Hypotheses & Assumptions

There are two possible outcomes: if the result confirms the hypothesis, then you've made a discovery. If the result is contrary to the hypothesis, then you've made a discovert.

—— Enrico Fermi, Physicist

The journey of start-up is all about hypotheses and assumptions and what you do about them. Here comes the biggest chunk of hypotheses of BetterPartners: business model canvas. I believe many parts of it will evolve as time goes by.

Business Model Canvas

In developing our business model canvas, we have some major hypotheses and "pivots" taken into consideration. Here are top three pairs.

Customer Segment

Hypothesis: NGO/NPO/social enterprise have the awareness of the benefit from professional services and they are willing to pay for them.

Pivot: such clients may not be the target at the initial phase, or we start from some pro bono services to raise the awareness and build relationship.

Value Proposition

Hypothesis: our expertise and experience in private sector are transferrable to solve organizational and managerial problems NGO/NPO/socail enterprise are facing in China.

Pivot: our services to this sector may "pivot" from business side to people side by providing only leadership and talent management services.

Revenue Streams

Hypothesis: our clients have approximately homogeneous price appetite towards professional services fee.

Pivot: we may need to customize pricing strategy for each client or client category. For example, for NGO/NPO/social enterprise, our pricing model may be performance-related.

At last, I found this video about "pivot" very interesting. I like how Eric Ries (author of The Lean Startup) puts it: Pivot is a change of the strategy without a change of vision. My interpretation: Do whatever you need to do, but say the same, louder :D

Why BetterPartners?

To be clear, BetterPartners is not a Not-for-Profit organization. We are a mission-driven, for-profit professional services firm in the sector of social impact and social innovation in China.

The initial funding was crowd-funded by all founders. And I realize that, at certain point of development, we will need more external fundings. As far as I am concerned, we will target philanthropy donors who have extensive private sector experience and expertise, and share the same ambition and passion with us. Given the nature of our business, we will not skyrocket as a tech start-up may experience. Therefore, we are holding back all venture capital investment right now as we think it may not work best for either party.

The backbone of a professional services firm is its expertise, and I believe that is the proof and credibility our funders want to see in our pitch. As for now, the core members of BetterPartners come from diverse business and public sectors and bring in different types of skill sets that have been proven useful in the private sector.

Member's Professional & Academic Background

In addition to professional and academic background, I expect that our funders will also look for our network in exisitng social impact and social innovation sector in China. They want to make sure if we have a foundation to further develop our business and network. Other than that, capability of continously recruiting talents, management experience, profitability expectation, and social impact measurement are also on their list, I believe.

The Start of a Venture

Back in the summer of 2011, I was an Summer Associate at Monitor Group (now part of Deloitte Consulting). At one overtime dinner, I asked my supervisor, Mark, if he could take some time and do a pro bono advisory work for my project in college. It was a small marketing project that aimed to revitalizing Chinese traditional shadow puppet art (see below picture) in Beijing, and he said yes.

Chinese Shadow Puppetry

It was hardly a consulting project but more like a series of brainstorming workshops. But the frameworks he used to direct our thoughts tremendously broadened our horizon, and eventually led to a successful marketing proposal for a shadow puppetry troupe. This was the first time I witnessed the power of private sector toolkits in the context of public or social sector.

Later on, I talked with Mark about the possibility of duplicating what he did for us in a broader community. Surprisingly. he was onboard immediately. I rememer he mentioned the term "social impact" in our conversation, though I had no idea what it was back then. It later became the heart and soul of BetterPartners.

We were inspired by innovators in both private and public sectors, such as McKinsey & Co., Bain Capital, IDEO, International Finance Corporation, Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, SocialFinance, and Harvard Business School. The vision of BetterPartners has evolved for the past several years. For now, our vision is to incubate impact ventures and leaders to enrich people's lives and impel society's development. We want to utilize our resources, network, knowledge, skillsets from mutiple and diverse business sectors to develop the social impact sector in China. This is our belief that the line between private and public sectors has become blurred, and either side can benefit tremendously from the other side. The key question is how? We try to solve this problem by bridging the gap, not only in organization development but also in people development.

Along with the evolvement of our vision, our brand has also developed from BetterLife+ Group to BetterPartners, a professional services firm in social impact and innovation. And our founders took couples of days to design the first version of our logo.

Logo

Fun part: as part of marketing and communication project, each founder taped a very short video in which each answered the question: Thank big and far, what is your ambition with BetterPatners. And here is my answer.