Who Is Springboard Commerce?

The Quick Answer:

(STRAIGHT TO THE POINT)

We are a crowd-funded, donation-based charity web agency established with the mission to help small businesses (especially small restaurants, bakeries, and others that rely heavily on foot-traffic) who are struggling with a technology gap that was either exposed by, or exacerbated by the lockdowns of the COVID-19 pandemic and it's after-effects on the economy. These small businesses such as small restaurants, bakeries, and other small shops tend to rely heavily on foot-traffic.

A More Detailed Description

(MORE INFO, PLEASE!)

At the core of our mission is a focus on tearing down a barrier to the entry, growth, and success of small, bootstrapped, mom and pop style startups and small businesses by building a solution that quickly and effectively allows these startups and small businesses who didn't previously have a website (or have one but can't take orders on it) get a website built FREE OF UP-FRONT COSTS.

Removing this barrier and filling the technology gap helps make these small businesses more flexible and responsive to future challenges. This in turn helps them become more profitable - springboarding them to higher levels of growth than could otherwise be acheived; and in many cases, saving these small businesses from closure.

We are able to achieve our goals by combining funding from both individual donors as well as sponsorships from larger businesses across all industries and sectors who receive a benefits package in return for their sponsorship, then leveraging proprietary solutions paired exclusively with the power and flexibility of the Shopify platform - all driven by the will of our small, and incredibly dedicated team.

If a lot of people are willing to lend a hand with a small donation, we can make a giant difference in the lives of many small business owners, their families, and their employees.

A Program Use-Case (or Three)

(Yeah, Give Us A Real-World Example!)

A Local Restaurant

The program goal is to help these small businesses diversify their order sources by allowing people to easily order online with the added bonus of reaching new audiences who might otherwise not know about them.


Example 1)

Take "Small Family Restaurant A" for instance who has a single location and no website. Their order and sales stream is limited to mostly those customers who live in the immediate area (say within a few miles). They have no website to increase online visibility, nor to take orders for customer pick-up or delivery.

Example 2)

Alternatively, "Small Trendy Restaurant X" has a bit larger of a following from customers who live further away. They also have a website, but can't take orders from it.

Example 3)

Lastly, "Small Local Chain Y" has a few locations spread out across a few local cities / towns. They have a website, and it does take orders for carry-out, but not delivery. Their site also charges a "convenience" fee to customers for the ability to order online. Bleh...for making the customer pay extra for "convenience".


who have their own sites can help keep the cost of ordering lower for their customers by removing the premiums attached to ordering with delivery services such as GrubHub and DoorDash, as well as removing unnecessary "convenience fees" if a restaurant does have ordering online processed by another service.

Additionally, there's a whole demographic of people out there who refuse to call in to a restaurant to order, and a whole other demographic out there who refuse to pay those premiums to use delivery services like GrubHub, Door Dash, Uber Eats, etc. Our goal is to help small restaurants reach those people and keep costs lower for both customers and restaurants.

We're building the COVID-19 Restaurant Recovery Program as a way to help the struggling restaurant industry not only survive, but begin to recover from economic impacts from customers self-isolating or government imposed lockdowns that have prevented restaurants from allowing inside dining or otherwise operating as safely and closely to full-capacity as possible.

While we hope to receive small-dollar donations from a large number of people, we will also soon be offering a corporate sponsorship package for businesses looking to also lend a helping hand. Business sponsorships will come with blog articles containing backlinks to your business website.

A Few Program Beneficiaries

Here are some of the first recipients of the program benefits.

SMCCC

St. Mary Child Care Center in Livonia, Michigan has cared for children ranging in age from 2 weeks to 6 years old for almost 30 years.

Kritter Crew

Kritter Crew is a unique street wear brand, with a big emphasis on street culture activities, cartoon graphics, and freedom of expression.

GLP Cat Rescue

God's Little People rescues sick, discarded, and ferral cats on the Greek island of Syros. They've recently been featured on a Netflix series!

More On The Way

We have more in queue awaiting their turn for a free website.

We Need Your Help

Like the businesses our program is designed to help, we are also a small business. We have huge goals and dreams for everyone, but we have very limited resources. We can't do this alone. That's where you come in. We're turning to you, the general public for help. We need real people to take real action.

Due to our limited resources, this program will initially focus on small shops and small restaurants (think small diners, local dives, or your favorite take-out places and even local bakeries!), with either single or multiple locations. With your help, we can expand our offering to businesses with a bit more customized needs, as well as expand our free service levels to include more benefits to help more small businesses and their employees.

READY TO HELP SAVE A SMALL BUSINESS?

What Does Your Donation Support?

