The concept of running a business for the greater good has been at the core of Humanitix since its inception in 2017, with founders Adam McCurdie and Joshua Ross setting out to create a blueprint for success when it comes to giving back.
Having donated more than $2.5 million to charity so far, Humanitix has redefined the event ticketing industry by directing the entirety of its profits from booking fees into charitable organisations supporting global education for children.
With a presence in Australia, New Zealand, Canada, the United States and the United Kingdom, Humanitix has received support from industry heavyweights like Google and Atlassian, and been honoured with several awards recognising their contributions to social causes.
Despite this, McCurdie says their mission remains to showcase how startups can have a profound social impact through business.
In the early days of business, when looking to expand and gain further investment, McCurdie said staying true to their original mission proved challenging.
“It began as a bold experiment to test whether a software business could thrive while giving away all its profits to charity, rather than conforming to the traditional venture capital route followed by many startups,” said McCurdie.
“We wanted to create a unicorn business that not only achieved financial success but also had a positive impact on society. The goal was to challenge the notion of traditional success and highlight the potential for businesses to make a difference,” said Adam.
However, McCurdie said finding their early believers proved difficult with a business model that was vastly different to other social enterprises.
“Philanthropists were used to donating to more traditional models and in those early days we had a lot of doubts as to whether we could raise more money, as we were bootstrapping ourselves. Thankfully, we found the right people who set us on a path to success,” said McCurdie.
By channelling booking fees towards the global education gap for disadvantaged children, McCurdie and Ross realised they could have a profound social impact through business that went beyond financial gains, but inspiring other entrepreneurs to follow a similar path became an intrinsic part of that roadmap.
After many years in business and millions donated to social causes, Humanitix is now on a mission to encourage other entrepreneurs to give back.
As a business which, at its core, believes in positive change McCurdie says he wants to showcase the right way of defining success.
“When I started out I was very afraid of failure, but my fear was of incorrectly defining success to exist solely around money and the accumulation of wealth,” explained McCurdie.
“My co-founder and I shared a vision, in the sense that, we didn’t want careers that were based on aspirationalism of the future, instead we wanted to do something that was rewarding and would have immediate impact,” explained McCurdie.
With many following the tried and true path of venture capital investment, McCurdie said there’s a disillusion in the ecosystem that when you ‘exit’ a startup you’ve achieved success.
“Many people in the startup world dedicate their time to achieving a successful exit, believing that success comes when you sell for millions, but what comes next?,” he says.
“Founders tell themselves that’s when they’ll do something of social impact or when they’ll have greater choices, instead they should ask themselves from the get-go what they would do with their time if they had the choice? That’s what allows you to explore your impact in a much freer autonomous way and enables you to do something that ignites and fills your cup,” said McCurdie.
McCurdie and Ross believe they can inspire other businesses to find their passion by taking a first step towards making a genuine social impact.
“The more people that copy us the better, we want to give other entrepreneurs a playbook on how they could create a startup or business which generates profits and gives back to society,” said McCurdie.
But McCurdie says impact driven businesses also attract and retain talent who want to be part of a business with purpose.
“It’s amazing to see how many people want a career that includes an interesting job with likeminded people at a company that has legitimate impact and purpose, it makes me optimistic,” said McCurdie.
“With thousands of grassroots and community events already on our platform, we want to be the go-to global events ticketing platform for any event producer around the world,” he said.
“Because at that stage we could give away hundreds of millions in profit every year, which is the ultimate goal, where we can together shift billions of capital from profits towards worthwhile causes,” said McCurdie.
On their mission to work alongside worthwhile businesses, Humanitix has recently partnered with Pin Payments, an Australian and New Zealand payments platform for small to medium sized businesses.
Pin Payments’ technology seamlessly integrates with Humanitix’s ticketing platform, facilitating secure and efficient payment processing events. This enables Humanitix to focus on its primary goal of maximising charitable contributions, while providing event organisers with a trusted partner to handle their payments.
Pin Payments is Australia’s first unified approach to payments for small to medium-sized businesses. It supports over 12,000 businesses in Australia and New Zealand to accept payments from debit and credit cards bearing the Visa, MasterCard and American Express brands without requiring a merchant account.
