I watched an Olivier Roland’s video  and I learned good stuff.

Use a crowdfunding’s platform is interesting to create a product. What is also cool is that by looking at projects we can have an idea of the future products.

Crowdfunding allow you to sell a product before creating it but there is a difference compared do the Lean Startup method  :

• With the Lean Startup method, a startup must create as soon as possible a prototype (minimum viable product) to test it in the real world (the market).

• With the crowdfunding, a product must be of sufficient interest to people to invest their money in the project. It’s mainly a relationship based on trust, people believe your promises.

Crowdfunding

Crowdfunding’s platforms have their own rules to protect their communities. Imagine you need $300 000.- to create your product. Unfortunately you can reach only $200 000.-. As you have not reached $300 000.- required, the money is refunded to people. Nobody lose money.

The truth is that sell content on crowdfunding’s platform is very difficult. Video games work well, there are video games that reached $1 million. Movies and short films also work well. For exemple, fans of mangas or comics make a movie about their heros. On the other hand, books are really a small percentage.

For an author it can work but you already have a large community, already have an authority or already have credibility in another area.

If you start from scratch and you want to create a blog but nobody know you and you don’t have a community, it will be extremely complicated to have funding with this type of platform.

And the reason is very simple, everybody know that we can create a blog for free.

Self made

And it’s precisely because it’s free (or not expensive) that makes the blog’s strength.

You can create a blog today from your home and work on it (part-time) next to your school/work.

With a good strategy, you blog is a company. Do you know how it was 30 years ago to start a company ? You needed to have a minimum capital and you had to do a market research by buying files or paying experts. Now with internet, you can do it from your home, it’s cool.

To have a blog that work well, you need to have a strategy and one of the points of the strategy is to reduce your distractions. Decreases distractions that prevent you from evolving your blog. A distraction I’ve decreased is the number of hours watching TV show or Youtube. I spent easily 3 hours a day watching what doesn’t matter, now I decreased to 45 minutes.

With Youtube, I subscribed only 13 channels and it’s channels that learn something or motivate me to develop my blog.

To have a blog, it’s a little bit utilize the Lean Startup method because your’re quickly in touch with reality to see if what you are doing interest people (number of views), you use feedbacks from your community to improve your content and you build your audience little by little so that your blog become a real company.

Share this article if you think it can help someone you know. Thank you.

-Steph