Let's Build a New Social Network to Keep Politicians Accountable?

We hear lots of promises during elections from our politicians. The problem is how to track the progress of given promises?  

Politicians mastered social media for their communication goals. The technology already gives tools to reach voters and communicate - visions, ideas, and goals but is it enough? 

I always wondered how to divide what specific politicians’ goals are and what was done to achieve them during the X time period. Looking from the private sector perspective every company has a vision, roadmap, goals, and methodology on how they track progress. 

In democratic countries with the help of open data, you can track different information on specific politicians like attendance, voting, asset declaration, meetings …. 

What about tracing specific politician goals?  We have more information on the process then on achieved results. From my point of view, we are more likely to measure politicians by their activity on media than on results.  Media gives all tools to get better exposure, but tracking progress from media is almost impossible. Yes, we have global data stats like GDP and others, but can we understand specific politicians impact on these results.

What if we could make politicians more accountable by providing better data to their voters based on : 

1. Values. 
2. Goals. 
3. Tracking progress (monthly, quarterly, yearly...)

I came up with the idea that is the hybrid of social network and planner that could solve this problem getting a better understanding of what politicians’ mane values and goals are and how to track them.  

The benefit for politicians publish and update this information could help voters identify specific politicians that work on problems they care about and the impact they are giving. 

So is there a potential opportunity for this idea? 

So what are the key benefits for politicians: 

1. Attract more voters based on your goals and results 
2. Collect donations without intermediaries directly 
3. Show your results hassle-free

So before we start: I am Vytautas Sabaliauskas bringing you freshly baked 🥧 startup ideas weekly to your inbox --> subscribe.

Idea

A planner that lets politicians publicly share and track their values, goals, results simply with their voters.

Value proposition 

What customer problems are you helping to solve?

1. Sharing your goals and tracking them with your voters doesn’t have long term value.
2. Collecting donations for your campaigns is time-consuming.
3. Communicating achievements and collecting feedback needs resources.

What customer needs are you going to satisfying?

1. Attract new voters.
2. Collect donations.
3. Share updates (weekly, quarterly, yearly) and collect feedback.

What are the key features of your product/service that match customer problems/needs? 

1. Share your vision, goals, and updates in a separate subdomain.
2. Collect donations from your supporters/voters. 
3. Connect with your supporters/voters

What is your USP and why is your solution better?  (unique selling point – the one thing that makes you different (and hopefully better) than your competitors.)

Attract voters and donations based on your vision, goals, and achievements.

Unfair advantage (can't be easily copied or bought)?

Freemium based business model.

Customers

Who are your most important customers?

1. Politicians and public figures 
2. What job do they want you to get done for them? 
3. Share their progress easily with their followers and collect donations.

How are your customers solving that problem today? 

1. Sharing content on social media (Facebook, Twitter).
2. Writing articles and making email campaigns.
3. Communicating threw media.

Revenue Streams 

There are several revenue models, so it’s up to you which model you can use.

How will you make money? 

1. Subscription-based model for additional features.  
2. What is the revenue model? 
3. Subscription-based model + % from collected donations. 

What are pricing tactics? 

It’s up to you what price tactics should be used. 

MVP

I won’t dive deep into MVP (minimal valuable product) specifications and only share the main parts as I see the project.

Can you make with no-code tools?

You can try using bubble.io and this paid template also you can try looking for other free templates.

Top features, project parts.

1. User authentication.
2. Create subdomains.
3. Politician dashboard
4. Planner (vision, goals, and tracking).
5. Donation - stripe integration.
6. Email campaigns - Mailchimp integration.

V2 of the project

1. Add integrations aggregators like zappier to connect Facebook, Twitter social feeds. Or just make it possible to add widgets to the user dashboard by pasting the link.
2. Integrate with open data portals to receive data on specific politics depending on the country.
3. Followers voting and prioritizing goals.
4. ….

The vision of this product should be - politicians live dashboard.

Competitors

Who are your competitors? Please provide links to your closest 3 competitors or product substitutions.

1. Trello.com
2. Patreon 
3. Facebook & Twitter

How are you different?

Planning and a tracking tool as a live dashboard with social interaction.

Market

What does the total addressable market (ie. market size) look like?

~520 000 in the United States,

What is localization for the product? 

United States

After that, exposure to Eglish speaking countries (United Kingdom, Australia ….)

Last word

So this type of business model (public goal planning and tracking dashboard with donations) could be used in other industries like the music industry and others.

Feel free to leave feedback & Subscribe to get freshly backed startup ideas weekly to your inbox!

Also published here.