Thought Processes Before During and After Launching a Crowdfunding Website

A Not-So-Novel Idea Was Borne Out of Frustration and Hand-Wringing 

How Do Kickstarter and GoFundMe Do It?

So I decided to set up my own crowdfunding site a few weeks ago. I got tired of hearing all the stories of the Big Boys (gofundme and kickstarter) not allowing certain projects that THEY deemed hateful. Two particular projects come to mind: the Christian baker in Colorado and the Kentucky county clerk Kim Davis. After the bakery raised some $300,000 on the huge fundraising platform, the owners or the platform decided they didn't like the bakery (or they couched it in terms that made us think that they weren't so bigoted) so they stopped accepting donations. Just like that. In essence and the pure irony of it was this platform did the EXACT same thing they accused the baker of doing: not accepting business they disagreed with. Not sure what happened to the money at all. Just shut it down. Come to think of it, the site owners said it's now in their Terms of Service that they don't discriminate or some such. Of course, it was after the fact that they took in a lot of money.

I set out to begin a site like Kickstarter and like GoFundMe. Perhaps I could even turn this idea into a full time business. Who knows? Well, even as I'm into it a week, I'm beginning to realize that it's not as easy as it sounds or looks. At all. There are a ton of details that needed to be considered when thinking about such a site.

First, there's the name and/or the brand. Did you know there are 500 or so of those crowd-funded fundraising websites on the web? Only 3-5 get any kind of recognition but it seems like everyone and their sister set one up hoping to make it big. I daresay most are just squeaking by.

But I was patient. I waited for a decent expired domain to become available.I wanted an expired name because it had some "age" to it. It's something I learned from my search engine optimization days. Perhaps age doesn't really matter, perhaps it does.

Well, it took more than a week but crowdfundmenow.com finally became available. I checked it out through normal link analysis channels to make sure it wasn't a huge spamming site or that large amounts of links weren't spammed to the site. Seemed to check out fine.

Next I made sure it was still indexed :site:<mynewsite.com>. No problem there. I learned the hard way that if your site doesn't show up for that particular search string, then you have been sand boxed. There are probably ways to get out of that Google sandbox but I don't have the time to waste trying to play google's games. If it was penalized, I would go for another name. Fortunately, I bought that name and had to wait about five days for it to clear godaddy's servers. Not even sure why that is, but it's standard with expired domains.

Next I had to decide what content management system (CMS) to use. It was actually an important decision to make. I like Wordpress (WP) but it seems like it wasn't what I wanted for this. I'm sure if I had searched for a day or so I could have come up with a different premium template that had what I needed but again I didn't want to waste that much time. I've seen some very large WP sites that are heavily trafficked but really slow down when they get lots of traffic. I hate slow sites. I guess it's every webmaster's dream that their site will one day go viral and get lots of traffic. Lots of problems when that happens, and if it's no managed properly it could be the death of your brand. More on that later.Most people don't realize the problems that occur when a major news site mentions your site. Instant viral for a few hours. If your site can't handle the traffic, people are blocked out, and your hosting provider gets upset with you and demands you pay them more money for bandwidth. I haven't had that problem yet but I'm hoping to.

Besides, I wanted to learn something new.

Something Old, Something New

So I surfed a bit for either drupal or joomla type sites. Drupal seemed overly difficult to get good at quickly but joomla was a bit different. It was a little less user friendly to use than WP but that's fine. Udemy had a course online with a guy who could walk you through a crowdfunding website set up from a free template. Ok, free is nice but is it robust and would it work? Well, after my domain became available I got a $10 course on udemy with Matthew Tamin and he walked people through the setup and basic layout of a site that was similar to kickstarter. But is it robust enough to accommodate a hundred or even a thousand sites? How can you really know unless you get to that point?

Right now I compare WP to joomla like I did with Microsoft Word vs. Adobe Framemaker. Both are great tools but they have their set of users that get very different results.Both Word and Framemaker also have their dedicated evangelists who promote their tools. Framemaker is much more robust for bigger documents, where as Word is good for short documents and general all-purpose documents. I've actually created entire 200+ page books in the most popular word processing tool and can tell you that it is a bear to maintain. But the comparison between Joomla and Wordpress is like that. Both have their purposes and goals. I wanted to go a little more robust this time. .

