Andy Hadfield, founder of failed social discovery app for wine Real Time Wine, has announced he has taken over as chief executive officer (CEO) of social impact startup forgood.
Real Time Wine closed last year after failing to monetise adequately, in spite of obtaining funding from the likes of Michael Jordaan and Mike Ratcliffe, managing director of Warwick Wine Estate.
In a blog post, Hadfield said it had taken him around six months to get over the startup’c closure, but he had now found something to get excited about in forgood, a for-profit startup in the social impact space that connects people to causes and others that want to make a difference.
The company has until recently been incubated inside another non-government organisation (NGO) – Heartlines – but Hadfield said it had “never really kicked on” and was now going to be launching some new products next week.
“We’re building out the plumbing (the glue?) of the NGO industry by creating technology and user experiences around volunteering and donation processes,” he said.
“We’re taking that plumbing and turning it into a cloud platform for business – to handle their employee engagement and staff volunteering activities. Think of it as sort of software-as-a-service-for-CSI.”
Hadfield said he had an “awesome team” currently making preparations, would be opening up a funding round shortly, and had obtained its first paying client.
“So. I’m back in startups (you’d think I would have learned my lesson). And hey, if we’re the one out of 10 this time (that succeed), not the nine out of 10 (that fail) – we might just get to change the country and the continent a bit,” he said.
