Pre-launch Questions
Hello to all Indie Hackers! I've been sitting on the sidelines with analysis paralysis for a long time now. Due to the amount of tech wizards on here, I figured the best thing to do was to join a tech company and gain a bit of experience in the field.
With that said, there is still hesitation to launch any type of idea that I've thought of for fear of xyz. The reality is, I just need to start probing and asking for feedback.
This is that attempt. At the end of 2016, I graduated with a BS and a good bit of debt to go along with it. Even with working full time and doing a bit of work on the side, it seems like I haven't been able to make even the slightest dent on the amount.
http://mystudentfund.me is a crowdfunding site geared towards assisting students tackle their student loan amounts. Mentors can view student profiles and invest in students to assist with paying down their student loans.
At the moment, it is just a landing page that has a type form signup survey to see if there is any potential interest in the project.
A few things that I want to touch on with IH.
- What would be a good incentive for mentors to want to invest?
- Any ideas on the mentor persona (who would be a good fit to want to invest)
- Should I start posting on other startup forums even though this is pre-launch?
- Do you have any student loan debt?
Here are my thoughts on the questions above as it stands:
- there are others that assist with no additional incentive (gofundme)
- I've used https://www.hubspot.com/make-my-persona?utm_campaign=NAM Acq [en] | Make My Persona 2018&utm_source=Product Hunt Post to create a persona, however, would like to see others input.
- I was thinking about posting on product hunt, reddit, hacker news, but at the same time, I would rather build an MVP before posting there.
- I do. Under 20k.
Another question that just came up, should I start building the MVP while getting signups or should I wait and get input before starting to implement what i think the project should be?
At the end of the day, this is a start to creating projects that have value.
If you do not think this project has potential value, please speak up.
Thanks IH community.
I do not know anything about this problem. Here in Brazil is a very different environment regarding this type of loan.
So I can't answer any of your questions. But I have the impression that you won't have many valuable answers from indie hackers.
My advice is that you should forget about all forum posts, MVP or persona for now. And focus all of your available time in trying to find real mentors. Find people who actually did pay to one of those gofundme pages. Find people who already did this for real and ask them a lot of questions. Why they did it, how, to whom, why that person, would they do it again, how much, how they found out about it
Find at least 10 people initially in this situation and learn from them.
If you struggle to even find these people yourself, it is a very good sign that your idea will have a very hard distribution problem and you probably shouldnt start it at all.
That's actually great advice! I did notice that gofundme has an education section, not necessarily to assist with student debt, but it is there. I'm definitely going to give it a try and reach out to them as you mentioned. Great starter questions to ask, as well. Thank you.
Good luck!