Getting a business off the ground can be stressful, a fact that hit Mark Hobbs when he was invited to interview for the prestigious Google for Entrepreneurs tenancy program.

Unfortunately, the Halifax-based entrepreneur had less than 48 hours’ notice about the interview and no choice but to put the costs of the trip to the Google Canada headquarters in Waterloo, Ontario on his personal credit card.

But Hobbs, founder of FundMetric, a Halifax startup that helps charities monitor donor activity, managed to get his credit card limit raised and eventually won a spot with Google at their location at Communitech, Waterloo.

“It’s tough bootstrapping a business,” said Hobbs. “I had no money to get to Google and I then gave a pretty bad interview.

“I wasn’t happy about that. I failed to articulate the value of predictive analysis (predicting future behavior from existing data).

“But I contacted the interviewer through an online fundraising campaign he was running and wrote him three paragraphs on how our product could help with a campaign to reduce hunger.”

Hobbs and FundMetric were accepted onto the Google program. They also won a spot with New Brunswick-based accelerator Launch36 and were one of seven teams presenting last night at the Demo Day of Launch36’s fifth cohort.

Now, Hobbs and his co-founder Chris Kolmatycki travel between Waterloo and Moncton to tap into the expertise that is helping them develop their product, which they plan to launch at the end of this month.    

“The key is not to give up,” said Hobbs with a laugh. 

The FundMetric product is a software-as-a-service tool that lets charity workers communicate with their donors and plot fundraising campaigns.

It presents lists of donors and their contact details, highlighting how they like to be contacted. It can stream the donors into groups. And, through a drag-and-drop mechanism, lay out the timeline of a fundraising campaign, plotting when and how to contact donors.

“The product makes donations more transparent,” Hobbs said. “Charities can follow their money using infographics, and make the money go further. It tracks how engaged the donor is. For example, do they open the charity’s email?”

He said that tests show that these campaigns are 41 per cent more effective than traditional blanket campaigns.

Hobbs and Kolmatycki, both former advertising execs, began FundMetric in May 2013 after a stint working with a hospital clarified their thoughts on marketing.

They knew they were onto something with FundMetric when clients said they would sign up for the product before it was even completed.

FundMetric now has two paying customers and is in talks with several others. They are also talking with U.S. venture capitalists about funding growth and are backed by multiple angel investors.

When the product launches it will enter a huge market. The company is first targeting health and education charities, and there are more than 200,000 such organizations in the U.S. alone. These groups raised $63 billion last year and spent $12.6 billion doing so.

Hobbs said his company owes a lot to Halifax innovation hub, Volta Labs.  The partners worked out of Volta’s Spring Garden Road space for their first year and attained the momentum that has allowed them to move into their own space and hire more staff.

“We got a lot of support through Volta,” said Hobbs. “The biggest resource is the other entrepreneurs. When I was applying for a program or accelerator I could walk down the hall and talk to someone who’s been there.”

Hobbs, now aged 28, has had a lifelong interest in volunteerism. He was born in Regina and gained a political science degree from Dalhousie University. He said FundMetric has a few competitors but his company’s advantage lies in its real-time monitoring of donor activities.

“In five years, I’d like FundMetric to be the gold standard in charity accountability,” he said. “It will lead to less wasted money and more transparency.”

Disclaimer: Entrevestor receives financial support from government agencies that support startup companies in Atlantic Canada. The sponsoring agencies play no role in determining which companies and individuals are featured in this column, nor do they review columns before they are published.