Member Profile: Develop Appalachia
Company Name: Develop Appalachia
Location(s): We are a remote-only organization.
Industry: Non-profit
What We Do:
Develop Appalachia is a 501(c)3 non-profit that aims to address socioeconomic development in the Appalachian region through entrepreneurship education. We work to connect students with coaches through our coaching program, put on our Hackpalachia event, and are working on additional programs and to create opportunities for students and young people in the Appalachian region.
What’s a Trend You’re Seeing/Prediction for the Future:
Near-future? 2020 will actually end at some point. Longer term, though, there’s a lot to worry about in the web/mobile industry. It’s likely that high-value customers will shy away from ad-supported business models in favor of “authentic” relationships protecting privacy and which don’t inundate them with advertisements.
As this happens, it will likely be more difficult to start many different types of companies as larger companies such as Facebook or Google expand their digital product offerings (likely through acquisition) to drive revenue. Looking at Google in particular you can see small movements in this direction already with their recent Waymo-GM partnership and now charging for reCAPTCHA services that were previously free.
In other words, your business model better be driven by paying customers instead of advertisement if you want to attract the wealthier customers that Google and Facebook will lose and avoid having to compete with their engineering teams or piggy banks.
A Problem/Challenge We Are Working To Solve:
The problem we are trying to solve is the disconnect from the Appalachian region with the explosive economic growth we’ve seen in other parts of the United States.
Appalachia suffers from internal brain-drain (movement from the region to tier-1 cities), and for those who remain in the region there is a lack of “churn” in the venture capital and entrepreneurial communities. We believe that if we can make an impact on this problem, we’ll see more startups and other small businesses grow and thrive in Appalachia and the network effects will lead to sustained prosperity.
Organization's Slogan: Inspiring the future of Appalachia
Why is Ohio is a great place to do business?
Ohio is a great place to do business (not just non-profit work) because of the people. Plain and simple. Ohio does not have the luxury of having beautiful mountains, a vibrant metropolis like New York City, a location on the east or west coast, but the people in Ohio more than make up for that due to their no nonsense approach to funding businesses, working with others, and trying to help one another.
For more information: www.developappalachia.org
Follow Develop Appalachia on Twitter: www.twitter.com/dev_appalachia
Connect with Develop Appalachia on LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/company/develop-appalachia