Real Time Wine founder Andy Hadfield launches social impact startup

Andy Hadfield, founder of the now defunct wine rating startup Real Time Wine, has announced his newest venture: a social impact startup called forgood.

The project, which has been in “stealth mode” since November 2014, allows people to volunteer their time or donate food, clothes and money to an organisation which they feel needs it or to create their own cause which would benefit from donations.

According to a post on Hadfield’s blog, he’s stepped into the CEO role at the company, which “has been incubated inside another NGO (Heartlines) for a while now, but never really kicked on”.

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“They’ve tried some stuff, learned some stuff, built some stuff,” he writes, “What we’re going to be launching next week […] is brand spanking new — so we’re calling it a startup. Because it is.

While Hadfield is holding some details back until the official launch next week, he did reveal that just because forgood plays in the social impact space, doesn’t mean it won’t be for profit. “We’re trying to change the world (and make it a better place) — and make money at the same time,” he writes.

According to Hadfield, the big vision for forgood is that it’ll build out “the plumbing (the glue?) of the NGO industry by creating technology and user experiences around volunteering and donation processes”.

“We’re taking that plumbing and turning it into a cloud platform for business — to handle their employee engagement and staff volunteering activities. Thinkn [sic] of it as sort of software-as-a-service-for-CSI”.

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It’s certainly a far-cry from Real Time Wine, which first came to the attention of the South African startup space during Tech4Africa’s Ignite competition in 2011.

From there it received investment from Angelhub and investors such as Michael Jordaan, owner of Bartinney Wines and Mike Ratcliffe, managing director at Warwick Wine Estate.

It was, unfortunately unable to sustain the momentum, shutting down in April 2014. Interestingly, Hadfield received almost as much attention for the brutally honest and self-reflective post he wrote about why the startup failed as he did for the startup’s initial successes.

Despite the Real Time Wine experience, Hadfield seems eager to be back in the startup game.

“I’m back in startups (you’d think I would have learned my lesson),” he writes, “And hey, if we’re the 1 out of 10 this time (that succeed), not the 9 out of 10 (that fail) – we might just get to change the country and the continent a bit”.