We interviewed the founder of incredible new app Drops

How would you feel if I told you that tall Vanilla Bean Frap you’re sipping on could do more than just fill the empty void in your soul? Seriously! You could help other people out during your cheat day.

Cue Drops, the newest app set to come out later this month. The premise behind Drops is simple: link your credit or debit card to the app and it rounds up your purchases to the nearest dollar. What was rounded up is then donated to charity. A $3.50 coffee just turned into a $0.50 contribution.

Now you can turn your Chipotle burrito into more than just a thing of culinary beauty…but a thing of philanthropic majesty.

Check out my interview with app founder Shea Rouda below as he guides me through Drops’s inspiration (it’s not quite what you might think) and how the process has been for him.

Before we start talking about the app, I wanted to talk about your background. How did you get interested in what you’re studying now at USC, and what has your experience been so far?

So I was born in Columbus, Ohio. I lived there for fifteen years. My family moved out to California when I was a freshman in high school. We lived in Malibu for two and a half years, then we moved to Laguna Beach.

Then I thankfully got accepted into USC. I didn’t know exactly what I wanted to study when I was here, I actually applied undeclared and I was kind of thinking between Business or a foreign language. One of my main goals in life has been to learn as many languages as I can, with the ultimate goal of becoming fluent, or at least conversational, in four languages before I die.

How many have you gotten down so far? 

I can understand Spanish and I’m conversational in Chinese, and thankfully fluent in English.

Sometimes.

Sometimes, yeah! Don’t talk to me on Monday mornings, but [laughs].

So I chose Chinese as my major, and there’s a little bit of pride to that too because I really want to prove to myself that I could follow through with such a tough major and be able to complete it. And as I started going through the years here at USC, I took a passion for entrepreneurship, especially for technology.

I was going through a bunch of different ideas sophomore year. Last year, when I was living in an apartment with eight of my friends…you know, we’re all on college budgets and we don’t have much money to spend. We were thinking, what was the best way for us to be able to save up some money to uh, maybe buy beer for the apartment to throw a celebration for our friends and whatnot.

So I came up with this idea called “The Monthly Fund” where we’d all link up our credit or debit cards and round up for a month at a time. The goal was the hit $100 of spare change roundups, and if you didn’t hit that target, all the money would be donated to whatever charity we worked with at the time.

I realized this idea was better suited for it to go towards the charities. Why not round up spare change for the charities themselves? So it was a quick pivot to this idea that made me stick with the concept and want to see it out till the end.

You know, when I see these new apps and I’m going in to talk to the people behind them, I already have a sort of origin story formed in my head. Something so simple and  amongst friends, for that to bring this idea is really cool!

Thank you!

Prior to that experience, did you yourself have a background with non-profits or charities?

I’ve always had some experience with non-profits. I volunteered for two summers at a camp in Maine called Camp Kahwanhee for Boys as a counselor for seven weeks there, no pay. Every day you’d wake up and teach the campers a new skill or craft. I definitely learned value through that.

When I was younger, we volunteered with Habitat For Humanity to build homes for the impoverished areas of New Orleans that were hit hard by [Hurricane] Katrina, especially the Ninth Ward. Then, in college, I kind of always wanted to take my passion for giving back. Thankfully, I found an app that helped me to do so.

I met my passion for technology, I met my passion to help others. On top of that, it’s a great way for me to challenge myself every day to strive to not only see a goal of where I want to be, but also work to achieve that.

Wow, that’s awesome. I really get a sense of passion behind what you’re saying. So as I was going through the website – by the way, I didn’t get to download the app!

Did you sign up?

Yeah, but there’s 305 people ahead of me on the waitlist! 305, Shea! [laughs] No but it’s okay. 

Back to my previous point: I was looking through the rest of the website and, hearing you talk about it, I hear a lot of what you’re saying and the influence on Drops there. One saying that stood out to me in particular: “We believe change can create change.” In terms of the philosophy behind Drops, how do you feel like it personally resonates with you beyond your charity work?

When we were creating this app, there are actually a lot of things we did subliminally that kind of, forward our philosphy. The name itself, Drops, is because it might seem like a drop of water in the bucket every time you make a roundup.

But at the end of the month, you’ll be surprised at how much you’ve actually totaled. You could go to Starbucks and buy coffee for $1.25, and those 75 cents might not seem like much of a contribution to the Red Cross, Greenpeace, or even a local charity. But if you look back after 30 days, the typical contribution is about $20. So if you do that on a monthly basis, or even three times a year…a $60 contribution to a charity is going to make a pretty clear impact.

Then, if you also look at the design of the app, it’s pretty cool because we have a gradient that transfers from blue to yellow. Obviously the blue symbolizes the drops, but on a more natural level, it’s water and the earth –the yellow– is at the bottom and symbolizes drops going into the earth. So it’s creating change, bringing growth, prosperity. There are a lot of elements we add to the app to kind of give a subconscious continuation of our philosophy.

Now that we’re getting into the more aesthetic and creative side of things, let’s talk about the app process itself. Who did you collaborate with, what was it like? Any stumbles along the way? 

Yeah, I think the whole process of entrepreneurship is a giant wave [laughs]. You’ve got your lows and you’ve got your highs. I think that every time you are able to power through a low, you always reach a higher high.

When we were first starting out, the hardest part was being able to convince somebody to give me some funding in order to hire some tech talent to get behind the app and develop it. My father, he’s an investor but he’s kind of a hard-ass in the sense that he made me create a business model, forty-page proposal about what we were going to do with the app.

He wasn’t going to let you off that easy!

