It’s a Wednesday morning in mid-February, and Pia Mancini isn’t talking about hamburgers. After countless phone calls, emails, text messages, and many, many bad lunches at conferences, she has found a handful of users to test out her company’s new collaboration platform. Five customers may not sound like a big deal for a startup that one day hopes to reach millions, but Mancini’s target isn’t any old user. Over the past two and a half months, she’s been courting elected officials, not your typical early adopter crowd.

DemocracyOS, which Mancini, 32, started with cofounders Santiago Siri and Guido Vilariño in 2012, allows politicians (or groups of any kind) to poll their constituents quickly. “It’s a tool that has promise,” says one of Mancini’s early customers, San Francisco city supervisor Mark Farrell, who signed up for the pilot program with city council members from New York, Cambridge, Massachusetts, and Mountain View, California. Farrell is using it to solicit feedback on a proposal to modernize city vehicles and another to encourage children to play outdoors. The programs aren’t exactly controversial, and Farrell’s commitment to DemocracyOS may be modest, but for Mancini this is a coup. “Selling to politicians is hard,” she says. “I needed to get that initial pool of customers. Now I can go everywhere else.”

Mancini is employing a classic growth strategy proselytized by Y Combinator, the Silicon Valley startup factory I’ve been writing about as part of Fast Company’s series, and in which DemocracyOS is currently enrolled. YC cofounder Paul Graham has long encouraged founders to, as he put it in a 2013 essay, “Do things that don’t scale.” That especially applies to rounding up your first users. This is how Airbnb went from a couple of air mattresses in 2007 to a company that is reportedly raising funds at a $20 billion valuation, and it’s how Mancini is seeking to launch DemocracyOS more broadly. YC’s bet is that the standards an entrepreneur sets early on will continue to inform how he or she treats customers when there are more than just a handful of them.

With two weeks to go until YC’s Demo Day, when Mancini will show investors her team’s work, she’s opening up the free platform to the public starting next week. Her goal will be to sign up as many city council members as possible, along with student governments, food coops, book groups, or anyone else looking for a collaboration tool. If all goes well, her two-and-a-half-minute pitch to investors will likely include a graph of user growth pointing up and to the right.

If DemocracyOS’s growth plans look similar to that of the other 113 startups in the current YC class, it has one of the most unusual backstories. First, it’s a nonprofit, an uncommon thing among so many companies that are aiming themselves at profit-hungry venture capitalists. Secondly, it happens to operate a political party in its home base of Buenos Aires, Argentina.

Mancini’s Partido de la Red—“Net Party,” in English—is a wild experiment in direct democracy that seems to take inspiration from both Occupy Wall Street and Reddit (a Y Combinator alum and ongoing investment). Party supporters, mostly young Porteños, as citizens of Buenos Aires are known, weigh in on issues like the possibility of extending late-night hours on city subways and legalizing the sale of small quantities of marijuana seeds. The Net Party promises to vote on bills based exclusively on the feedback it gets online. In 2013, Mancini and her cofounders entered the party into Buenos Aires’s local elections, garnering 22,000 votes. That was 1.2% of the total electorate and not all that far from the 3% it needed to win a seat in the local parliament. “We were trying to find a strategy to hack into the political system and upgrade it to the 21st century,” says Siri, 31, who serves as the organization’s product chief.