Build The Refinery, Not Just The Well
Build The Refinery, Not Just The Well
Why I’m excited by Time to Spare
Since shutting down Furrow, I’ve been doing some advisory work with the team at Time to Spare. The deeper I go into the business, the more excited I get about what they are building. Tom and Will are building a company that has the opportunity to disrupt every kind of social impact programme, from redefining the way services are delivered within local communities to building a standard matrix for impact measurement. They’re currently raising and I’m looking to get whatever allocation I can in the round. If you’re interested in finding out more, they’ve got a live deal on Odin, or get in touch with them directly - tom(at)timetospare(dot)com - or let me know and I’ll make an introduction.
The beginnings
I first met Tom and Will at Cambridge University where Tom studied Economics and Will, along with me, studied Systems Biology. We’ve gone through similar paths of entering the corporate and then startup worlds and have helped each other navigate the highs and lows of starting a business.
Tom has always been a tinkerer and curiousity follower. Deciding it would be fun to learn Chinese, Tom applied to a programme at Beijing University. On getting accepted, he found he had 7 days to learn enough Chinese to take part in the programme. A few late nights later, he passed the language test and was on a plane to Beijing. Likewise with coding. Tom is a self-taught coder after he decided to pursue several passion projects in his spare time. Never to waste a good opportunity to tinker, when the Evergiven got stuck in the Suez Canal, causing widespread interest in the fate of the shipping industry, Tom launched Is The Ship Still Stuck to put our minds at rest, and subsequently went viral.
Beyond this tinkering on the side, Tom has always had a passion for the voluntary sector. From an early age, he was heavily exposed to the voluntary sector. Through local charities, his parents would host families in need of support from all over the world and Tom spent many evenings after school teaching them English or tutoring their children. His family would also spend several summers holidays volunteering and teaching maths in Uganda. While a consultant at Oliver Wyman, he ran pro-bono strategy projects for charities across the UK. Seeing first-hand the problems in the sector, he decided to put his skills to good use and build software to support it. After a few different attempts - including Who’s In?, a platform to encourage low-touch volunteering, and All for One, an attempt to gamify charitable action - Tom had developed a deep understanding of what the sector did and didn’t need and identified where the core pain points really were.
Will grew up in a small village in Kent, with an extremely strong and tight-knit community. His early exposure to the community sector came as a regular volunteer at the local village hall. His parents were also on the Board of Trustees of the local Citizens Advice Bureau, part of a nationwide network of charities providing invaluable advice across the country. After leaving Cambridge, he qualified as an accountant at Dixon Wilson, a firm specialising in working with HNWIs, and importantly their trusts, foundations and charities. The tax-advantaged status of charities in the UK comes with the extra requirement that even small organisations need to be audited every year, so Will got an inside look into their workings. As a data-loving accountant, he was pretty shocked by the state of the record collection and the inefficiency caused by a clear lack of good operational tools.
Seeing the inefficiencies in the system and a joint urge to leave the corporate world to do something about it, Tom and Will teamed to launch Time to Spare as we know it.
A surprisingly complex sector
Most people think of the voluntary sector as bake sales and Go Fund Me campaigns but this is in fact less than 15% of total income for a sector that is £80bn in the UK and makes up 5-10% of GDP in English-speaking developed countries.
The majority of the sector's income comes from people paying for services directly (like someone attending a yoga class at a community centre) or particularly interestingly, grants and contracts with the public sector. You might not be aware this happens, but Government departments and Councils will often commission charities to deliver services on their behalf. Like youth clubs, mental health support and support for people with disabilities. And they’ll often commission the same charity to run a variety of different programmes. As a result, charities, and their funders, have multiple contracts to manage across many different projects and programmes.
And it also means if you’re running a charity, with all those different income sources, you’ve not got 1 KPI. You’ve got 120. Reporting on this is not something that fits neatly into existing off-the-shelf software for businesses and, with very few businesses building software for the charity sector, many of these charities are running on poorly designed or hacked-together systems using excel or pen and paper. This is a sector that is underserved and under-digitalised. As a result, information gets lost in the cracks. Information that is vital to ensuring the charity can help those in need.
Let’s give a real-world example from one of the charities that Time to Spare works with [Names not their real names etc.].
