Case Study: Tiny Choices

 
 

Overview

TinyChoices was a bold initiative by Headway Collective to inspire individuals to take small, meaningful actions that collectively drive global change. Designed with a human-centric approach and grounded in behavioral science, the app empowered users by presenting simple, value-aligned steps that could create a ripple effect of positive impact. TinyChoices embodied Headway Collective’s mission to build a more informed, empathetic, and equitable world. Imagine an elementary school restocking its library as hundreds tap “buy a book” with a single click or a community efficiently redistributing surplus items to those in need with a simple “ready for pick-up” action. TinyChoices sought to make these visions a reality by transforming small efforts into significant change.

This project was a search for product-market fit, demonstrating the critical role of user-centered design in testing hypotheses and refining strategies. Using Lean Startup methodology, we conducted hypothesis-driven experiments to explore how social influence, gamification, and behavioral science could motivate altruistic behavior. While we ultimately implemented an exit strategy and did not fully achieve our vision, the effort provided valuable insights. We influenced and inspired other social impact organizations, and we remain hopeful that the project can be revived or adapted in the future to continue its mission.

 
 
 

Building a Team and Driving Progress

To bring TinyChoices to life, I assembled a passionate team of colleagues and former students who shared a commitment to social impact. Together, we formed Headway Collective, an LLC operating under the Slicing Pie equity model, with team members contributing their expertise in exchange for equity rather than salaries. To optimize resources and sustain progress, we also partnered with offshore developers. Despite balancing professional responsibilities, family commitments, and this ambitious project, the team displayed extraordinary dedication and creativity, cultivating a collaborative, supportive, and enjoyable work culture.

We embraced modern product development approaches to drive progress efficiently, including continuous discovery and agile practices. Our toolkit included Jira for project management, Figma for design, Confluence for documentation, and collaborative platforms like FigJam and Miro for brainstorming and planning. 

We built the TinyChoices platform using robust, modern technologies. The mobile apps were developed with React Native for cross-platform compatibility. Google Firebase powered authentication, user data management, personalization, and notifications through Firestore and Cloud Functions. We utilized Drupal with headless delivery for organization and content management, ensuring flexibility and scalability for content distribution.

Participation in the DePaul Social Impact Incubator and membership in the 1871 early-stage cohort further supported our efforts, providing us with mentorship, networking opportunities, and access to invaluable resources. Focusing on productivity and finding efficient ways to collaborate, we built a strong foundation for TinyChoices, ensuring steady progress while maintaining a healthy balance for our highly skilled professionals.

Target Market

While we hoped for a mass-market offering, our initial target market focused on young to middle-aged women, as this demographic tends to be highly engaged with social media platforms and leads in charitable giving. We believed this group would resonate with the app’s mission to make small, meaningful contributions to improve the world. By aligning the app’s functionality and design with their interests and behaviors, we aimed to create a platform that seamlessly blended their social media habits with their philanthropic tendencies, making it easier and more rewarding to take positive actions.

Understanding the Competition

Several platforms operate in volunteerism and altruism, but none offer the unique focus on easy, personalized actions that TinyChoices provided. The four-quadrant diagram below illustrates how offerings in this space vary across four key dimensions: community building, event awareness, fundraising, and volunteering/advocacy.

The most significant competitors in the space were: 

  • Golden: Connects users with volunteer opportunities, acting as a directory for finding ways to give back.

  • Catchafire: Matches users’ professional skills with local and global volunteer needs, emphasizing skill-based contributions.

  • SignUpGenius: Helps organizations manage volunteer event logistics, streamlining the participant sign-up process.

  • Facebook: Offers a simple and frictionless platform for charitable donations, leveraging its extensive social network.

TinyChoices offered a personalized, low-friction platform for meaningful contributions, from donating to advocating. Unlike competitors focused on specific aspects of altruism, it provided a holistic, user-centered experience that made doing good effortless and rewarding.

Insights from Focus Group Sessions

 
 

We conducted several focus group sessions to refine our concept and validate our approach. In these sessions, participants provided feedback on various stimuli, shared their preferences for different "microtasks," and discussed their likelihood of engaging with the platform.

