The bet
Ruck.us bet that online political engagement was still organized around the same two parties that were driving people away from politics. A social network built on issues over party labels, it reasoned, could pull in people who wanted to talk to the other side instead of shouting past it.
Nathan Daschle and Raymond Glendening founded it in 2011. Daschle was a former executive director of the Democratic Governors Association and the son of former Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle. Glendening was the DGA's former political director and the son of former Maryland governor Parris Glendening. The press leaned hard on that origin story, casting the founders as "political sons" trying to build something their fathers' generation of party politics could not.
Peak
The launch drew attention. In September 2011 TechCrunch covered Ruck.us as an attempt at what it called the world's first political social network, with user profiles built from issue positions in place of party registration. The founders pitched it as infrastructure for a less partisan style of engagement.
The company operated with institutional backing and a small team through 2011 and 2012. It rode the same wave of civic-tech optimism that produced several other platforms in this catalogue.
What worked
The critique behind Ruck.us holds up. Party affiliation is a poor predictor of what any one person believes issue by issue. A network organized around positions was a different structural idea, not a rebrand of an existing product.
The founders also had something most civic-tech founders lack: direct institutional relationships across the political establishment. That's likely why the launch got national press attention that a similarly staffed startup without their pedigree wouldn't have.
What failed — the mechanism
A social network needs a critical mass of ordinary users and a reason for them to keep coming back. Ruck.us got neither at the scale a network needs. Politicians didn't show up in numbers that made it worth a citizen's time, and citizens didn't show up in numbers that made it worth a politician's time. It's the same two-sided cold start that stalls most platforms trying to seat a supply side and a demand side on day one.
By mid-2013 one of the two co-founders had already left for a job outside the company, a visible sign the original bet wasn't paying off. In 2014 the company raised a further $500,000 and used it to rebuild the business around a fundraising and organizing toolkit for local political candidates. The social network was no longer what the money was for. Ruck.us had become an ordinary campaign-technology product with a paying customer, campaigns, in place of the citizen network it started as.
What Agora takes from it
Ruck.us dropped its own citizen-facing premise as soon as a paying customer appeared on the other side. Once campaigns were the ones willing to pay, the product reorganized around what campaigns wanted, and the "break down party lines for ordinary people" idea disappeared.
Agora's structure exists to avoid that fork. Verified officials are the only ones who post. Campaigns and parties don't. The free, non-partisan citizen side of the platform isn't the part expected to fund the company someday.
If a paying customer only ever appears on the supply side, the product shouldn't have to trade away the demand side to survive on it.
Common questions
- What was Ruck.us?
- A political social network built by two former state-party operatives' sons to organize around issues instead of parties, which drew press and funding, then became a campaign fundraising toolkit when the network never caught on.
- Why did Ruck.us move away from civic technology?
- Ruck.us is recorded here as pivoted away. We file it under the pattern we call The supply-side cold start, which names the recurring way this kind of platform comes apart.
- When did Ruck.us operate?
- 3 years as a social network (2011-2014).
- Political Sons Launch Ruck.us, A Social Engagement Platform Based On Issues, Not Parties — TechCrunchprimary · 2011-09-26
- Second Ruck.us co-founder takes job outside of the start-up — Washington Postsecondary · 2013-06-29
- Tom Daschle's Son Raises Half A Million To Remake Ruck.us Into The Kickstarter Of Local Politics — TechCrunchprimary · 2014-08-19
- Ruck.us — Wikipediasecondary
- Americans ElectA $35 million bet that a hidden centrist majority would go online and nominate a third presidential ticket, which ended when neither the voters nor the candidates it counted on showed up.
- DemocracyOSArgentina's open-source direct-democracy platform, which tried to make legislators vote the way citizens clicked and, when the legislature wouldn't listen, ran for the seats itself and lost.
- OpenGov FoundationA nonprofit that built an elegant tool for citizens to mark up legislation, then spent years discovering that legislators would praise it, pilot it, and then not use it.