With your donation and support for the program we can help thousands of small businesses in the restaurant and food-service industry. When fully funded, our program will be able help small to mid-sized restaurants, bakeries, and more by:

APPLYING TARGETED ASSISTANCE TO A STRUGGLING INDUSTRY.

By giving small restaurant owners a website to take orders from, we're providing another tool to use to not just survive the pandemic effects, but recover and thrive in to the future.

IMPLEMENTING A TOOL AS A PREVENTATIVE MEASURE.

These businesses are in an industry that relies heavily (if not exclusively) on in-person interactions. If anything preventing in-restaurant dining happens again in the future, our friends in this industry will have a way to make sure they won't be caught flat-footed again.

HAVE A DOWNSTREAM EFFECT.

By helping keep as many restaurants open as we can, it won't be just those restaurants that benefit. We'll have a downstream effect on the supply-chain. From those that supply the ingredients (such as local growers) to those that supply the equipment, and everything in-between -our goal is to protect jobs now and allow job growth in the future.

READY TO HELP SAVE A SMALL BUSINESS?

Real People Taking Real Action

Real action costs real money.
(If you can't donate, we understand completely - perhaps you'd be willing to share this page link to your social media?)

For those that do choose to donate - thank you!
From the bottom of our hearts, THANK YOU!

We will apply funds from donations and sponsorships to the following internal needs:

Finish Development

We're not quite done building our solution. Our target completion date is too far out for comfort. Your assistance will ensure our team can focus on finishing the development of our solution faster so we can start helping others by delivering websites to small businesses in need quicker.

Scale The Team

As the program expands we'll need to expand our team to keep up with program growth. Our team members will be trained and paid rather than relying on volunteer support as this ensures we deliver a quality product to program beneficiaries with as little friction as possible.

Expand The Program

Each new tier of fundraising we reach is like rocket fuel allowing us to accomplish more for program beneficiaries. If fully funded, we can confidently and effectively expand the program to include add-on services, or expanding the program to larger businesses and other industries.

Our Funding Goals

The Foundation

Funding Tier 1 Goal

$2,500,000

Funding our tier 1 goal means we can fully concentrate on:

1) Finishing the development of our turnkey solution.
2) Refining our processes for the program.
3) Complete an initial round of team expansion to process requests and build sites.
4) Begin an awareness campaign to start accelerating program growth and website signups.

Help Us

Team Scalability

Funding Tier 2 Goal

$5,000,000

Funding our tier 2 goal would secure our ability to move from the pilot phase of the program to and be able to quickly scale our team up to meet new increases demand.

Assist Us In

Expansion, Phase 1:

Brand Enhancement

Funding Tier 3 Goal

$8,000,000

Funding our tier 3 goal would enable us to enter an initial phase of expansion that allows us to be able to offer program beneficiaries extremely valuable foundational SEO and brand enhancement services.

Lend A Hand

Expansion, Phase 2:

Value Added

Funding Tier 4 Goal

$10,000,000

Funding our tier 4 goal would allow for a secondary expansion phase of the program concentrated on building valuable add-on services specific to the needs of restaurants. These add-ons would not be required to be successful, but may be features requested from restaurants that could help make their lives even easier.

Contribute To Recovery

Expansion, Phase 3:

Program Self-Sustainability

Funding Tier 5 Goal

$20,000,000

We would consider the program fully funded and self-sustainable at this level of capitalization. Funding our tier 5 would allow for a third phase of expansion which includes modifying the turnkey solution to begin offering it to businesses in other industries. We'd also be developing new program add-ons that allow our program beneficiaries to get the most out of their websites and aid in their economic recovery.

Ready To Help?

Program Sustainability Plan

WE'RE SURE YOU'RE WONDERING:

(WE WERE WONDERING, TOO)

If we're giving away the websites, how does the program sustain itself? Do we always have to ask for more and more donations, and more and more sponsorships?

THE PLAN:

(WE DEFINITELY HAVE ONE!)

While the funds collected from individual donations and business sponsorships will help pay the up-front costs of website development (and other services) for program beneficiaries, our plan for program self-sustainability involves collecting a fair, low-cost, monthly fee for all websites developed.

Currently our self-sustainability membership fee structure is:

- $25/month for small, bootstrap startups.
- $50/month for small businesses with revenues up to $100,000/month.
- $100/month for small businesses with revenues exceeding $100,000/month.

*This fee structure is subject to change as our program expands and we learn more about our program beneficiaries.

Additionally, as expansion phases are reached, new brand enhancement and value-added initiatives will also bring in fair, low-cost, monthly fees. When thousands of restaurants are signed up for the program, we expect the program to become self-sustaining.

We can't rule out new rounds of fundraising.

However we don't expect to need them with a fully-funded program.