#ThankTheTeacher www.ThankTheTeacher.com

Thank the Teacher crowd funds fund gift carts for teachers. If you want to use the service for a school or sports organization, please contact me.

Thank the Teacher is a Lean Startup experiment. Our hypothesis is that pople will use our service to contribute to teacher gift card accounts and that we can make enough money along the way to cover our costs and help a school fund-raising organization.

Our goal was to test this hypothesis with as little money as possible through one Lean Startup (Build/Measure/Learn) cycle.

#Build

A giftcard campaign requires participation by:

• a participating school
• teachers and support staff
• a fundraising organization
• the parents of a school’s students

In late November, we got our first customer, Fishers High School. The fundraising organization was the school’s Volleyball Club.

We used the site to create a gift card campaign and upload a CSV file of 250 teachers, coaches, administrative, and support staff.

On December 4th and 7th, parents of the participating school were notified of the gift card campaign. The two emails invited parents to voluntarily contribute to their favorite teachers’ and staff members’ gift card accounts by clicking an embedded link our web site.

Once on the site, parents coud purchase a contribution to their favorite teacher’s gift card account. We summed the purchase and added 3.1% to cover credit card processing fee.

We ordered gift cards via our Amazon Affiliate program on December 12th. We printed greeting cards identifying the recipient, gifted amount, redemption instructions, and the names of the contributors.

On December 18, all cards were delivered to school faculty.

##Business Model The Amazon Affiliate Program offers a 6% commission gift card purchases. We intended to split the proceeds between the fund-raising organizaton and ThankTheTeacher.com.

#Measure

The site generated over $1400 of gift cards contributions. We delivered Gift Cards to 122 different staff members. The average value of each card was $10.00.

Our total cost was about $100. Of this, cloud costs and secure encryption was around $20.

• Campaign Duration: 10 days
• Total Recipients Listed: 320
• Total Recipeints Funded: 122
• Maximum Gift Card Value: $60
• Minimum Gift Card Value: $1
• Average Gift Card Value: $10.50
• Total Contributions: $1400.04
• Total Contributions/Credit Card Transactions: 31
• Average Contribution: 45.15
• Max Contribution: $154.95
• Min Contribution: $1.33
• Abandoned Carts: approximately $1000
• Surcharge Overcharge: $1.12
• Surcharge Average: $.03
• Surcharge Max: $.16 (on $160 order)
• Site traffic and site performance was not measured

##Cash Flow

• Stripe time to approve payment: 5 seconds
• Stripe time to transfer payment to TTT bank: 7 days
• TTT time to clear transfer: 2 days
• Amazon time to debit checking account: 15 minutes
• Amazon time to pay affiliate: 30 days

##Revenue

• Expectation: 6% (5% to participating organization and 1% TTT.)
• Actual: $0.00
• Amazon affiliate closed our account because of T&C violations.

#Learn * Parents were willing to use the service * Our cash flow was not sustainable * Amazon affiliate program T&Cs should have been reviewed much, much earlier * Our customer (participating schools) acquisition cost too was high to scale * Our gift card recipient processing cost was too high to scale (we knew this going in) * Abandoned carts suggest that a more professionally prepared site would successfully usher more customers through checkout. Or, maybe customers were turned off by the credit card fee.

#Conclusion The service could be viable if we kept donations funds in-house until gift card redemption. This would solve our cash flow problem and allow us to make a bit of interest on the contributions.

Redemption costs could be minimized with email distribution of gift card with a “click to redeem” feature.

Although the numbers were not huge, clearly some parents are willing to use the service. However, I am not sure this could be a viable business.

##The Team

• Annette Doherty: Customer Development
• Matthew Newell: Product Development