Blake is passionate about, well, everything! As the CEO of Pulse For Good, he uses that passion to help nonprofits worldwide gather feedback from vulnerable individuals more effectively. With his background in technology, Blake is helping to bring business-class survey tooling to organizations ran on shoe-string budgets.
As someone who likes to talk, he knows how hard it can be to listen, and along with the Pulse For Good team, he’s working towards building a more empathetic future.
Where did the idea for Pulse For Good come from?
Pulse For Good emerged from an early pilot of a partnership with the city of Seattle. The various city offices were trying to figure out how best to facilitate gathering feedback from the youth homeless population in Seattle, and our early solution, which was designed to gather employee feedback, was suggested. We quickly found that traditional survey methods left a lot to be desired when gathering feedback from vulnerable populations and set out to build something that better fits the unique concerns of serving vulnerable groups.
What does your typical day look like and how do you make it productive?
As a small startup, our typical days are full of adventure. Some days are dedicated to sales, other days we spend doing support, some days we are working on marketing, and other days we’re trying to improve our operations.
We find that using an agile model works well for our team. We utilize Kanban boards and team standups to keep track of everything from development tasks to customer onboarding.
How do you bring ideas to life?
As a team, we tend to be very visual-focused, so often, our ideas begin to emerge onto whiteboards before they become something a little more tangible.
Once they’ve been thoroughly debated and diagramed on a whiteboard, they make it onto one of our tasks on our kanban boards.
What’s one trend that excites you?
Our team is excited about the combination of technology and social impact. More groups are looking to do good in the world instead of maximizing profit. It is fantastic to see people use their time and talents to help those around them.
What is one habit of yours that makes you more productive as an entrepreneur?
One of our core values is a default to action, which has proven time and time again to be the primary driver of our productivity. Too often, we spend hours debating something, and nothing gets done. By defaulting to act, we might at times cause some headaches, but those headaches are often quickly fixed, and the value we gain from the constant action greatly diminishes any headaches we’ve created.
What advice would you give your younger self?
Spend less time worrying about what others think of you and more time worrying about how you think of others.
Tell us something that’s true that almost nobody agrees with you on.
Pain can be good for you. It’s a form of feedback, and the more you experience it, the more opportunities you have to make a change.
As an entrepreneur, what is the one thing you do over and over and recommend everyone else do?
We’ve had tremendous success posting on Linkedin. We try and do it every day, and it’s been an incredibly valuable part of our growth.
What is one strategy that has helped you grow your business?
Very early on, we developed an advisory board of industry experts. This helped us gain a considerable amount of credibility and allowed us to develop tools, relationships, and techniques far beyond our abilities as just a founding team.
What is one failure you had as an entrepreneur, and how did you overcome it?
One failure we had coming out of the pandemic was a communication breakdown amongst our founding team. Previously, we had conducted in-person meetings, but with the world changing, we switched to a more remote first attitude. Over time, our perceptions and goals changed without getting together.
We had to have some serious heart-to-heart conversations and institute more formality in our processes to help bridge the gaps that this lack of communication caused us.
What is one business idea that you’re willing to give away to our readers?
We’ve always thought there would be an opportunity for a crowd-sourced travel agency. We believe you could utilize people’s passion for planning vacations and natural competitiveness to offer tailored vacation plans to the masses without the expense of full-time travel agents.
What is the best $100 you recently spent? What and why?
We recently conducted a series of case studies with our customers, and we paid each person who participated $100. These case studies are invaluable to us, and it is one thing for us to share how our system can help an organization. It’s entirely different for a peer of those organizations to share how we help. Case studies are worth their weight in gold.
What is one piece of software or a web service that helps you be productive?
Slack – we use it for all of our communication, and as a remote team, it helps us all stay connected and on the same page.
What is the one book that you recommend our community should read and why?
The Outward Mindset – changing the way we think and feel about others helps all aspects of your life
What is your favorite quote?
“Listening is the first act of love.” – Paul Tilch
Key Learnings:
- Defaulting towards action drives productivity
- Pain can be good for you
- The best $100 spent is the one that makes your next $1000
Mario Schulzke is the Founder of ideamensch, which he started a decade ago to learn from entrepreneurs and give them a platform for their ideas.