Creatorbase

Been caught up in my full-time job for the last 2 months so progress on Creatorbase has been a little slow. But, over the last 2 weeks, been putting a lot of work in the last 3 weeks to bring the Webflow site to completion. Had to do a hard re-think on what I wanted to use as the homepage and eventually changed it from what I had originally planned. Lesson learned. I should have had a better sense of what the main use case I wanted for the site and what potential monetisation I wanted before driving the design. That would have saved tons of Figma, Webflow edits.

Most of the Airtable Database population of these Creator Co's is more or less complete. Have a deep database of ~400 tools alr, but will probably launch with 250+ first due to some missing data and also need to prioritise the work to get it out the door asap.

Another challenge during this process was also the limits Zapier has for its plans and the ridiculous pricing for the more expensive plans. I decided to still just pay for the upgrades as I'm assuming a very high Task count this month as I'm doing a lot of the initial data entry from Airtable to Webflow, but that volume should drop drastically after this month and I can drop to a lower plan.

With the product build being close to completion, I've been working more on preparing for the Product Hunt and Indie Hacker launches. Been working on getting folks to sign up for my upcoming page. Would appreciate if you did so as well here:

https://www.producthunt.com/upcoming/creatorbase

Outside of that I'm preparing the relevant graphics, images as well as several tweet threads that might serve as traffic drivers. Would love to get to a decent size of followers on the "upcoming" page to make the launch more successful.

But thats where im at for now.

Do let me know if you would like to help give feedback and I would love to chat and share with you the live link! Else if this is something that interests you, do sign up in the link 👇🏼 and I'll be sure to let ya know when we launch! Drop me a follow on twitter too @dilcapital .

Finally settled on a structure of how I wanted to build the site and what no-code tools to use.

1. Airtable:
   From the start, I was already intent on using Airtable as the database for my project. The flexibility and speed of the platform makes it a go-to.

2. Webflow:
   Despite having built a couple of sites with Webflow, I had initially considered going with bubble.io having seen a couple of examples online of people easily integrating the 2 platforms and reading that it was a more complex process with Webflow. However, after chancing upon Connon Finlayson's in-depth video showing how he built a fairly complex site using Webflow and Airtable, I was sold and ran with this structure.

3. Zapier:
   Was already familiar with Zapier having used it for a previous side project. Decided to stick with this even though I also looked at integromat and a couple other automation platforms. FYI, you've got to plan out your zaps strategically to stick to one of the lower plans as their pricing is pretty steep.

Since I started podcasting and writing occasionally, I've found it really hard to find and compare tools for different creator services like creation, monetisation, community and more. What makes this problem even harder is that there are new projects being launched every day, many of them bootstrapped, meaning that they don't make it onto your TechCrunch-es and Crunchbase-es.

Secondly, working in the VC space and been working hard to closely track the space, I had found it really hard to find a single place where I could view, categorise and sort through all of the projects out there. Mainly to understand the space, see what projects might be investible ideas and also any noticeable trends.

And lastly, for creators who are launching their products, I have always found that, while I love product hunt, today many larger companies and recognised folks are using the platform as well to launch their products compared to just more indie, bootstrapped folks from years back. Today the types of products also range across all industries making it hard for new creator tools to bubble to the top. (Note, I still really love Product Hunt, visit the site everyday and will probably launch this one PH as well)

The consolidation of these realisations made made me want to build a side project out of this and see where it leads! Will likely just no-code the whole project for speed of launch. I'll also try to document as much of the process as I can to share along the way and after its live!

Look forward to sharing the end product with you all and if anyone wants to work on things together do hit me up! especially if you're also based in SG, would love to get to know more folks in the community!

BTW, I'm already 30 days in, just backdating this so it reflects the actual starting date and I know exactly how long I take to launch this project :)