LIFE LESSONS

How to Start a Social Business — and What You’ll Learn in the Process

I share some of my personal experiences and life lessons as Co-Founder of Project Yemen, a social business

Most people would prefer to spend the summer after their high school graduation taking a vacation, going somewhere nice, or at least relaxing with family and friends before heading off to college.

I was at my friend Murtaza Bambot’s house too that summer of 2013. But what I found myself doing wasn’t what your typical recent high school grad might be doing. Instead, I was learning how to make a Facebook and Twitter page for a business, and I was attending Atlanta Startup Village meetings where I would network with other startups in the Atlanta community.

I was learning how to start a social business. What is a “social business”, you may ask? It has no current single definition, but as my friend explained it to me that summer, it’s a term that was first coined by Nobel Peace Prize laureate Muhammad Yunus to describe a business whose purpose revolves around solving a social, economic, or environmental issue. This can be anything ranging from poverty, pollution, illness, or hunger.

In other words, it’s a business (usually a nonprofit) whose ultimate mission is to do good and generate enough revenue to become self-sustaining. All excess profits are reinvested back into the business, allowing it to grow and thrive, doing more good.

It sounded like a good idea to me at the time, and I didn’t have any other real plans that summer, so I jumped on board. A mutual friend of ours saw Murtaza’s vision and jumped on board too. The three of us began to work heavily on this social business we dubbed “Project Yemen”.

What is Project Yemen, you’re probably wondering? I’m glad you asked. If you’ve ever been to a developing country, odds are you’ve seen how much of an issue pollution can be. In general, people in many countries around the world are much more lackadaisical when it comes to their efforts to not litter. It’s a lot more prevalent of an issue than it is in America, and it does nothing good for the environment either.

Project Yemen is a social business aimed at curbing the pollution problem in Yemen while simultaneously helping alleviate poverty there. How so, you may ask? We planned to partner with local sanitation companies in the capital city of Sanaa and generate enough funding to pay the poor of Yemen to bring us plastic trash they would find on the streets. In the process, we’d be helping the poor with daily expenses while cleaning up the streets of Yemen.

It seemed like a feasible concept in theory, and we already had contacts in Yemen through Murtaza that could expedite the process. So we decided to give it a shot, but we ran into snafus when we tried partnering with local sanitation companies.

We even got a friend to design a logo for us (in the picture above), which we ended up using for all our social media. I was the creator of the Twitter page for Project Yemen, but all three of us contributed.

In the process, all of us learned a lot about not only how to start a social business and promote it, but also many of the common pitfalls many startups encounter when first starting out as well. We struggled to secure funding for our vision, and we ultimately had to disband Project Yemen. All three of us went on to different colleges and universities shortly thereafter.

Even though Project Yemen ultimately wasn’t successful, the lessons I learned about myself and the startup industry in the process are some I’ve carried with me to this day. I learned how difficult it can be to try and create a new business from scratch, get funding for your idea, promote and market it successfully, and ultimately grow it into a financially stable entity.

To make others realize your vision takes hard work. If you want to start a publication like Illumination, even if your idea is great, just ask Dr Mehmet Yildiz: success still doesn’t come easy. You have to be prepared as well for the pitfalls you may face and know how to overcome them. If I can apply these same lessons to any similar future endeavors, you can too.

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