Good United
Nick Black's journey to founding Good United began with his own nonprofit, Stop Soldier Suicide, which he started in 2011 after leaving the military. Having served 27 months in Afghanistan as an Army Ranger, Nick was driven to support veterans struggling with suicide. While running the nonprofit, he witnessed a fundamental problem: donors weren't being treated with the recognition and engagement they deserved. He recalled attending Johns Hopkins University with Mike Bloomberg, who donated $1.8 billion, yet Nick himself was asked for $50. This stark contrast illuminated the gap between enterprise-level donor experiences and those available to average supporters. Nick saw an opportunity to build technology that would democratize donor engagement and increase lifetime value for nonprofits.
Launching Good United in 2015 with co-founder Jeremy Berman, Nick and his team initially pursued a different direction entirely. Their first idea involved allowing donors to contribute items instead of cash—think Habitat for Humanity donors giving a two-by-four or Toys for Tots donors contributing toys. While innovative, the nonprofit side didn't see enough value to justify adoption. The second pivot shifted to email automation, attempting to give donors control over the content they received. Again, the market response was lukewarm; nonprofits didn't see this as solving their most pressing pain points. These failures were brutal. Nick reflected: "If you're coming from an organization where there's a lot of people, you might get recognition for things that go well. But in the startup world, it's just you, you and a couple of people on the team and the punches are that much heavier."
After raising over $1 million in capital to fund their experimentation, Nick and Jeremy made a critical pivot in July. They narrowed their focus exclusively to Facebook fundraisers—specifically peer-to-peer fundraisers that nonprofits were already running but couldn't effectively manage. The insight was elegant: Facebook had the donate button, but nonprofits had no way to manage the individual fundraisers, send personalized messages to fundraisers, or nurture donors through the experience. Good United built a Messenger-based platform that sat on top of Facebook's infrastructure, automating workflows and improving key metrics like total funds raised and donor participation rates. The first customer was the Parkinson Foundation, signed in July through a personal connection. This proved to be the beachhead Nick needed.
The difference between the failed ideas and the winning one came down to solving acute nonprofit pain. By July, Good United was doing over $100,000 per month in revenue across 20 customers, with an average contract value of $5,000-$8,000 monthly. What worked: landing customers through personal relationships and introductions within the nonprofit ecosystem. Nick had spent years building credibility in the space through Stop Soldier Suicide, and those relationships translated directly into customers. The usage-based model meant revenue grew predictably each month as nonprofits ran more fundraisers. Importantly, there was zero churn—every customer that signed up was still paying. What didn't work: the earlier product-market fit cycles took four years and two pivots before hitting their stride, requiring Nick and Jeremy to work four or five jobs simultaneously to keep the lights on until achieving profitability.
By the time of this interview (roughly mid-2019), Good United had achieved a rare milestone: cash-positive growth with significant revenue. The company operates a lean team of 5 full-time employees based in Charleston, South Carolina, supplemented by 15 contractors distributed globally. With over $1.2M annual revenue run-rate and capital already raised, Nick was focused on cementing the beachhead and preparing for expansion. His three-year plan centered on reinforcing the Facebook fundraiser management space while exploring new markets as peer-to-peer functionality rolled out to additional countries. By staying the course through failure and maintaining personal relationships, Nick had built a profitable business that directly served his original mission: giving average donors—and the nonprofits supporting them—the experience they deserved.
- •Solving a problem the founder experienced firsthand allowed Nick to identify a genuine market gap that nonprofits couldn't articulate themselves, enabling faster product-market fit once the right wedge was found.
- •Focusing on a specific use case (Facebook fundraisers) that nonprofits were already doing but struggling to manage reduced friction to adoption because the value was immediately obvious rather than requiring behavior change.
- •Leveraging personal relationships as the primary customer acquisition channel worked because Nick's credibility as a nonprofit founder himself made him a trusted advisor rather than a vendor, leading to faster sales cycles and higher conversion rates.
- •The usage-based pricing model aligned revenue growth with customer success, ensuring Good United only made money when nonprofits were running more fundraisers and reaching more donors—creating natural alignment of incentives.
- 1.Start by deeply understanding a specific pain point within your target industry that you have personally experienced, then validate that other organizations share this exact problem before building any technology.
- 2.Identify workflows your customers are already running manually or on suboptimal platforms, and build a solution that plugs directly into their existing tools and processes rather than asking them to adopt entirely new workflows.
- 3.Build your initial customer base by leveraging personal introductions from people within your target industry who already know and trust you, rather than cold outreach or broad marketing campaigns.
- 4.Use a usage-based pricing model tied to the outcome you help customers achieve, so your revenue scales with customer success and you have built-in motivation to continuously improve results.
- 5.After each failed product direction, spend time with customers to understand why they rejected it, then pivot to address the most acute pain point rather than refining the rejected solution.
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