Locating The Best and Sturdiest Content Management System 

Now, I will say that the course I took in Udemy was not a crash course on joomla. There was some initial learning to do with the CMS but it seemed manageable. It's not like WP where if you get stuck you can search around a bit, and it's a good bet that others have had that same problem with a good fix to the problem (or a plugin). Joomla has a much smaller base of users so getting stuck was a problem, but then I decided to burst through the problem and figure it out on my own. It happened a few times that way because the version of Joomla Matthew was using was slightly older than what I was using. Lay out was different but just trying and testing things seemed to work for me. Joomla was easy enough to navigate through but I still wasn't really tasked with anything difficult to overcome.

In all of that, I had to get a new logo made. I went to the online outsourcing site fiverr.com and had two people create one for me. I figured one of the two would work out. Actually I had a third assigned to create a decent logo but he cancelled when I told him I wouldn't be paying for all the extras he wanted me to buy. It took him a full five days to cancel though. I am satisfied with the one I ultimately chose.As you can see above, it's not a bad design. It cost me $15 because he gave me much more than what I asked for. You really can't go wrong for $15.

I find that it really is hit or miss with fiverr. I don't think I've ever complained that I didn't get my money's worth there. I mean, it's only five bucks. The gig owner only gets about $3.84 after fiverr and paypal take their cut. I learned recently though not to give a review until my questions were answered. I paid someone $100 to set up a site for me with more than 1000 products on it. I reviewed the work then asked him about adding more things. Haven't heard back at all from him. I could see that if I was only paying $5 but he could have at least threw me a one line sentence about how to add more products. I doubt I would ever use his services again because of that. I digress.

Much More Work to Do: More Than I Originally Thought

I got through the training and realized I had a lot more work to do.

• I still had to create all the help, legal, privacy, frequently asked questions, and security files that these sites typically had. I am determined to write these myself using the above websites as a guide. Since they've already done it, it wouldn't be difficult to piggyback off what they've already done. Mine would have to be highly tailored to my site. It needs to be solid and lawsuit proof. I'm not ready to take on a lawyer just yet but when I do the verbiage should be solid.
• I had to think through the terms of use and rules. They need to be geared to my site and my beliefs.
• I chose basic hosting for the site but I had to think through what would happen if I were to get busy quickly? I have some ideas about that and have other sites in mind to boost the site's speed and performance.
• I had to think about what differentiates my site from the 500 other sites. I suspect I will be similar to some but very different from others. Already I know how I am different from the top three sites.
• I had to think who I would allow on my site and who to exclude and how to do it in such a way that it doesn't offend or worse yet cause someone to sue. I would then be in a similar situation as the baker or the photographer. It seems to the politically correct, that the offense ever only goes one way. But I am determined not to make this a political blog, but one for someone thinking of creating a startup.

The biggest stumper for me, though, was project creator validation. How do you get people to send money to people they don't know? How do people know that their money is not going into somebody's pocket and not intended to do what they say? In the case of the baker or Kim Davis, how do you set something up for their behalf? That truly is a baffling question. On the one hand, as long as I have a solid terms of use in place, and everyone signs on to it, what difference does it make? Reputation. I don't want to create a site that people question whether it's reliable or not. It has got to be solid and trustworthy.The site's reputation is on the line, and so is mine. I'm still thinking through the best solution.

So as I begin working through all of the thousands of little details that are often overlooked when planning one of these project money sites, I realized that the task is not as easy as it looks. A big Duh! Nothing worthwhile ever is easy.

The Difference Between Standing Out and Differentiating

It's one thing to differentiate yourself from the millions of others that are out there but the bigger question is, how do you stand out from that same pack? How do you make it so that you're not just another "me too" site?

As I write this there are 16 GOP candidates for President of the United States. Only one, though, stands out from the rest of the pack. Love him or hate him, Donald Trump has clearly stood out from the other 15 candidates. What did Trump do to get to that point? Well, pundits and so-called journalists have written thousands of articles on his successes both in the polls and in his business.

He's brash, egotistical, confident, obnoxious, grandiose, successful, loud, rude, and has a winning attitude. He's also tapped into the political class of politicians who really have sunk the nation with their policies and spending. He's a fighter. He doesn't apologize for his views. He's unrepentant and he's a braggart. He uses a lot of hyperbole in his speeches and interviews. He's also given a lot of interviews. He's not tied to the money donors, and he can afford his own campaign. The thing is, he would agree with most of what I've just written about him. He does seem to be thin skinned and takes insults personally. He does fight back when others start something but he usually doesn't start it first.

