Deck: americanpolitics.co/wiki/deck
American Politics Company
TL;DR. The American Politics Company is fixing American politics, starting in San Francisco. Our mission is to empower political leaders to build effective campaigns and allow anyone to vote with context and confidence in minutes. We’re launching with a social voter guide by July 4.
Round 0 Deck
2024-05-31
What’s the problem?
Political influencers
For example: Small business owners. Parent-teacher associations. Neighborhood groups, nonprofits and community leaders. Church groups.
- can’t afford the time and money to advocate on political issues.
- The scope of what you have to do is large: create a political action committee (PAC) with related legal requirements; hire consultant; collect donations; manage physical ad targeting and analytics.
- Going 0 to 1 is too hard in both time and minimum financial cost.
- don’t know how to start and feel disempowered.
- Government should work for them, but they don’t know how they can affect it.
- are wary of putting controversial political messaging on existing social feeds.
Voters
- are negatively polarised against both parties.
- feel disempowered, they feel there’s nothing they can do about dysfunctional local politics.
- are busy. They want to be an informed voter but are cynical about toxic culture war discussions on existing social platforms.
- know they should vote, but don’t know who to trust.
- don’t trust political parties anymore nor media or other institutions.
- trust is moving local and grounded to their communities.
- don’t have a source of truth for voting information: no paper of record in San Francisco. (Chronicle is losing influence). There are specific voter guides but most are partial and/or factional.
- lose track of election-related information delivered via different channels and media (eg mail, video, email, various chats).
Politicians
- want a direct channel to voters.
- want a “safe” social platform.
- no comments, no toxicity, no moderation overhead
Rough market sizing
- 2022: $16B in political spending in America on an off-year election cycle. source
- $8B in state/local political spending (our initial market)
- 2022: $500B in donations to charitable nonprofits in America. We want to shift some of this to political spending. source
What’s the solution?
Vision: fix American politics
Mission: empower political leaders to build effective campaigns. allow anyone to vote with context and confidence in minutes.
What’s the initial product? Coalition
votecoalition.com (previous prototype live at meetbilly.co)
- Social voter guide platform (first focus)
- Political ad platform (lay groundwork now, virtuous cycle with social platform)
Coalition: social voter guide platform
Status: in active development, launch by July 4 or earlier.
- Create, compare, and share voter guides for state and local elections.
- SF-only for 2024.
- Voter profile can be anonymous, but we reward verification.
- Our affilated SuperPAC has access to full voter data, which is legally usable for any political purpose.
- “My voting streak is 8 elections in a row!”
- Subscribe to any users you like, but be proud to pledge your vote when you’ve committed to voting with a user or group.
- Pledge your vote to multiple users/groups: not everyone endorses on all ballot items.
- Anyone can view follow graph and voter guides even in logged-out state.
- Anyone with an account can also see live support data for each candidate/politician, as well as analytics on impressions.
- Once we have any traction, the platform provides constant, live, 100%-response polling data.
Coalition: physical local political ad platform
- Currently in exploratory / experimental state
- Devote ~20% of resources to building out capacity for physical ad tooling
- Physical ads: mailers, posters, yard signs, handouts, billboards, bus ads.
- Best-in-class attribution. Bring political advertising into the 21st century with a platform usable by all parties that persists and builds across cycles.
- SuperPAC-as-a-service
- Political consultant as a service
Flywheel between digital social voter guide platform and physical local political ad platform
- The social voter guide platform (which will grow into a full political social platform over time) will both be a highly-optimised and effective landing page for political advertisements, and be upfunnel marketing for political ads.
- 5% of voters who make an account will become influencers (share their own guides) and 5% of influencers will pay to mail or otherwise advertise their voter guide / other political campaigns.
- We aspire to lower CAC and even have negative CAC at scale: potential advertisers hear about our ad platform when they receive an ad and land on our platform.
Why now?
- Generative AI makes almost-as-good creative free. Previously, if it costs days and $1000s to create the ads, there’s not as much value in automating the political consultant.
- Trust in institutions is at historic lows, and negative partisanship continues to increase.
- It’s a presidential election year, so we’ll capitalise on attention that is already building.
- feel confident in their vote
- be rewarded with status for political participation (show off your verified voter streak!)