The most significant finding was that while the concept resonated strongly with some participants, others were less interested. This confirmed our initial belief: TinyChoices may not appeal to the mass market, but it has the potential to find a strong product-market fit within specific, motivated groups. This insight reinforced our focus on identifying and targeting audiences passionate about making a difference, enabling us to design a platform that met their needs and aspirations.

Harnessing Behavioral Science and Social Connectivity

TinyChoices was designed to inspire action and foster community by leveraging key behavioral science principles and social media dynamics. We crafted these strategies to encourage positive behavior, deepen engagement, and amplify the platform’s impact.

Vision for Applying Behavioral Sciences:

  • Collective Impact Visualization: Showcased how individual contributions added to a more significant community impact.

  • Community Connection: Fostered a sense of belonging by linking users to initiatives alongside hundreds of others.

  • Social Proof: Highlighted collective efforts to motivate users by seeing others take action.

  • Emotional Rewards: Celebrated user contributions with personalized feedback, reinforcing motivation to continue

  • Compelling Calls to Action: Engaging media and storytelling were used to drive participation.

  • Streaks: Encouraged habit formation and a sense of progress by tracking consecutive days of participation.

Vision for Social Connectivity:

  • Personalized Feeds: Delivering tailored tasks and updates aligned with user interests while showcasing collective achievements.

  • Activity from Others: Real-time updates on others' actions to inspire and encourage participation.

  • Sharing Capabilities: Empowering users to share milestones and contributions to amplify the app's reach and impact.

These combined approaches ensured that TinyChoices motivated users to take meaningful actions and cultivated a dynamic and connected community, reinforcing that small steps can lead to significant change.

Revenue Model and Monetization Strategies

TinyChoices was crafted to drive positive change while ensuring long-term sustainability through a diversified revenue model. While our primary focus was on achieving product-market fit, we outlined the following monetization strategies as key avenues for generating revenue:

  • Partner Organization Fees: The two-sided marketplace offered a tiered system for non-profits, with free basic placements and paid advanced features like interactivity, quick pay, multimedia, and analytics. These tools helped organizations promote initiatives effectively and optimize impact.

  • Payment Fees: TinyChoices earned a small fraction of each transaction, aligning with our mission while maintaining a sustainable revenue stream.

  • Sponsorship: Socially conscious companies could sponsor the platform, gaining visibility with a highly engaged audience while aligning their brand with impactful causes.

  • Employee Volunteering: A white-labeled app version could provide socially conscious corporations with a modern alternative to traditional service days. Employees could collaborate on altruistic goals, fostering team engagement and corporate social responsibility.

  • Additional Revenue Streams: Other potential sources included advertising, data marketing (focusing on ethical practices), and sales of products that aligned with our mission.

Progressive Development and Deployment Strategy

Our strategy focused on progressively building and deploying TinyChoices to ensure sustainable growth and alignment with user and partner needs. This phased approach allowed us to iterate effectively while gradually expanding the app’s functionality and reach. Our overall strategy focused on three objectives:

  • Build a mobile app platform: Start with a foundational mobile app for iOS and Android, supported by a content management system to manage and publish content seamlessly.

  • Partner with relevant organizations: Collaborate with partner organizations to create mission-aligned, engaging content that captivates users. Expanding partnerships strengthens our ability to deliver personalized, impactful experiences for customers and their members.

  • Incorporate personalization to enable mass-market adoption: Gradually evolve the platform to serve a broader audience, leveraging personalization to deliver relevant content automatically and foster deeper engagement.

This progressive strategy prioritized iterative development, early partnerships, and scalability, laying the groundwork for TinyChoices to grow and adapt to the needs of both users and partner organizations.

MVP Strategy

 
 

Fully aware of the ambitious nature of this endeavor, we aimed to find product-market fit by identifying a dedicated audience eager to contribute to making the world a better place. We aimed to create a compelling, meaningful experience by combining exceptional design and personalization, ensuring users were presented with tasks aligned with their passions and interests. By leveraging behavioral science techniques, we sought to motivate and empower individuals, fostering a sense of purpose and engagement in helping create positive change.

We initially focused on developing a foundational feed system for our Minimum Viable Product (MVP). This feed allowed us to create basic cards featuring an image, title, text, organization logo, and a call-to-action (CTA) linking to an external website. While not ideal for long-term functionality, this simple solution enabled us to set up the app quickly and begin gathering feedback to inform future development.

