What is Crunchy Garden's Mission Statement?
Mission & Vision
Make it super easy and fun to go green and garden
Values, assumptions, and beliefs
Assumptions and beliefs
- People want to help others and share
- Helping people compounds, so that the number of people helped grows exponentially until we’ve indirectly helped everyone, to some degree (pay it forward)
- Understanding how to be green is hard (without our website)
- We can efficiently help others by doing hard/technical things that relatively few others can do
Core Values (inviolable, we’ll never make a decision that violates these)
Caring - We want to save people time and energy (even if they can’t pay)
- Aggregating knowledge for stuff people are interested in is useful to them
NonMaximumMinimal Margin - We charge as little as we need to, not as much as we can.
- We don’t devalue our work and do plan on taking care of ourselves, but profit maximization isn’t the goal. We seek the balance between caring for ourselves and others.
- By not being greedy, we can provide more value to customers, creating a sustainable model
Chill Vibe - We’re looking to create a chill job/work environment with fun/exciting projects, not necessarily to make millions of dollars.
- (That said, it would be nice to make some money within the good lifestyle constraints.)
Accidental values (arise spontaneously, not always good)
Deferential - We err on the side of deferring to each other and experts (except about core values). It makes sense to defer to experts (including each other, as we're relative experts in our areas.)
We also tend to defer to whichever of us has a stronger opinion about something.. That seems less sensible, at least when it comes to bigger decisions.
Also, anytime we defer, we should try to "kick the tires" of (think critically about) the decision, rather than automatically deferring.
What exactly do we [think we] do?
We’re building a website for sustainability and gardening enthusiasts to curate and share knowledge and communecommunity [unless we have a better idea of problems to solve].
Strategy
(Question 4, How will we succeed? intentional decisions that differentiate us vs our competition)
Trustworthy because of AI enhancements, crowdsourcing (social capital), trust systems, etc.
Build what you want to build (do what you want to do) Why build these cities glorious, if man unbuilded goes? In vain we build the world, unless the builder also grows. -E. Markham
- We lean in heavily on things we want to learn/experiment/develop and the cross section between that practical use cases
- This feeds the builder and provides motivation/passion
- Because we don’t really know what we’re building anyway, the cost of building it twice is outweighed by the gain
Experimental by Design
- We deploy small features with an iterative mindset
- Momentum builds from success
- Constraints of time
- Need to be comfortable at an early stage leaving the entire project on the cutting room floor
Fundraising Strategy
- We’re not planning on fundraising:
- Rationale: keep ourselves on our tempo and not beholden to investors
Exit Strategy
- We’re not planning on exiting
- Rationale:
- we can do it better than whomever we sell to
- we can be more responsible with governance
- case study: Mint selling to Intuit, and Intuit pumping and dumping for users
- etc.
- case study: Mint selling to Intuit, and Intuit pumping and dumping for users
- Rationale:
Equity Sharing
For equity, something proportional:
e.g. if one were to do 4 hours of UI/UX, and we combined did 96 hours of coding, it would be a 4% share (could be weighted based on salary: talk about it explicitly if so. Otherwise assume equal weightings per hour worked),
The shares would be dilutable (i.e. as people do more next year, they would also gain shares and decrease our percentage), but I think it's reasonable/fair that early participants get a higher weighting (maybe on a yearly basis?) as the risk of earlier projects is higher.
That being said, there is probably a 90% or higher this project goes nowhere.
Reference
Crunchy Garden- Stakeholder Interviews
Initial thoughts from Crunchy Garden Website Journey Log
- Blog idea: think in public. Use the blog as the first version of the website
- community
- research learn about communities for eco products and sustainability
- random idea:
- can we use chatgpt + user context to generate ecofriendly product recommendations
- i.e. crunchy green chatbot
- can we use chatgpt + user context to generate ecofriendly product recommendations
- First development work
- GA4 (do it for all of our sites)
- Bob is adding 2 solo development hours per week
- Seems fine to spend $200/month (maybe more) on development/learning costs i.e. AWS compute
- Interested in trying out new technologies/ways of working
- SST - Serverless stack, used at Vital, scales well, Infrastructure as Code
- Next.js (via SST template, OpenNext)
- AI tools/processes
- Will provide good fodder for resumes/interviews/Meetup talks
- Can justify spending time learning this stuff, vs. Vital work where actual coding takes precedence
- Not super concerned about monetary results - possible risk
Keep in mind:
- AI tools provide many new opportunities; don’t just do things in the old way
- Anything rote/routine can probably be automated fairly easily with AI help
Patrick Lencioni’s Six Critical Questions
Things to be clear on, and for executive teams to have on an index card after every meeting
1. Why do we exist?
Mission - what difference the organization seeks to make in the world
2. How do we behave? (See “Understand the Different Types of Values” on page 2 of Make Your Values Mean Something, an article by Lencioni)
- 1, 2, or 3 Core values (inviolable, we’ll never make a decision that violates these)
- Aspirational values (we don’t reflect these yet, but we want to)
- Permission-to-play values (minimum behavioral/social standards, common across orgs, e.g. Integrity, Honesty, the “No Assholes” rule)
- Accidental values (arise spontaneously, things like common interests or personalities, e.g. Niceness, Millennial, Cat Lovers)
- Can be good: people who share something feel a sense of inclusion, belonging
- Can be bad:
- people who don’t can feel excluded, which makes sense for core values but not for these
- may create a brand/reputation you don’t want
3. What exactly do we [think we] do? (1-sentence factual description, minimal adjectives/adverbs)
4. How will we succeed? (strategy - intentional decisions that differentiate us vs our competition)
5. What is most important now? (rallying cry that all teams align toward for the next 3-6 months; maybe 12-18 months for very slow-moving organizations)
- “Thematic goal”, temporary in nature
- Doesn’t always have to be achieved to move onto next goal
- Made concrete by supporting objectives
- Trumps other goals (“sustaining goals”?); this clarity is vital when weighing tradeoffs between two goals
6. Who on the team must do what? (specific action items for each member of the leadership team)
- Be clear on this at the end of every meeting
- Addendum:
- Hypothesis: You can be good to others, good to yourself, and not broke. (i.e. chill vibe, i.e. Aaron’s volunteer dad steps back and life is okay.