- feel proud of affiliating with specific (nonpartisan) identity and issue groups
Voters will
Influencers will
- spin up a political campaign in a day and for only $100, without worrying about legal liability, advertising logistics, or marketing/politics details
- wield political influence more effectively and openly in once it becomes legible (not just 400k followers across 5 social networks, but 50k verified San Francisco voter followers)
- foster a direct relationship with their followers, with trust that their followers are actually verified voters.
- connect, partner, and compete with other influencers on the platform
Roadmap
- Hire cofounder (I’m not blocking on this but would benefit from a detail-oriented, technical (eng and/or design) cofounder with political skills. Would also bring on a cofounder with an exceptional political/policy background.
- Open to as much as 50% equity split for right cofounder.
- Hire full-time eng (blocked on equity raise)
- Goal to ship MVP social voter guide product by July 4.
- Q3: market and iterate on voter guide product while testing out political ads before the election.
- Focus on San Francisco only in 2024.
- Scale of political ad spend depends on equity raise or grants. Goal is to find a couple clients, such as a ranked choice advocacy group, and handle their advertising / field operations for a marginal profit, but as a backup we still want to run experimental ads on nonpartisan topics, such as “register to vote” or “increase the salience of housing as a political issue” or “be aware of ranked choice voting.”
- 2025: Expand to New York City, Washington, D.C., and LA, other localities where our future employees and clients are based.
Future directions
- Paid political polling
- Payments for political services via the SuperPAC (eg peer-to-peer payments for door knocking, “buy a volunteer a coffee”, etc)
- Working with various community orgs to get out the vote and register new voters. Can be a nonprofit arm
- Potentially, charge political consultants for pro data access and services
- Automatically generate and iterate on political ad creative. Run your campaign on autopilot. Fully customised to each voter.
What have you accomplished so far?
- Barak Gila founded American Politics Company in Feb 2024
- Assembling initial team (all contractors with flexible hours for now, bootstrapping with cash + equity pay)
- Neall Seth, engineering. https://neall.org/
- Aaron Kruse, political advertising
- Brought on 4 summer interns (part-time, one Berkeley-grad and three high school students) to market and sell the product in San Francisco. All in-network.
- Initial build focused on political advertising social network, but high amount of overlap with Coalition product. Prototype / alpha / unviable state, but live here: meetbilly.co
- Spun up various infrastructure.
- Shopify swag shop at americanpolitics.shop.
- Created a SuperPAC and acquired full San Francisco voter data (for free).
- approved on ActBlue to solicit political donations.
- PR and brandbuilding to double down on Barak’s reputation as an SF political influencer
- Events
- Cohosted Gays for London Breed launch party for Mayor reelection campaign on May 3 (photos)
- SF Mayor London Breed posed with my #breedmeagain underwear
- Hosted SFYIMBY / Will Stancil fundraiser dinner party 5/9
- Hosting fundraiser dinner for Supervisor Bilal Mahmood 6/5
- Hosting meet and greet for Mayor candidate Mark Farrell 6/11
Who’s Barak?
- 2010: precocious math student (USAJMO, top 100 in math among American 9th and 10th graders)
- 2016: UC Berkeley EECS grad (head TA of CS 170, algorithms)
- 2017-2020: Affirm engineer (200 employees → 1200 employees)
- 2020: First eng hire at Mos.com (now defunct)
- 2021-2022: Tech lead and acting Growth Eng manager at Sprig, the user research tool
- 2022: active in SF Prop D (Affordable Homes Now) campaign, which got 49% of the vote.
- 2022-2023: SF YIMBY Lead (unpaid position with decisionmaking authority, eg endorsements)
- 2023: Built stock rewards integration at X1 Credit Card (acq by Robinhood)
Press coverage
Politics-curious techies are attending teach-ins with moderate candidates March 2024, SF Standard, article by Christina C
My property taxes are too damn low. I’m donating the ‘windfall’ to charity March 2024, SF Standard, op-ed by Barak Gila
How you can help
- Invest in the technology company
- Do you have a message to amplify, ideally in SF or the Bay Area and targeted towards local policy? Contribute to the PAC: https://secure.actblue.com/donate/sf-politics (we’ve also applied to WinRed but haven’t heard back yet).