The Empulse App

TodreamalifeEngineeringBiz devPreventive medicineApp developmentGraphic design

Jun 19

Empulse was created to help people buy services for homelessness from nearby nonprofits based on a geocode.

The app was built with seed funding from Stanford University’s AI in Medicine: Inclusion and Equity Initiative. It was originally a pro-bono project of the Todreamalife consultancy, became its own Delaware-C spinoff Empulsive Inc., and was finally incorporated as a subproject under the 501(c)3 nonprofit Empulsive Ink.

The app was built by Todreamalife freelancers with the aim to reduce homelessness, increase charitable giving and reduce anomie, and create smart cities everyone loves to live in.

Unfortunately, despite many grant & startup applications the app never received additional funding and without further development or resources was unable to attract significant consumer interests.

Our group felt very sad about this. The project was based on excellent economic and public health observational data and had behavioral design input from some very bright minds. We felt very inspired to work on it, not only from personal experience in the field. Empulse represented significant idealism and prosocial motivations within our group. We feel it was a hard lesson that the coolest projects are sometimes unable to achieve the traction they deserve.

Our failure on this project, led us to be more pragmatic about both behavioral economics, consumer motivations, and economic incentives. Surprisingly, it has led to meaningful long-term relationships in high-tech as we surfaced some of the most ethical, effective, and prosocial advocates buried in tech hubs, hard-nosed investment groups, high-functioning nonprofits, and engineering dev groups. The people who tried the hardest on this app, and mourned its loss most deeply have become integral parts of our high-tech network and this failure led us to try harder on subsequent projects.

We retain the rights, design, and prototype code for the app and have offered it to several large nonprofits over the years along with all grant and written materials used in its initial funding. If you know of a group that is better positioned to incorporate what we have done in a wider context we would happily contribute our groundwork to another organization.

Our group has been working in high-tech for a long time, and it is a hard truth that not all projects succeed — one often obscured in the dazzling lights of startup pitching and launch parties. We’d like to publically acknowledge that we know what it feels like to have a project you dearly love fail. We believe this is an important, and critical part of building new things.