FindCollabs

Sedventures is an investment program on top of FindCollabs.

The goal is to solve the FindCollabs chicken-and-egg problem by investing in projects on the platform.

No idea if this will work and would love your feedback on it!

https://findcollabs.com/project/sedventures-meta-project-cGy0iOcmZMzPr0hjDcWt

I started writing content to share FindCollabs with the world. I have always liked blogging, and this is a good excuse to use blogging as a funnel.

I am trying to follow Quincy Larson's Free Code Camp playbook, where he posted a lot on Quora. I feel like IH and DEV are where Quora was when FCC took off, so here's to crafty mimicry.

https://dev.to/the_prion/where-are-the-open-source-consumer-apps-1p46

I found out about the milestones feature on Indie Hackers and this is the perfect place to solicit feedback on FindCollabs.

Indie hackers take their creative work seriously. I have always loved this community and made a dedicated shoutout to indie hackers in a recent conference keynote I gave: https://youtu.be/L-WWaGVCXyw?t=1456

I'll be posting regular updates. I would love feedback, advice, and suggestions from anyone in the community.

After tinkering on various iterations, I was ready to launch FindCollabs. I used Software Engineering Daily as my distribution channel to reach initial users: https://softwareengineeringdaily.com/2019/03/03/findcollabs/

A short excerpt from that post:

"Collaboration on the Internet creates innovation. New inventions, new art, and new products–built by people working together on the Internet.

FindCollabs is a product we have been working on to enable people to find and collaborate with each other. If you want to try it out, you can go to FindCollabs.com."

After saving up some money, I thought about what to build next.

I still felt that it was impossible to find reliable collaborators online. Everybody flakes. Nobody is accountable.

My experience writing The Gig Economy allowed me to collaborate with musicians from Fiverr, who were the most accountable online collaborators I had ever met.

I wrote about this on Medium: https://hackernoon.com/singing-in-the-gig-economy-dfbb751318f8

On Fiverr, people are accountable partially because of the financial incentive. But also because of the rating system. My theory was that you could remove the financial component and keep the rating system, and maintain accountability.

With that in mind, I put a prototype together in Sketch, and hired a contractor to build the first version of FindCollabs, which I originally called handoff.cc (terrible domain name).

Building a two-sided UGC advertising marketplace through self-funded paid acquisition can get expensive. I ran out of money, and focused back on Software Engineering Daily to save money again.

In the meantime, I wrote an album about the gig economy to keep my creative juices flowing and think about what to work on next. https://open.spotify.com/album/27JdDr9ENb0OtRfLKHgiBw

Shortly after leaving Amazon, I had the idea for FindCollabs. The vision was a place to build projects with real identity and a rating system.

By adding a rating system, you enforce credibility. If someone flakes on you, you give them a bad rating.

I also had the idea for a user-generated advertising platform. I prototyped both ideas in Sketch. I was working on Software Engineering Daily and saving up money from that business to eventually launch either Adforprize or FindCollabs.

As I saved money, I thought about which to start.

I was torn between working on FindCollabs and Adforprize. Adforprize seemed like a stronger viable business, so I chose Adforprize first. www.adforprize.com