Exactly, exactly. Thankfully, he hopped on with the idea, and he believed in me and what we were working for. And then I was able to hire an extremely talented developer in India. Incredible guy. I’ve worked with him for the past year…we actually ran out of funding within the first two months, but I talked to him and you know, he believed in the idea. He thought we worked well together, and his help has really changed this app and has made us, I think, one of the strongest applications in beta currently.

Without the tech talent that I have, and the design team that I was fortunately able to meet through my CTO [chief technology officer], we wouldn’t be nearly the great app that we are right now.

That’s great. I’m just- I’m just taken aback by how positive the intention behind the app is. Sometimes people, myself included, can get a little cynical and think, “Oh, my 30 cents isn’t going to make a difference. My $20 a month doesn’t matter.” What would you say to people who might be more adamant towards Drops’s approach?

I think there’s always going to be people that prefer a different method of contributing to charities. A lot of people will simply want to write a check that has maybe $1000 or more to a charity at the end of the year, and that’s absolutely acceptable. That’s just someone’s preference. Say if they are a little hesitant towards a concept like this…it’s kind of because there isn’t a community feel to it yet. And that’s what we are really trying to build with Drops.

So currently, if you download the app –we’re in beta– a simple feature is that you link your debit or credit card, you round up purchases to donate to charity. What we’re trying to do eventually is turn it into a giant community of people that are able to encourage one another, comment on one another’s donations, like one another’s donations, interact with the organizations they support. There’s not really any sort of ecosystem that exists out there right now that brings donors together on one platform, and allows one another to encourage donations towards a specific organization.

Given Drops’s relatively interference-free nature, do you still think the philosophy of it will ring true to users? In other words, will contributing in such a simple way lead to people engaging in more community work, like a food drive? Maybe the potential for a social media side will help with this.

Yeah, that’s our hope. I think technology exists to make everyone’s life easier. With Drops, our ultimate goal is to make donating easier for everyone, as well as making fundraising easier for the charities. Also, with an app like this that’s so easy to download, so easy to use, and so easy to connect you with the cause, that maybe if you contribute to an organization over a four-month period or a three-year period, you’ll probably develop a bond with their cause and what they’re supporting.

I think if that’s the case and we’re able to do that, then people could be persuaded and motivated to go out on their own time and help an organization or help a charity that they normally wouldn’t. So I think that there’s definitely potential for that. It’s just something that we’ll have to see through time.

Besides that, are there any other hopes you have for the app?

There’s a ton. I think my favorite one, with this app, is if you build a community of 10,000, 100,000, even a million users: whenever disaster strikes, you have the ability to instantly reach out to every single one of them. Say, a 9.0 earthquake just hit Japan and we’ve partnered with the Red Cross or a local organization in that community. Simply respond yes to this text message to donate $10 towards that organization right now.

If you could do that and instantly provide people an easy, effective way to contribute to a national disaster, I think that the prospects of relief and the prospects of being able to create a huge impact on an otherwise terrible situation…it’s pretty tremendous.

It’s really impressive to hear everything this app could be. I mean, a whole new platform where donors get to interact with one another is totally new. I know it’s important to stay humble and all but wow, how does it feel to have this app and the potential it carries?

It’s motivating and painful at the same time. It’s like, you want to be there and you see where it could be. The future is extremely bright for an idea like this. And it’s motivating and painful at the same time because you know that any second, the app could fail. Things could go wrong. A competitor could come along and that’s fine if they do it better. I’d be happy to join them and collaborate with them.

But it’s definitely a scary thought to think that this idea could be huge, and it’s also motivating because I want to be the person that’s hopefully building the correct ecosystem around this idea, ensuring that it’s good and that it stays true to the heart of what the ultimate goal is: supporting charities, supporting causes.

Yeah, the app world is tough, especially with so many possible competitors. What has your experience been with that environment so far? Positive, negative?

You know, it’s been both. We have about five competitors working on this, and they’re all in various regions across the United States. I’ve reached out to the majority of them, all with a collaborative tone. Most of them, half of them have been extremely positive, willing to collaborate down the line. Some of them have been a little bit shaken by it, a little more off-putting. They want to do it on their own, which is totally fine. I think everybody has their own approach towards it.

But it’s cool, at the same time, because each one of our competitors is doing the same idea in a very different way. Some are web-based instead of mobile. Some are identifying solely with progressive causes versus ones that are also religious. Some are identifying strictly with environmental causes or partnering with charities, whereas some are featuring every single charity in the United States and just giving users the option to choose whatever non-profit they feel is best.

In the end, one of these will be successful, or a combination of ideas from each platform, will be successful. I would just love to be a part of whatever team that can build this app.

That’s the spirit! And I don’t really know what else to ask you at this point because you’re giving fantastic answers. Uhhhh [prolonged groaning because I am a professional].

Well, if people want to sign up, we’ll be launching on the app store–

Yes, do the plug!

[Laughs] Gotta throw in the plug. If people are interested, we’ll be signing up beta testers up until we launch on the app store sometime in mid-April. Our pricing, instead of taking a part of the donations, we ask our users if they’d like to select a tip fee. The tip is an add-on, you can choose $1, $3, $5 to help us out. And we work with some of the strongest institutions out there for security and transactional data.

When it comes to working with charities, we’ve got about 20 in the pipeline, and I think eight or nine on the app right now. So we’re expanding pretty quickly, and we’re looking forward to launch.

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Drops is set to launch later this month on the App Store. You can sign up to be a beta tester, and learn more about the app itself, on their website here.