2020 Q3 Goals
What I learned as an early volunteer for the Yang 2020 presidential campaign
Aside from helping out with a few small city council races I am typically apolitical. I had never volunteered for or donated to a national or even statewide candidate before.
But starting in April 2019, I supported Andrew Yang’s presidential campaign as a volunteer leader.
Spring 2019
Summer 2019
Fall 2019
Winter 19/20
In ten months’ time I witnessed a groundswell of support that catapulted the “longer than a longshot” candidate and polling below 1% nationally to around 10%. He made all but one of the eight DNC debate stages despite a constantly rising polling threshold.
There was a great deal that drew me to the campaign, including:
Universal healthcare as a mechanism for driving mobility and happiness
I have long held the belief that the lack of universal healthcare stifles new venture creation in our country and across the globe and there is starting to be some data to support it. It is quite hard to strive for your special north star unicorn unique purpose if you are worried about your health or of your loved ones’ while absolutely terrified about the associated costs. Presidential Candidate Marianne Williamson is known for saying “We don’t have a health care system in the United States, we have a sickness care system” and she is right. If an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure we would see tremendous savings by enabling preventative instead of reactionary care.
A modern economy and government
I could list a dozen of policies that seem to nest under “our government is operating on Windows 95” concerns.
If you are not a billionaire or an oligarch there is this pesky little problem of paying for the business underlying your campaign.
Politics is especially interesting because donations are the only thing that can fund a candidate’s efforts outside of their personal assets. Unlike for profit entities, raising money for a political campaign is restricted by federal regulation, limiting its funds pipeline and operating budget, both factoring into the campaign’s popularity and coverage.
The need to fundraise takes away from the real work of politics. Instead of building a community around the vision the forcing function instead becomes money raised. Without money there is no campaign, it can’t exist. In July 2019 I subscribed to email updates from every single presidential campaign. For the past eight months I received on average15 emails a day, roughly one for each campaign, and nearly all of them calling for donations.
In the end of the primary cycle I was asked for money 3,400 times, once a day by each campaign for eight months.
I worry that money is a fundamental threat to our democracy, that participation–and success–in elections can be purchased. Which is why I support publicly funded elections to bring dignity back to politics.
A political campaign is not only a contest of ideas but also an exercise in building an enterprise. In less than a year, the Yang campaign went from a handful of staff to 230 people on payroll at the end of 2019.
When I joined the campaign’s volunteer channel on Slack in May 2019 there were around 1,000 of us , and in the end of February 2020 the channel boasted around 20,000 members. That is 20x growth in 7 months. As with any enterprise, and certainly one with such exponential growth, leveling up brings necessary changes. It can no longer be business as usual when your organization is 100 people deep up from 10 in less than six months. You can’t manage 100 people the same way you managed 10.
At every step along the journey,campaigns need to adjust how it operates and changes with growth.
Most of the narrative for the 2020 democratic presidential primary was effectively about how one candidate was outperforming expectations and another was underperforming. But your performance can only be measured if you’ve been in the arena before. Like Donald Trump in 2016, Andrew Yang stood out as he bypassed the expectations game and was allowed to write much of the narrative around his campaign. Nobody was constantly holding them up to a measuring stick based on past performance or prior comps. By bypassing the expectations game you can focus on what really matters and avoid riding the “pollercoaster”.
With politics the volunteer wrinkle is particularly interesting. Just by nature of being a citizen and human being in America we are all brought into the stakes of the game. For many volunteers the drive to improve our collective circumstance takes them to make it their full time jobs. I met more than a handful of volunteers that had stopped their vocational work to campaign full time for free. I met a new mom who did Voter ID calling for the campaign who regularly logged a 40+ hour work week just as a volunteer. That rarely happens in other industries.
The best thing about my time in the Yang Gang has been the people. Every staff and volunteer member I met was both earnest and kind and genuinely wonderful.
I expect to be involved and update this post at the 2024 election.
I try to believe that people are default good and will try to be helpful if it is 1) easy and 2) doesn’t negatively impact their lives. When you give them an incentive to care they care even more.
This is why I’m constantly surprised how few businesses fully leverage the power of getting new customers from existing customers.
I notice two recurring problems:
If you have a personal relationship with your customer (think B2B or Services) and you have provided them a tremendous amount of value just asking them for referrals without an incentive should generally work. If they don’t like you enough to make a referral you should get better at business.
The catch is it needs to be as easy as possible for them to make the referral and the asker must do a ton of work upfront to ensure this.
A good test for this is can they make a referral from their mobile phone. The more work on the referrer the less likely they are to follow through.
Roy Bahat has a very good formula that is used for intros but can easily be repurposed for referrals.
The key is highlighting the wins you put together for your client or customer.
Must-haves:
At a minimum reviewing your customer list quarterly and asking for referrals is a great way to get started.
If you don’t have a 1:1 relationship with your customer because you are selling a branded good, commodity, or high volume product they still likely care enough if they have the right incentive. The key is the incentive has to be meaningful to the consumer and commensurate with the value of the referral.
The annual or lifetime customer value is a good benchmark for how much you can spend or discount to make it worthwhile.
That can come in the form of a one-off gift card with an ambassador or refer a friend model all the way up to a % of the sale for affiliates. The key is making it matter to the customer
I see so many companies giving a token gift instead of a meaningful carrot.
For example, I have been an OrangeTheory Fitness customer for nearly a year. I pay $200 a month happily. The carrot is an entry to a raffle for an Amazon gift card. With a few hundred members I have a sub 1% chance of getting anything at all and nowhere near the value I will bring if a friend joins.
The holy grail is an affiliate relationship. The customer gets a % of the sale either one time or recurring.
Click here to see what products I am an affiliate for and help me pay off my student loans.
It gets a little complicated with accounting and 10-99s but can be lucrative for everyone involved. A majority of Smart Passive Income’s funds come from affiliate deals.
From what I’ve seen most businesses can profitably give away 10% of the sale for a reliable channel or source. Some SaaS products do 30+%.
I’d be hard-pressed to find a business beyond groceries that couldn’t benefit from investing more in this area. I would venture to guess that this channel is low hanging fruit for at least half the businesses I come across
Mike Smith, management consultant by day and venture capitalist by night. I 
, underdogs & roads less traveled
