It’s been four years since our founding team began making plans for Humanitarian Toolbox. We’ve now reached an important growth milestone: We’re beyond ‘startup’ and entering the ‘second stage’ phase of our existence.

This is a major milestone for us as an organization. We created a business plan that reflected our experience as startup business founders: We bootstrapped the organization. We tested our core concepts. We found potential customers. We released a Minimum Viable Product for our first entry. All the while, we managed our finances carefully as we proved our core business model.

Now, it’s time to grow.

We’ve validated our core value proposition, our ability to create and deliver software, and our ability to work with our customer organizations. The next steps are to scale the organization, and prove that we will be effective maintaining and supporting all our applications.

The most important part of this plan is growing the organization. Our first board meeting of the year was our most significant. We celebrated what we have done. We have managed to survive those first difficult years for a new organization. We’ve proven that we can build software with volunteer developers in a sustainable and consistent fashion. We’ve proven that we can deliver software that our customers will use.

Then we created our goals and plans as an effective force for good. We’ll be adding project managers to our team. We’ll be launching development on new applications. We’ll be releasing updates to our first application. We’ll be growing the capital in the organization. We’ll be reaching out to more donors and partnering with our customers to secure grants to build and maintain more applications.

All of these actions mean we will expand our reach, help relief organizations do more, and yes, save lives. We could use your help. If you want to work on one of our projects, checkout our github page: http://github.com/htbox to find a project. If not, we value your contribution to help us grow and achieve our mission to save lives with software.

-Bill Wagner

Humanitarian Toolbox President