial and temporal debt. I lost too much faith and became too greedy for a life without that level of sacrifice. But what I can do is use all of my technical skills to help build a company whose mission statement is explicit in its goal to make things better. Not sure how long I will resist the call of extreme outdoor adventures, but I do not mind at least allowing the possibility of sticking around for that.