Bootstrapping Using Services from The Netherlands to a $300M+ Exit: Quintiq and ActiVote Founder Victor Allis (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: Is this a B2C business?

Victor Allis: Yes, it’s for voters. The strange thing is, there’s no revenue. There is no business model at the time. All we’re trying to do is to get people to use it to vote. I always believe that if you do something that adds value, there’s always a way to get people to invest in it or pay money. We have a lot of policy questions. People make choices based on it. We can take all these choices and add them up and we could predict that a candidate would win. Our poll was actually closer than most polls.

Most recently, there was a decision about abortion. We had a question about it on our app. We suddenly saw the way people thought about abortion and we are able to publish an op-ed about it. Our app became a beautiful instrument for people to share their voices without having to speak out at the Thanksgiving dinner. They can just privately speak out.

We are becoming an organization that provides voter information and also an organization that provides insight into what the US population thinks. The overarching goal is to depolarize the nation.

Sramana Mitra: Is there a business model that you are starting to think about?

Victor Allis: We are funding it ourselves. We have a long period of time. It’s not a lot of money that we need to spend on it. We are thinking that there will be options in some States to make sure that we get some revenue for the polling that is not contrary to our goal to be there for voters. There’s a business idea behind that.

When we ran Quintiq, we always realized that the essence of what we wanted to do is to add value to the business and that our hefty license fee was no problem. The way we look at ActiVote is if we can create true value by getting millions of people suddenly feel way more empowered to vote and feel comfortable that their data is safe, then that is good for a lot of people. It means that if we need to fund the organization, there are options. We are taking the two years of startup a little bit longer and creating something of real value.

Sramana Mitra: The other question as I’m looking at your business is user acquisition. 100,000 users is one thing. This is supposed to be a hundred million plus users that you want to have. Is it in-app advertising? How do you get to that?

Victor Allis: The difference, in this case is, we had no clue when we started. I volunteered for campaigns to figure out how politics works. We have spent the last few years to get to a point where we have this balance between an app that is very informative but still easy to use. It was harder than we thought.

Now we are at a place where we realize that people like the app. We get all sorts of shoutouts. We are really ramping up for the presidential election in 2024 as our breakout moment. The best way is really word-of-mouth. We have a lot of candidates who are spreading the news. We have this funny gimmick.

For every candidate that is on our app, everybody can see where they stand on the spectrum. They have the possibility to post a virtual long sign. There are thousands of social media signs where someone is running for the local state house. We see quite a few users coming in through these channels. With more and more candidates, we see a groundswell of more users. We are happy with our trajectory.

Sramana Mitra: Do you like living in America?

Victor Allis: I love it. I became a US citizen in 2018. I think America is still the greatest country in the world.

Sramana Mitra: Thank you for your time.

This segment is part 6 in the series : Bootstrapping Using Services from The Netherlands to a $300M+ Exit: Quintiq and ActiVote Founder Victor Allis
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