We utilized Google Play Console and Apple App Store Connect to publish and distribute the TinyChoices app to users. These platforms enabled us to manage app listings, track performance metrics, and ensure seamless updates. By leveraging these tools, we were able to reach a broad audience across both Android and iOS devices, ensuring accessibility and a smooth user experience for our growing community.

We built a content management system (CMS) to support this effort to streamline content creation and publishing. Realizing that scaling content to meet the demands of a broad audience was beyond our immediate capabilities, we began building strong relationships with partner organizations to provide the content needed to power the platform. 

While our strategy to partner with non-profit organizations to supply content was well-founded, it proved challenging to execute effectively. We continued to create our content simultaneously and experimented with various approaches targeted at specific audiences. 

Given the difficulty of getting partners to create content and users' lukewarm reception (likely due to the limited functionality of only linking to URLs), we decided to pivot.

First Pivot: Building Partnerships with Organizations

 
 

We repositioned the product as a white-label platform for organizations to communicate directly with their members. This approach addressed two critical challenges: attracting users to the app and encouraging organizations to generate content. By focusing on this model, we aimed to achieve an initial degree of product-market fit, with the potential to enhance value over time by building more advanced and integrated functionality. The new approach would allow organizations to communicate with and engage their members. Members would benefit from having a one-stop destination that consolidates notifications, events, and opportunities and seamlessly connects with their calendars for enhanced convenience and engagement.

Rather than focusing on content creation and user acquisition, we could focus on efforts to build tools and features that empower organizations to create compelling and relevant content for their members. By partnering with organizations, we could work closely with them to understand their specific needs and challenges, ensuring that the platform delivered real value and met their goals effectively. Finally, this shift would allow us to explore enterprise functionality and tiered fee structures, providing a more straightforward pathway to profitability before pursuing a mass-market audience.

We initially identified school parent-teacher organizations (PTOs) as our primary target market. PTOs aligned well with our objectives due to their strong focus on fundraising, openness to new solutions, and active member bases. Additionally, this segment presented a relatively low barrier to entry.

After conducting interviews and surveys with PTO leaders, we validated the need for our platform and identified key feature enhancements (e.g., the ability to add events to personal calendars) required to launch an MVP. We partnered with a local PTO to pilot the product in a school setting. While the trial demonstrated some successes, we encountered significant challenges: adoption proved difficult due to parents' busy schedules, and content management became a burden for PTO leaders.

Although these challenges might have been surmountable, continued research revealed deeper systemic issues that made the PTO market less viable. Decision-making often required buy-in from school leadership, PTO leaders were overextended as volunteers, and frequent leadership turnover meant we would need to re-establish partnerships annually.

Ultimately, we concluded that PTOs were not an ideal partner organization. As we explored other types of organizations, we encountered additional barriers, such as competing products and structural challenges, which further diminished the viability of this approach. These insights led us to reassess our strategy and explore alternative paths forward.

Second Pivot: Orienting the App to Communities

After struggling to acquire organizations, we shifted to a community-based approach, returning to the idea of a mass-market app built gradually, community by community. To test this hypothesis, we focused on Oak Park, IL, a familiar community representing our target market and offering numerous organizations capable of generating content. We took the lead in populating content for local nonprofits and marketing directly to residents, aiming to demonstrate the platform’s ability to engage both organizations and their members effectively.

This phase involved identifying suitable organizations in the Oak Park community, creating a detailed content management plan, and a plan to update the app with more community-centric features. A low-cost guerrilla marketing strategy targeted local audiences through social media and outreach to organizations. Feedback loops were established to gather user and organizational insights while we provided training and support to help organizations use the app effectively.

Despite these efforts, adoption rates remained low. Focus groups revealed that residents didn’t strongly desire to act on broad community improvement initiatives, but they were deeply motivated by specific aspects of the community they cared about. This insight led to another pivot: shifting our focus to user-driven affinities and interests rather than community-wide engagement.

