Brightest

Live better, spend your time better, and maybe even change the world.

1. Problem. We're in the early stages of one of the most profound transformations in our labor force (and, more broadly, culture and society) in history. Mass job automation is on the horizon with advances in machine and deep learning, the gig economy is growing 3x faster than overall US workforce growth (Source: Brookings, Edelman Research), and people across all demographics want job stability, economic empowerment, and the opportunity to pursue a meaningful career.

At the same team, many are (increasingly) detached from their jobs, communities, and political participation. 75% of the US doesn't volunteer or give to charity. 50% of eligible voters don't vote. Roughly half of surveyed employees around the world say they don't find their current 9-to-5 meaningful.

There's no simple answer or solution to these sweeping changes or the alienation many feel. We need policy change, economic change, education change - even value changes.

But one thing that's clear is technology advances (machine learning, personalization, automation, customer-centric design, etc.) have under-invested in helping people discover and reconnect with their passions, purpose, and role in their local community. Ironically, tech isn't helping enough people feel meaningfully productive online OR go offline and do socially valuable things with their time.

2. Proposed Solution. Brightest is an intelligent coach, recommendation, and discovery engine for finding meaningful ways to spend your time  - based on where you live, where you are in your career, and what inspires you.

One analogy we like from a data perspective is Spotify (and Discover Weekly).

Spotify has genres (hip-hop, rock, classical), artists, and music (albums, songs) in a similar way causes and missions (fighting climate change, gender, race & identity equality, voting rights) have organizations (Planned Parenthood, March for Our Lives) contributing work (volunteer, gig, contribute to this open source project, find a specific type of job, etc.) toward them. So we're building the "Discover Weekly" for meaningful work.

Brightest includes a website, mobile app, and other ways to query, access and get recommendations from the service via our API. We also want to supplement this with real-world community groups and events (just like you supplement listening to your favorite music by going to concerts) to make sure people in need also feel in-person connections and social support.

3. Impact. If we get this right (no small feat), we believe we can deliver essential info and recommendations for how people pursue their passions, contribute meaningfully to causes they believe in, and increase their likelihood to vote, volunteer and contribute their employment time productively. Along the way, we're confident we can index a much more open, comprehensive, and searchable database of social trends, things to do around the country (and eventually, around the world), and bring more attention and resources (particularly among younger generations) to thousands of different causes, non-profits, aide workers, progressive political organizations, activists and other changemakers. We can build a transparent, democratic ledger for progress and helping others.

With machine learning and recommendation systems, there are many great existing algorithms, open-source libraries, and "best practices" developed by researchers and companies. Our initial recsys is based on collaborative filtering, tf-idf (term frequency, inverse document frequency), structuring and joining data from 3rd party APIs and web crawlers, and some algorithms and models we're developing for our particular needs and data set. Building on an initial, open-source foundation accelerates our time-to-market, which will then allow us to develop and train our own models to improve Brightest further.

Building empathetic, socially-beneficial software is central to our mission. We already employ several programming languages (python, javascript, objective-C), web frameworks (django, reactjs), web APIs, and methods for data and natural language processing. We've also created our own Brightest API which we hope in the future will enable us to share more of our data, tools, and solutions with other developers.

1. Launch v1 iPhone and Android apps
2. Complete v2 of our recsys and supporting data pipeline
3. Add new data sources to Brightest to build out a fully-indexed, national database across all causes, missions, interests
4. Broaden the product to include a variety of ways to purposefully spend your time: full-time work, part-time work, volunteering, political involvement, etc.
5. Integrate Brightest with 3rd party tools and systems that make us easier to use and access; work toward opening up our own public API
6. Translation and localization for outside the US

We already have usage in all 50 states and most major US cities, but our software is primarily hosted on AWS and straightforward (and cost-effective) to scale to hundreds of thousands or millions. We're also in the process of making it more accessible by building iPhone and Android apps and an Twilio client to make the app searchable directly via text/SMS. We also have plans to translate and localize the software for other countries (once we have high-quality in-country data), and generally will design everything we do to incentivize referrals, social sharing, and word-of-mouth.

Brightest's web app is already accessible on all devices. In the next 6 months, we'll be improving its design, experience and capabilities while releasing Brightest for iOS, Android and text/SMS. We also have v1 of an internal (private) API completed, and will gradually open access to our developer platform once our infrastructure and documentation are ready. In addition to deepening and improving the product experience, we're going to begin local organizing efforts to build our offline community and make sure we're building lasting connections and a meaningful brand.

Although our service has only been available in beta for 3 months, we've already had several thousand people use Brightest. Our software helped co-organize and drive attendance for multiple local elected representative town halls following March for Our Lives, we are (and continue to be) an early digital organizer for the #FamiliesBelongTogether moment (and protests), and are actively working on raising awareness and participation across dozens and hundreds of different social causes and movements.

As you can hopefully appreciate, there are many variables (team size, marketing & PR budget, speed we execute, landscape for alternatives, prioritization tradeoffs given the breadth of our "market"), but we're confident we can to get tens of thousands of app users in the next 12 months. Having done a lot of strategic forecasting in my career, I'd much rather focus on 3 month sprints and making a great product that solves immediate problems vs. trying to forecast 3 years out, but I can confidently say if we get this right we will build a big, important company and community.

I led a cross-functional Growth team in my prior job that included engineers, designers, data scientists, and marketers (both digital and event). Our current team has over 25 collective years of software engineering, design, and development across (everyone is "technical" at the moment), and we're looking to expand the team through our existing network and relationships, budget and resources allowing. I'll also say, generally, finding people who believe in the project and mission hasn't been difficult - our key focus for the next 6 months is ensuring we have the capital and resources to enable that.

Our current focus is more on impact (and product usage + retention) than revenue, but we do believe if we're successful in our mission it will allow us to build a sustainable revenue model.

Our first expected revenue stream will be paid career coaching and work placement offerings, and longer-term we'll be opportunistically exploring and testing a paid API tier, other data products, and potentially contextual ad units (promoted/featured listings), consistent with our mission and providing a high-quality experience to our users.

While we're making good progress developing and working toward our solution, we're tackling a big set of problems with a broad, ambitious project. We can't solve this alone, we're only part of what the world needs, and no matter what resources we have at our disposal, we need (and greatly appreciate) all the help we can get. 

In particular, we have extensive needs for technical talent, expertise, and mentorship, and hope to be able to work with the Solve community to accelerate our access and knowledge transfer in those areas.

1. Our solution relies on an increasingly large and complex data pipeline, including data collection, processing, model development and training, and managing all of the necessary infrastructure. While we are not data science or engineering novices, we recognize the Solve/MIT community could meaningfully advance and accelerate the quality of our work (and thinking/problem-solving) in this area.
2. While we view our solution as highly-scalable and cost-effective, we have unavoidable engineering, server, and service costs we need to be able to cover to continue our work and expand the team.