sif'd

After months of painstaking development, highs, lows, and lots of coffee, I've finally launched my latest project - sif'd - a web based marketplace for brands to find content creators to promote a product or service (and vice-versa).

Where'd the idea come from?

A bunch of things happened which led me to build sif'd.. In 2020, I started a company called Merchonate with the purpose of selling merch for youtubers. Basically, I hired artists to make designs which I then slapped onto t-shirts and coffee mugs. I'd set up an online shop branded for each of my partnered youtubers. They'd promote the merch and we'd split the profits. The brilliance of this business is that, the really hard and expensive thing - marketing - suddenly became easy and free. I didn't pay for marketing and I didn't bother doing it. My partners did it for me. And what I learned was that it's pretty easy to contact youtubers and sign them up as partners when you offer them the potential to make money with 0 up-front fees and very little effort. The other critical thing I learned was how to use the youtube data API to identify lists of potential partners.

Although Merchonate had a lot of traction, it was a ton of work and it took a bunch of up-front captial to operate, with pretty small margins.

After Merchonate, I built a data science education platform called Practice Probs. Unlike Merchonate, Practice Probs required almost no effort to maintain (other than writing new content). It was the first time I integrated a platform with Stripe using a subscription based model, and boy is that sweet. There are weeks where I literally don't lift a finger and I still get payments from users. The problem? Very few people know that the platform exists. I tried some paid ads, but could never get a positive ROI. So, at some point I decided to look for youtubers to promote my platform...

Now, this was the second time I faced this problem of finding youtubers to promote a product. While this sounds easy, it's actually a painful process. Most youtubers are too small or too big, they don't speak english, they aren't exactly in my target market, they don't have contact info, they haven't posted recently, etc. etc. And, as far as I know, there isn't an easy way to search for youtubers. AND, I always wonder what the fair market rate is for these people??

Having faced the same problem twice, the alarm bells were ringing in my head. Not only did I have a problem, but I had a fairly decent solution, leveraging the youtube data api to speed up my search. I started doing some research and quickly learned that lots of other people had the same problem. At a certain point, it became obvious I had go for this one.

How did you build it?

I'm a data scientist - not a web developer - so I knew I'd need some help building this thing. I reached out to a contractor I'd previously hired and he was stoked to become a cofounder in my new venture. We agreed on a 65/35 split in my favor since I'd be doing more work and my cost of living is higher.

Unfortunately, things started pretty shaky from the get-go. I was hyper motivated to get things up and running. He seemed to be as well, but the deliverables just weren't there. I tried to be patient and understanding, but eventually realized we had to "break up" if I was going to get the MVP built anytime soon. It was hard to do, as I consider this person a friend, and we had even consulted a lawyer and started drawing up a founders agreement. But he was super nice and understanding when I broke the news to him.

Having parted ways with my cofounder, I started to search for another. Unfortunately, I couldn't pull anyone onboard. I suspect most of these people figured "ah, it's just another 'ideas' guy looking for a programmer to do all the work". Whatever the reason, I just couldn't find a cofounder. But I still believed in the problem I was solving so I decided to bite the bullet and learn Firebase. and Next.js. and React. and Tailwind CSS. and JavaScript. ...Ooof what was I getting myself into!?!?

I hit the books hard and eventually transformed myself into a pretty capable web developer. After a month of studying, I finally started developing my product. Day after day, I devoted all my time and energy into this thing, and finally, here I stand today with a working MVP!