Meet Kathy. Kathy runs a community centre in London. She gets her income from 10 different grant pots, 5 contracts with the local Council, and from the users of her centre. As a result of all of these different sources of income, she has to report on 125 different KPIs to 20 different people across 15 different organisations and collect information on 7 different forms in order to get the data for the right reports to the right funders at the right time so she can keep her funding. Sounds complicated right?
Now meet Alan. Alan comes along to the mental health session Kathy’s centre runs every Thursday. To help Kathy compile the reports she needs, he’s supposed to fill out the 7 different forms, often with overlapping information, just for a coffee and a chat. They’re all on paper, so Kathy or her colleague has got to type them up manually into an Excel sheet. Half the time it gets entered incorrectly because Alan’s handwriting isn’t great. Every Thursday, Alan turns up at the centre and has to fill out all these same forms again. After a few weeks, he stops turning up because he’s sick of spending 20 minutes filling out forms each time, when he just wants a chat.
All Kathy wants to do is help Alan. But she can’t do that, because all his information is in so many different places, and it’s not correct anywhere. She doesn’t know if she’s already referred him to the free advice and support sessions they run on Mondays or if he’s turned up to the 5-a-side football sessions another charity they work with runs on Wednesdays. All the while, she’s getting hounded by her funders to report on the outcomes her charity achieves for Alan and others like him, which she can’t do because the data’s such a mess or doesn’t even exist.
Meanwhile Ben, her counterpart in the Local Council is also under stress because he knows Kathy’s doing a great job, but can’t prove it to his boss, so now he’s under pressure to cut Kathy’s funding. More broadly he’s struggling to justify the expense of dealing with hundreds of small charities to deliver a programme rather than commissioning a large charity or professional services firm to do it. He knows charities like Kathy’s provide a much better service but he hasn’t got the data to prove it.
The reason behind all this mess is that there’s no single source of truth about what’s going on, for Alan, for Kathy, or for her funders.
A Single Source of the Truth for Voluntary Sector Activity
This is where I start to get excited by what Tom and Will are building. Their key insight is that these problems stem from a lack of understanding of what is happening in the sector. There’s no single source of truth about what’s going on.
Time to Spare is building the operating system for the voluntary sector. For funders. For charities. And for service users.
Their product for charities and service users builds a digital twin of all the activity in a charity. Information about their service users, their attendances, their outcomes (like whether someone got a job), and responses to surveys if necessary. Everything comes together in one single record, centred around the service users.
So Alan fills out one form. He can do it in his own time and can update his info later. Kathy can even give him a membership card and track the whole thing by scanning it at the front desk. When Alan comes to the next session, she can see what he’s been up to, and what other services he accessed, and can identify new services to refer him to. In short, she can help Alan a whole lot quicker and more effectively.
To get all this information, Time to Spare has built a compound business. A company that “consolidates systems for clients and solves problems across multiple different point solution products”; like Rippling, currently valued at $11.25bn. (For a great introduction to Rippling and the concept of compound businesses, check out this talk, this podcast, and this article) They’ve built multiple products within the product, in place of multiple-point solutions, allowing them to become the operating system for the charity sector. Each feature they launch builds on top of and enhances the underlying data set.
Building the refinery, not just the oil well
Crude oil on its own is useless. Its value is in refining the oil into useful products. And this is where Time to Spare can excel.
To stretch a metaphor, Time to Spare’s first set of features were building the oil wells; now they’ve started to build the refinery so they can create even more useful products for the service users, charities and funders who rely on them. And given the complex and multi-actor nature of the voluntary sector, lots of people are interested in the products that can be built from the underlying information about what’s going on.
So while Kathy uses Time to Spare in her interactions with Alan to give him a better service, she can use all this information about Alan, all her other service users, and all the other projects she manages in the charity to report to her multiple funders and trustees. She doesn’t need to dig through 10 different files and a load of paper documents to get the information she needs. It’s all there, in one place, in real-time. And because Time to Spare works directly with her funders, Kathy doesn’t even need to lift a finger. All the required information is sent automatically; sliced, diced and configured according to each funder’s specific requirements. All from the same underlying single source of the truth.
