Virtuous Cycles and The Benjamin Test

Hello everyone! I hope you had an excellent week. The theme of today’s Letter is one of my favorite quotes:

“Start where you are, use what you have, do what you can.”

Our bootstrapping adventure continues, and we are still focused on getting our hands on our first student debt portfolio. Our next milestone on that journey? Finding a debt buyer who is willing to take a chance on us.

I expect that will take a while, but we won’t sit around twiddling our thumbs.

We’re starting a little side quest — The Benjamin Test.

Don’t Want to Read? Try the Video!

An Experiment in Virtuous Cycles

Thanks to a couple of incredibly attractive and brilliant donors (you know who you are), we’re making several $100 payments on student loans over the next few weeks.

I hear you thinking: “That sounds like a nice thing to do, but that’s not the life-changing big bang action we’re working toward.”

Is this a distraction? Are we bike-shedding?!

Hit pause on that thought and zoom out a little.

There are two kinds of work that we do as a charity. The first is deployment, which is how we use our funds to reduce student debt. The second type of work is development — how we raise funds to fuel those debt relief activities.

The magic happens if we can build a virtuous cycle between development and deployment — when relieving debt leads to raising more donations, which leads to relieving more debt, and so forth.

$100 loan payments and sharing stories from the people we donate to is just about the simplest possible way to start that cycle.

We’re calling this experiment The Benjamin Test.

Here’s how it works.

Deployment: Donate and Learn

Along with paying down a tiny bit of genuine student debt, we’re gaining hands-on experience with student loan industry people and processes. This is an opportunity to get on the phone with debt servicing organizations to build professional relationships and goodwill.

We’re also going to learn how their payment systems work and better understand how much of the loan payment process we can automate in the future.

Development: Sharing Our Stories

This is the fun one: we’re going to record and share the stories of the people we’re donating to, and every one of them gets to end on a hundred-dollar high note.

We’ll learn how student debt has impacted their lives, hear about the awesome things they’re working on today, and start feeding the Internet content machine.

The Internet content machine is a topic for another time — hang on to the idea that we can have a lot of fun raising money for debt relief while entertaining and delighting people.

I Want Your Help

If you want to share your story and receive a $100 payment on your student loan, email [email protected].

If you know someone interested in participating, ask them to do the same!

If you’d like to help fund The Benjamin Test (and simultaneously help validate our excellent new donation system), click here!

Onward!

Thank you all for your support, curiosity, and desire to crush massive amounts of student debt. Big things start with little steps, so remember …

“Start where you are, use what you have, do what you can.”

Cheers.

P.S. We’re playing around with logos and branding. Yes, this is bike-shedding. It’s also cheap and fun. What do you think? Do ya want stickers?