Crowdfunded

Yesterday, I posted my side project Crowdfunded on Hacker News. It happened on a whim, without any major preparation. Now that a little more than 24h have passed, it's time to share what happened.

So, what did happen?

Nothing.

Well, close to nothing. But certainly no run on the landing page or any of the infamous comments on HN.

Some numbers. As of writing, my post has 4 points. About only 30 visitors to the landing page. No side effects on visits to my personal site, subscribers for my newsletter, or new followers on Twitter.

To be honest, that's certainly not what I expected. And nonetheless, I do not consider this as a fail. For me, the question was not "why do it" but "why not". It was an exercise in exposing me and my work. To step out of my comfort zone. It was an experiment.

I don't consider the (great) folks at HN or PH to be the target customers for Crowdfunded as crowdfunding campaigns tend to concentrate on physical products, "artsy" stuff etc. Me posting there is more like dynamite fishing. I'll focus on spear fishing in the future.

I want to share this with you as I think that the Makersphere needs the full bandwidth of our experiences while building things. Survivorship bias lurks at every corner 😉

I just shipped a major update.

The biggest change concerns the pricing model: no commitments in the form of a subscription anymore. Just a simple one-time payment to get access.

The dataset itself grew massively from the 2,000 entries I started with. What you get with the update:

• 20,000+ campaigns from Indiegogo ending in 2019 and 2020
• 40,000+ campaigns from Kickstarter ending in 2019 and 2020

As #buildinpublic also means "fail in public", here is something to learn from.

Some stats on yesterday's launch of Crowdfunded on Product Hunt:

• 142 votes
• 8 comments (excluding my own)
• 2 reviews
• 10th most popular product for the day

And 0 new customers.

As for any side effects:

• 2 new followers on Twitter
• No new subscriptions to https://basicproblem.co
• A couple of service offers to help me reach product of the day/ week/ month (which I declined, obviously)

Some personal takeaways and learnings. As this was my first launch on PH, I don't have a solid opinion about this platform yet. Interesting to see, though, how the voting dynamic changes and what PH chooses to tweet throughout the day.

And, most importantly: I won't give up on Crowdfunded yet. There are at least three hypothesis why I got no conversions, all of them worth testing out:

• Unattractive value proposition
• Marketing to the wrong customer segment
• Wrong pricing model

On we go. Crowdfunded is only one week old and I there are plenty of MVP iterations to make.

I just launched Crowdfunded on Product Hunt.

This is my first product launch on PH and I'm both very nervous and excited to see what the day will bring. If you have any feedback or questions, I'm happy to hear and answer them on https://www.producthunt.com/posts/crowdfunded

In my https://basicproblem.co/ newsletter, I used scraped data to highlight the top-performing campaigns. Last weekend I wondered if that data might make an interesting product.

So, apart from firing up Carrd for a decent landing page, it was time again to learn new tools. The scraped data needed some finishing touches, be put into an Airtable base, and got a product page on Gumroad.

And today, it went live. In slightly less than a week. Another first ;)