As odd as it seems, brash and extremely confident Donald Trump is the anti-establishment candidate in this race. 

Case in Point: Real Estate Mogul Donald Trump

Wow, what a list of things to consider.Out of all of those things, though, I'd say that he is always in the news. Think about that from a publicity standpoint. Does he spend his own money? As long as people are interviewing him, he doesn't need to spend a lot of money getting his message out. People are always talking about him. And most people do have an opinion about him, which means people are talking about him. It's an interesting thing to see from the 30,000 foot view.

So what does that mean for a fledgling fundraising site? Somehow, somehow I need to get the site in the news and have people talking about it. How can I do that? How does that really happen? I doubt I'd go the rude or controversial route, well, that is, to some.If not, I would be like the other 15 candidates. Many of them are working hard on their ground game, slowly churning away and building a base. Trump, on the other hand, is out there for all the world to see, warts and all.

One area I've considered strongly is what they call Facebook dark marketing. Kudos to social media icon and forward thinking Gary Vaynerchuk for talking at length about it. He says it is to marketing now what google's adwords were 10 years ago, and buying ads on facebook is much cheaper and more targeted.

So, before I get all of that going, I still need to finalize my site. It will take a few days as I am required to think through what I want to represent with the site. It's not good enough just to copy what others have done, though it would be easy enough to do. I have to think long term with this site. What do I want to accomplish? Who do I want to visit the site? How do I want the site to be seen?

It's interesting as I write that. Most of the sites I've built in the past were really not very good looking. Unfortunately I never took the time to flesh out the sites and build them properly. I was always moving on to the next shiny new object on the market. To my detriment and sadness. How I would have benefited greatly if I had something I could have been proud of.

I'm taking my time with this site because I've learned some hard lessons that I really don't want to repeat.

What Role will Search Engine Optimization or SEO Play in Marketing the Site? 

Then the question becomes, what about search engine optimization? I've played that game a long time before realizing that the deck is stacked against "the little guy." If you have a small site you don't stand a chance against the "big guys" unless you have a lot of money to throw at SEO. But then how did the big sites get to be big? They used social media and paid ads, the two things I'll be engaged in.

The major search engines have really played havoc on being able to rank sites over the past 10 years. People gamed he system so the engines adapted. It's been a cat and mouse game all along with internet marketers becoming increasingly frustrated by the constant change and figuring out what changed to drop their sites so quickly.

Tonight I was able to customize more of my footer information. I went online and generated a generic but premium Privacy Policy. I had thought about copying kickstarter's or indiegogo's but figured probably spent a lot of money getting their privacy policy drawn up. Why risk the chance of them coming after me? I know I'm very small potatoes to them but why take unnecessary risks. As it is I will be hustling to get my first hundred customers.

I also updated my Cookies policy and spent a lot of time trying to get rid of the GavwickPro footer messages. I knew it was somewhere in the template or module but finding it was difficult, mainly because most of the advice for changing footer was for much older version of Joomla. It took me well over an hour to locate some of the footer pieces. After that, I decided to call it quits because my mind was getting tired. I've made plenty of mistakes before when my mind was tired and I've regretted most of them.

I was also able to tweak some other footer files. Going through that text is tedious. But I'm sticking to it because I believe it will pay off in spades eventually.

Actually I bought some customized open source Cookies and Privacy Policies online. I don't need lawyers crawling down my back because of some copyright infraction. The less interaction I have with attorneys and the legal system, the better life will be for this site. At some point I will need legal counsel, and I should probably look at that sooner rather than later.

So, what to do now that some of this stuff has been written?

• I need to link the Articles in my site to the footer links so that they are clickable. 
• I need to eliminate extraneous links so that only the bare minimum is there.
• I need to test the site to make sure the paypal and payment links work. 
• I need to begin promoting the site. Am I ready for this? What am I waiting for? 
• Are there other tasks I need to look at before officially launching the site?
• I need to continue to build up my twitter following.
• I need to create a Facebook page specific to the site. 
• I also need to formulate a Unique Service Proposition. What makes this site different? Why should someone come on here and use it versus any other funding site on this marvelous world wide web?