We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Christian Lowe a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.
Christian, thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. We’d love to have you retell us the story behind how you came up with the idea for your business, I think our audience would really enjoy hearing the backstory.
When I was growing up, the church that my family attended had a gymnasium that was supposed to be free for all church members.
However, when my siblings would visit the gym, we found that the gentleman who was in charge would specifically not rent out equipment to little Black kids like us.
Luckily, we had accomplices. So whenever I wanted to rent a soccer ball or tennis racket, my siblings and I would stand around the corner while our white friends would pretend to be us and rent the equipment in our name.
And truth be told, as a little Black kid growing up in the Deep South, this was a completely normal experience for me.
In our everyday lives and yearly vacations across the Southern United States, my family and I spent so much time and energy navigating discrimination that, to me, it felt as normal as trying to avoid traffic.
But this all changed in my senior year of college when I studied abroad on a program called Semester at Sea. In four months, I traveled to 13 countries across four continents while sailing on a cruse-ship turned floating college campus. And during my travels, I quickly discovered that I often felt safer in countries where I didn’t even speak the language than in my own neighborhood back home.
But as I began to experience a newfound sense of safety and security abroad, I noticed something wrong. I noticed that across the globe, my friends who were women, queer, or from ‘the wrong ethnic group’ still had experiences with discrimination that mirrored my own.
And this broke my heart.
I realized how patently absurd it is that so many of us have to live our lives in constant fear of facing discrimination (and violence) simply because of the circumstances of our birth.
And so late at night on the MV World Odyssey (the only time that the ship’s internet worked), I started looking for a solution to the problem we all faced. And my very first thought was, “is there an app for that?”
So, I immediately sought out my friend who had interned at Google. I asked him whether there was an app that could keep all our friends and us safe from discrimination.
He responded, “No, but someone should definitely make that one.”
Not too long after disembarking from Semester at Sea, I learned about a civil-rights-era publication called “The Negro Motorist Green Book” (also simply known as the Green Book). This annual travel guide helped African-American travelers stay safe during the Jim Crow era by using reader submissions to help folks find restaurants, hotels, gas stations, and other establishments that served Black travelers.
I realized that my friends and I needed a new green book, one with a more expansive audience in mind. And I decided that if no one in Silicon Valley was going to solve this problem for us, then I would. And thus, The Green Book Project was born.
The Green Book Project is a mobile app that helps people from marginalized groups find inclusive businesses and avoid discrimination. With our app, users can rate and review businesses based on how inclusive they are and warn others to steer clear of especially discriminatory establishments.
As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?
For folks who don’t know, The Green Book Project is a mobile app that helps people from marginalized groups find inclusive businesses and avoid discrimination. With our app, users can rate and review businesses based on how inclusive they are and warn others to steer clear of especially discriminatory establishments. At its core, our app helps people of color, women, queer folks, and folks with disabilities identify locations that are safe and welcoming.
I never saw myself becoming a software engineer, much less the founder of a tech startup. I majored in International Studies & Diplomacy in college, hoping to eventually work for the U.S. State Department or the United Nations.
And funnily enough, in my first year of college, I took a computer science course as an elective and, after barely passing, thought to myself, “who would want to do stuff like this all day?”
But after deciding to start The Green Book Project in my senior year of college, I quickly realized that I couldn’t afford to pay a developer to build it for me. If I wanted my idea to leave the confines of my head, I would have to teach myself how to code.
So, I spent a year teaching myself to program using free resources online, attended a career accelerator in Downtown Houston, moved to San Francisco, and landed my first job as a software engineer at Change.org.
While working at Change.org, I spent my nights and weekends writing the code for The Green Book Project’s iOS app, and in April of 2021, I quit my job to focus on The Green Book Project full-time.
And we’ve accomplished a lot in the last 18 months. Since going full-time, we’ve launched The Green Book Project on Android in addition to iOS. I’ve hired a team of absolute rockstars who have greatly improved the app’s design and our startup’s social media presence.
Just in the last two weeks, we’ve hit 9,000 downloads of our app, and we expect to hit 10,000 within the next month.
If there’s one thing I want to leave readers with, it’s that The Green Book Project is genuinely meant for everyone. Whether you are a person who faces discrimination in the form of racism, homophobia, ableism, sexism, or are simply an ally to those who do. Regardless of whatever may bring you to The Green Book Project, we need your help to identify businesses that are safe and welcoming toward people from marginalized groups.
