A Good story

Good, a simple word that perfectly represents the philosophy of the successful homonymous American start-up , launched in 2006 by  26-year old Benjamin “Ben” Goldhirsh. Today, with its 142 thousand fans on Facebook and its 661 thousand followers on Twitter, Good.is  is considered to be one of the babies of the 2008 Obama campaign: it gives great importance to the brand and to the partnerships that could be created between the different protagonists of its sector, choosing a slogan that can’t leave anybody indifferent: “For people who give a damn.”  It’s a brand that has been able to capture the attention of consumers, as well as of investors.

“When we started, a “do-gooder” was a looser”, says Goldhirsh, “but then things changed,  things have become so shitty that everyone dug in and said I’m gonna figure out how to be part of the solution, I think that’s what led to Obama getting into office and that is probably what made us grow.” This project had the ability to spot the trends of its time and turned a social stigma into a brand that is extremely successful on the market:  the quarterly paper magazine has 65 thousand subscriptions, the web platform  counts three million single visitors a month, then there are the marketing consultancy firm, GoodCorps and the production company Reason Pictures . They are all part of the same company: Good Worldwide, which has activated partnerships with the Silicon Valley giants: Yahoo! (for the development of the search engine Goodsearch.com), Starbucks (the welcome pages of the coffee shops wireless networks are designed by Good), Microsoft, Ibm, Mastercard, Apple, Bp, Pepsi, Gap, Virgin,  just to mention some of them.

Conquering Juno

In 2009 the company received a large amount of money (among the investors there was also Nicholas Negroponte, new technology guru and creator of the project “Laptop for a child”), thanks to the funding, Good activated some new partnerships such as the ones with Govit, a website designed to monitor the activities of the American parliament; Mob.ly, a word of mouth system to share reviews of bars and restaurants; Causes, a donation system on Facebook that supports different NGOs, which was created by Syllicon Valley hero, Sean Parker, co-founder of Napster, Plaxo and shareholder of Facebook and Spotify. Moreover, thanks to the new resources , Good was able to buy the fundraising web platform wowcrowd.com, and later in 2011, Jumo, the social network  launched by Mr. Facebook’s old roommate and director of the Obama’s online campaign, Chris Hughes.

Following in his father’s footsteps

However the path has not always been smooth. Because of their notoriety, Ben Goldhirsh and his business partners have sometimes been criticized.  As a matter of fact, someone had doubts about the ultimate aims of this young group of heirs and geeks kissed by Wall Street who decided to put their skills at the disposal of the non-profit universe. But young Ben, son of the more famous Bernie Goldhirsh, founder of Inc. magazine, knows where he’s going. He still considers his father, who,  died of cancer, as his mother, Wendy  Martz did, his point of reference, as he never gave up fighting his illness but managed to create the Goldhirsh Foundation. It was his father, a well-known figure in the publishing business  who, before his death, in 2003, told him: “Try to do something good”. And that’s what Ben, in his own way, is doing.