PlatformKit
Full stack framework for building online business platforms.
This week I published my first site using PlatformKit. DharmaWorks - a venture I've been developing offline for about two years now. It's basically Hogwarts, but online, via Zoom.
Aside from the thrill of putting PK to use, and the joy of finding the right aesthetic for my brand, I'm already enjoying some of the benefits that PlatformKit provides that other platforms can't compete with.
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I can deploy to Netlify for basically zero dollars per month.
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Instead of selling books directly, all of the product pages for books are Amazon affiliate links. Likewise all the services link to Calendly booking pages. Most e-com solutions like Shopify, Woocommerce, etc make something like this a pain, because they expect transactions to occur directly on their platform, requiring the user to manually rewrite the templates, or to write some custom HTML. Since PlatformKit simply allows products and services to be sold via external url, all I have to input is the desired link, and the markup is handled automatically.
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All of the content which is currently available for free will one day be premium content, and all I will have to do to enable that for each piece of content is to change one field (assign a required Stripe subscription plan). This means that my marketing efforts will eventually be monetizable. Knowing this, I can fully invest in producing high-quality content.
Feels good!
I've been developing PlatformKit (https://www.platformkit.com)
for the duration of quarantine. All the while I've been trying to explain to my mother what it does, how it works, why it's going to help me launch a number of startups I've been developing, etc.
She knows terms like e-commerce, marketing automation, etc. But I'm not sure she knows what a platform is, aside from abstract notion of facebook and instagram being platforms. Because of this ambiguity, I've had a hard time getting any kind of meaningful response from her.
After a particularly frustrating phone call where this lack of understanding really came to the forefront, I found myself feeling some pain about the disconnect between my excitement and hers. Then it occurred to me that simply making an explainer video might do the trick.
😓 This is a bit absurd, because my job for the last 15 years has been to produce Audio/Video marketing content (see: https://jameshuntercarter.com), yet it had not yet occurred to me to apply this skillset to PlatformKit. Somehow the two were separated in my mind!
So I spent a day putting together a video, using a sweet music track from https://musicvine.com/ (great licensing options for IndieHackers, by the way) and some graphics from http://motionarray.com (same principle as MusicVine, but for visual assets). 10 hours later, I had made this video:
Total budget: ~$40.
The next day I sent it to her, and of course, it finally "clicked" for her. This was a significant personal milestone for me because my projects never feel "real" until they pass the mom test. And professionally, it was empowering to use a skillset normally reserved for clients on my own project.
The night/day difference really made clear to me how crucial explainer videos can be when you're doing something new, innovative, or simply technical.
Has anyone else had a similar breakthrough with pitching your concept via video? Or what about leveraging a skillset you forgot you had? 😂
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