The ally piece is one that people are often surprised by. But truth be told, my friends, who are allies, have often helped me avoid discriminatory establishments simply because they are privy to conversations that I am not. As such, it only makes sense to me that we should recruit allies to help us do this work.
How did you build your audience on social media?
It’s really funny; when things first started out, it was just me running everything, and we had basically zero social media presence beyond my Facebook friends who had been following my story. I rarely posted anything about The Green Book Project on public social media. This was mostly because I’m a struggling perfectionist, and I only wanted to post things that felt super polished. But because of how much time I spent coding the app, I rarely had the time to make nicely polished photos and videos for social media.
But one night, I was working on the app late in the library, and I decided to record a super simple video of me sitting at my laptop and “coding an app to keep my people safe.”
I think I expected no more than 10 or 15 views and hopefully a handful of likes at most. After I shot the video, I went home, ate a very late dinner, uploaded the video to TikTok, and then went to bed.
The next morning I woke to my phone buzzing constantly. I looked at it and saw all these notifications of people liking and commenting on my video. The comments were filled with messages of people telling me how proud of me they are and others saying that they were downloading it right then and sharing it with all their friends; I even had people asking me if I was hiring!
The video got more than 85,000 views and gave me an understanding of how I would get my app in front of its target audience.
And I say this is all funny because I had spent months trying to develop a marketing strategy and create the perfect content but got no traction when I posted to social media. But when I finally just kept it simple and authentically put myself out there, I received our best results yet.
I think the best advice I can give to people who want to build their social media presence is that in a world where there’s a lot of fake content out there, people really value authenticity and seeing the people behind the products they use.
Can you share one of your favorite marketing or sales stories?
Earlier this year, I read about the story of how Twitter first got off the ground.
It was 2007, and they were struggling to get traction, but they had learned that many of their users would be in one place, SXSW.
At the time, Twitter didn’t have the money for big booths like the established tech companies, so they had to be creative. They got scrappy and instead canvassed the hallways and lobbies of the Austin Convention Center. The result was a success, and launched Twitter into the public eye.
Fast-forward to this past spring, and Blavity Inc., the number one media company for Black millennials, announced that they would be hosting the famous Afrotech conference in Austin, TX, this year.
A lightbulb went off in my head. And I realized that Afrotech could provide the springboard for my startup that SXSW provided for Twitter 15 years ago.
I quickly explained my vision for canvassing Afrotech to my team, and we unanimously decided. to attend.
Six months later, on the weekend before Afrotech 2022, our entire team met in person for the first time ever in Austin, TX. Before we even arrived, we had devised a plan for telling as many people as possible about The Green Book Project. Like Twitter back in 2007, we didn’t have the money to pay for a booth in the Afrotech expo hall, so we also had to be creative.
To market our app, we brought thousands of flyers and hundreds of t-shirts, stickers, buttons, and even pieces of candy to hand out to Afrotech attendees.
So when the conference started, it was go time.
On the very first day of the conference, during the main kickoff, we got to answer an audience question on the big screen and tell over 15,000 people about our startup. Our “pitch” was an immediate hit, and within minutes our’s server’s traffic benchmarks were lighting up!
And my team didn’t let up from there.
Despite the unseasonably cold weather in Austin that week, we stood on the corner of the street outside the convention center, giving out all kinds of swag to attendees who downloaded our app. We even put flyers on every car’s windshield in the convention center’s parking garage!
By the end of the conference, we had handed out 1,400 flyers, 620 stickers, and 505 pieces of candy. The result? Within a few weeks of the conference, we reached 10,000 downloads of our app!
I tell this story because I think it’s common among tech founders to believe that marketing is all about paid ads, SEO, and big corporate partnerships. And while those things are all important, there’s a lot of power in putting boots on the ground and spreading the word in-person. While this approach may not have the same reach as others, it’s an amazing way to meet new evangelists for your company and get amazing feedback on what you’ve built.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://www.thegreenbook.io/
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/the_green_book_project/
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/christian.g.lowe/
- Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/the-green-book-project/
- Twitter: https://twitter.com/_thegreenbook
- Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@thegreenbookproject9059
- Other: https://www.tiktok.com/@thegreenbookproject?lang=en
Image Credits
Personal Photo: Tony Morales Photography – https://www.instagram.com/tonym_/