#freelancr

Check out the investor memo now live on the website!

I am admittedly a bit behind on readings, so I was having a look through both the week 7 and week 9 course content. What I found in there was a gold mine in terms of inspiration, direction and a bit of reassurance from both the Lean Startup (our textbook of sorts) and the author of week 7′s reading, Jeff Jarvis. In hindsight, I think I have been neglecting Freelancr these last two weeks out of fear and uncertainty as to what direction to move in. After struggling to link up my GoDaddy domain with my Wordpress site, finding that I purchased the wrong Wordpress membership, and watching deadlines creep closer the project was stressing me out more than anything. 

Recently I’ve been doing a lot of wondering why I chose to take on such a big task, and worrying about how I am going to pull it off. Looking back, I could have just stuck with what I already knew, and created a blog or online magazine for freelancers. The readings I did this week definitely helped me overcome my anxieties and I think I am back on track. 

In the Lean Startup chapter, Eric Ries discusses the benefits of small batches in keeping startups flexible to change in a period when validated learning is so important. Reading this made me feel as if the small step in getting even a minimally functioning site up that people can visit and become acquainted with is important. In Jeff Jarvis’ article he makes note of Chris Anderson’s Long Tail Theory (which essentially describes the internet has facilitated a multitude of niche markets that now have outgrown the traditonal ‘mass’ market). This also proved to be a sigh of relief for me. I seemed to have forgotten that my site doesn’t have to be the next Facebook as long as it is useful to some. 

This week I received my feedback from Tom on my first assignment. Overall it seemed as if he liked it, but he mentioned that he would have liked to see a community built around the idea. His comments inspired me to get going on building the Freelancr community, and so I went ahead and used some of the funding I am set to receive through Kickstarter to purchase a domain name.

Earlier this week, I compared some options and prices and decided to buy freelancr.info for a few dollars off of GoDaddy. At the moment the homepage is simply showing up as a ‘coming soon’ landing page with a link that takes you to the Kickstarter campaign. In my web design course, the instructor stressed the benefits of having a coming soon page to start building momentum for your site. He likened traction to a snowball, which builds in size though search traffic and social followings. As someone who works in marketing and studies design, the current state of my coming soon page is the stuff of nightmares. The colours for the ‘learn more’ button were limited and thus are completely off brand, and the lack of any design components other than a tiny logo make me cringe. I’ve included a screenshot of the monstrosity below for us to all laugh at now and compare to the future versions of freelancr.info. It can only go up from here!

freelancr.info is just a ‘coming soon’ landing page at the moment, but we are up and live on the web and can now collect insights as to how many people are clicking through to the site. Journal post to follow. 

This week was fairly busy with work, other assignments and travel, so my Freelancr efforts were admittedly not as full-force as past weeks. I figured I deserved a bit of a rest once I finalized and handed in my first assignment, but startups never sleep so I did work on some decision making for how I’m going to move forward with Freelancr. I was able to do some looking into options for site building and hosting. I’ve decided on Wordpress and social plugin Buddypress for the first working iteration of the site. Eventually, I hope to design and code the site for myself, but at this point I believe Wordpress will be give me all the options I need to get Freelancr on its feet. I’ve compared a few different Wordpress social network plugins – WPSymposium, WP Mingle, and BBPress - and have decided that Buddypress will likely be the simplest structure to work with that will afford me the means to begin an online professional network. I am nearing the end of my web design course and am learning lots about effective design, so I am hoping to be able to employ some of it when I begin to build the site next week.

Catching up on Tom’s online lectures has also brought SEO to the front of my mind, and I am looking forward to working with Google’s software that helps with keyword planning. I have minimal background knowledge on SEO despite being in marketing, so I’m looking forward to reading up on it.

I’m also very pleased with the way that Freelancr is fairing on Kickstarter. I get regular emails with updates and the backers continue to roll in, which provides encouragement to keep moving forward with the project. Another thank you is in order for those that have hopped on and provided a few dollars towards the cause.

This week I started putting together my Business model canvas and startup plan as it is due for submission next week. It is nice to finally have all the ideas that I have written down here, in emails and in my paper notes all coming together in a visually pleasing way. It also helped illuminate the three unique camps of customers I will be serving (freelancers, hiring entities, advertisers) and how freelancr could meet their needs. I guess you could say that I get the point of the business model canvas. Cheers, Tom.

This week was also exciting in that I was finally able so solve the issues with Kickstarter and am officially up and running, meaning that I’ll be bothering everyone for a couple of dollars in support of the cause. If you’re reading this, it is probably best to ignore my calls this week.

I also decided to run a short survey through Surveymonkey (mentioned in my last post) to better understand whether or not my idea is something people would even want. I see it as a bit of original market research that can be used in my report, as well as a failsafe MVP for if my Kickstarter campaign flops massively. I’ve been bothering people on Facebook to help get it out to freelancers and those working in the creative industries and already have a few responses. Full steam ahead!