Third Pivot: An Audience-First Approach

 
 

At this stage, two critical insights emerged: (1) People identified more strongly with causes (e.g., women’s equality, democracy) than with communities or organizations, and (2) our platform lacked the sophistication to deliver on its promise of making it easy for people to take meaningful action. These realizations led us to a new approach focused on proving two hypotheses: (1) Could we attract an audience by publishing compelling cause-based content? (2) Could we engage those users with advanced functionality that made taking action effortless?

This pivot eliminated the need for organizations to build content and connect their members to the app. To stay focused, we concentrated on two causes, believing they had the potential to resonate deeply with users.

We successfully built cause-based groups on social media, demonstrating our ability to attract a dedicated following. However, converting this interest into meaningful action remained a challenge. While we introduced features like push notifications and streaks to increase engagement, our calls to action—primarily URL-based—lacked the compelling functionality necessary to inspire users to act. Ideas such as one-click donations, Amazon Wishlist integration, petition signing, video advocacy, and even scheduling item pickups were envisioned as transformative features but proved too resource-intensive to implement with the team and funding available.

Ultimately, we made the difficult decision to disband. As one analysis of startup exits highlights, “Businesses often decide to exit when they face a lack of resources to deliver on their vision or reach sustainable growth.” This was true for us. While our innovative ideas had promise, the required investment in design and technology was beyond our capacity. Despite the challenges, we remain hopeful that the insights and lessons we gained can inform future efforts to build solutions that empower people to make a difference effortlessly.

Exit Strategy

The team has faced challenges maintaining momentum due to life events, commitments, and burnout, prompting reassessing our path forward. While we’ve demonstrated the ability to create quality software and content, generate interest in social networks, and intrigue users with the concept, we’ve struggled to drive app downloads, produce content essential for retention, and monetize the platform. Although we believed these goals were still achievable, the team’s capacity made us unlikely to realize them. Given our history of pivots and limited viable options, it made sense to explore a final pivot that aligned with our constraints -- an exit strategy.

Outcomes

While TinyChoices faced challenges in driving substantial app downloads, the initiative yielded several meaningful outcomes:

  • Social Media Success: We built a significant social media presence, earning praise for the quality and impact of our cause-based content. Customers still interact daily with social media content created months ago, even years ago. This demonstrated our ability to engage audiences and foster meaningful conversations, even if it didn’t translate into app adoption.

  • Contribution to Social Impact Knowledge: TinyChoices inspired and informed other social impact initiatives, showcasing the potential of cause-driven content and innovative engagement strategies. While the app has concluded, the ideas and methodologies we developed could continue to influence similar efforts in the future.

  • Innovative Process: We pioneered a unique approach to balancing quality with limited time investment. Our collaborative methods and strong team relationships—many of which were forged during the pandemic's challenges—enabled us to move quickly and effectively. These connections and approaches remain a valuable part of our legacy.

  • Individual Growth: As social impact entrepreneurs, we gained invaluable experience and insights, deepening our understanding of the challenges and opportunities in this space. These learnings not only shaped TinyChoices but will inform our future endeavors.

While falling short of our original vision, these outcomes reflect the broader impact of TinyChoices and set the stage for reflecting on lessons learned.

Lessons Learned

Building TinyChoices was an ambitious journey that taught us several important lessons about innovation, collaboration, and perseverance:

  • Navigating Social Impact Organizations: Collaborating with mission-driven organizations requires carefully aligning their goals with a scalable business model, a delicate balance that often feels like threading a needle.

  • Overcoming Engagement Challenges: Inspiring consistent user engagement proved difficult; while the concept resonated with some, overcoming the broader indifference toward altruistic actions required significant effort and innovation.

  • Limitations of Lean Startup Methodologies: Unlike traditional startups, proving TinyChoices's potential couldn’t be achieved solely through lean, iterative testing. A complete build was necessary to showcase its impact, which added complexity to the development process.

  • Challenges of Time and Resource Constraints: Launching a startup with a part-time team of professionals—many of whom had families and full-time careers—highlighted the difficulties of sustaining momentum and balancing priorities.

  • The Power of Team and Culture: Our ability to keep the team together over an extended period was a standout achievement. Success came from recruiting the right people—skilled individuals passionate about the mission—and fostering a culture of respect, collaboration, and shared purpose.

These lessons reinforced the importance of vision, adaptability, and the strength of a dedicated team in pursuing ambitious, mission-driven goals.