Remember Ben, Kathy’s counterpart in the council? He gets these reports and can use Time to Spare to see exactly when and why demand increases for Kathy’s community centre, and can do something to stop it. And for the first time, the data is standardised and aggregated across all the charities that Ben funds, so he can see the effectiveness of each charity in his programmes, as well as the overall effectiveness of the programme, spot trends, and see particular pathways between different services that are most effective.
These are just the first products made by the refinery that Time to Spare are building. With the underlying dataset of everything that is going on in the voluntary sector, Time to Spare can build an incredible range of products and services for people and communities that need them.
They can build the “single view of the resident” for parts of Government, joining up the dots between the NHS and other formal statutory support and the voluntary sector, so that no one slips through the cracks in an emergency.
They can start to streamline all the £20bn of payments made by service users to charities directly (for example, paying for a yoga class at a community centre). These payments are currently made in cash, in small amounts and are almost impossible to track. Time to Spare can directly facilitate these payments and build a marketplace where service users can directly book, pay for and access community activities; something they’re piloting already.
They can build the hub for testing and measuring the outcome of different interventions. Since they already have data on what’s going on across the entire sector and the outcomes of the different approaches charities are taking to tackle the same issue (for example, individual vs group therapy for mental health issues), you can test the effectiveness of different approaches. Whether that’s at a local Council level, at a corporate CSR level or at a philanthropic foundation level, if you had the complete dataset on everything that every charity was doing in the world, you can run experiments and discover insights from things that have already happened.
The possibilities are endless. And they’re not limited by Time to Spare’s imagination. They can open up their platform and dataset to developers to build apps on top of it. There’s an untold number of products and services that can be brought to life by people of any background that are determined to make an impact.
Designed to mimic an industry that is inherently collaborative
Tom and Will know the value of Time to Spare is in the data they are collecting and the products they can build on top of it, and they have built a business model to reflect that. By giving the software to charities for free, they are able to quickly get in at ground level and begin collecting data. This, combined with the fact they have made a genuinely useful product for the charities, means they are quickly taking off. They’re now used by over 400 charities with over 90% using them at least once per week (unheard of in the sector).
As discussed earlier, the voluntary sector is incredibly complex. This complexity is driven by the collaborative nature of the industry. Charities regularly refer service users to each other. Social workers in councils refer service users to multiple charities. Charities report to multiple councils. Service users access multiple charities. Councils fund multiple charities.
Unlike the few competitors also building in the voluntary sector, Time to Spare has been built to mimic this collaborative nature from the ground up. Whereas competitors have built point solutions for specific individuals and use cases, the compound startup nature of Time to Spare allows them to harness the complexity and build a product that becomes the operating system for the entire sector.
This leads to viral growth loops and network effects that the business is just beginning to unlock. Since they use Time to Spare to manage their interactions with service users, charities will suggest to their funders that they report to them using Time to Spare. This introduces the funders to the product and provides a warm intro to them. Funders are sold a contract to use Time to Spare to manage their programmes and interactions with the voluntary sector. As this contract is implemented, funders will request that charities report to them through Time to Spare; bringing more charities onto the product and further building out the data set.
Additionally, charities can refer service users to other charities through Time to Spare (for example, Kathy may suggest Alan goes to the financial advice session run by another charity around the corner). These referrals introduce the charity to Time to Spare and on the cycle goes.
Finally, service users can introduce Time to Spare to other charities they access; suggesting they scan their QR code or access their records on Time to Spare, rather than having to fill out several different forms every time they access a charity service.
The more charities there are, the richer the dataset, the easier the sell into funders and the bigger the contracts can be. The flywheel spins faster and the network effects get stronger.
Due to the collaborative nature of the industry, charities often need a way to safely and securely share this data across organisations or with their funders. Tom wrote a great blog post explaining what a collaborative platform looks like for charities and how they have solved the trade-offs of ease of use with security.
All in all, I’m incredibly excited by Time to Spare and the opportunities that having a complete picture of everything that is going on in the voluntary sector presents. They’ve put in the effort to deeply understand the sector and build a product that mimics its structure. Once they’ve created the underlying dataset, the products and services that can be built on top by the refinery are endless.
OK, you made it this far, you must be as interested as I am. If you’re a charity or funder and want to learn more, get in touch with will(at)timetospare(dot)com or message me; and if you’re interested in investing or just want to learn more, get in touch with tom(at)timetospare(dot)com or check out the deal on Odin