This is the third-and-three-quarters post in a series applying Seth Godin’s rules of bootstrapping (see also here) to building a non-profit organisation.
Rule 3: Serve Clients Eager to Pay for what you do (part 4)
In a nutshell, Seth says that if someone isn’t eager to pay, they’re not your client. You get to pick. So work for people eager to pay.
Seth Godin on non-profits and two-sided markets… part 1
While it’s tempting to believe that non-profits are generally funded by large numbers of philanthropists giving small amounts of money, in general it’s not the case… A non-profit is almost always bootstrapped because the founder goes to two or three or four passionate individuals and says, “If we could work to solve problem X, is that the sort of thing that you’d like to support?”
And so it begins with one side of the market, which is the donor and the founder deciding to take on a problem.
Seth Godin, Akimbo, “Thrash Now (and ship early)” Q&A@22mins
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Seth’s Q&A answer offers a different way to look at Rule 3. I’d been thinking of the non-profit organisation as the link in a two sided market, with clients on one side, donor on the other, and the organisation in the middle, which is more or less accurate…
But you have to start by looking for those donors who are eager to pay for what you do – so eager to pay, in fact, that they’re prepared to join you, so that whatever you’re doing becomes a problem that you take on together.