Why we’re building Crowded
After months of hard work we are finally able to expose a bit of our recently founded startup ‘Crowded’ to the public. We launched our landing page on Tuesday and gave a pitch last week at the Dutch Product Hunt meetup. Though we are still months away from allowing users on our platform, I’d like to start sharing the bold plans we have, as well as some struggles and challenges we face in a series of blog posts.
Crowded?
Yes. Crowded. Our name shows the aspiration we have for the product we’re building. To have many crowded online places of people that share and discuss things they are really passionate about. To allow entrepreneurs, marketeers and natural leaders to gather likedminded people in a simple and effective way. To ensure that high-quality communities are able to extract value and invest back into the community.
This wish or dream comes from a personal experience: The epic things that happen when the right people meet in the right places.
Young Creators
Two years ago I founded Young Creators, a brand with the mission to help and connect young ambitious people. There were many of them around me and on Twitter, but there was no obvious place for us to gather and discuss. With Young Creators we launched a creative agency, a pay-rolling company, we organised events, tried to index all young talents — but there was one thing that stuck and worked out the best: The Young Creators Facebook group.
With over 3000 posts and 35,000 comments, the value generated with this group of almost 4,500 teenagers is incredible. A rough guestimate is that every week, thousands of euros worth of services and goods are being exchanged by the members — and this does not even include the value of the free services and advice that is being shared.
I’ve no idea what this group will evolve into, but I’ve one major concern.
The Problem
The biggest problem I have with this particular Facebook Group is the potential that’s left untouched. To name a few:
- I have no idea who’s posting and what their background is, maybe we could have been working together?
- Every day dozens of people want to join the group and there’s no way to tell how motivated they are.
- Several times a day people post jobs, but they aren’t indexed — and worse, they always lack way too much details and context. It’s hard to force people to give more info about the jobs.
- Many great projects are being built by the members and I *really* want to know what everyone is working on. I got no clue.
- You can’t easily make money from a Facebook group. I’d love to so we are able to finance the events and meetups we organise.
- Some people think the group is great for OnePlus One invites and other spammy bullshit.
I’m sure active users of Facebook Groups will recognise some of the listed problems, although I love Groups and the way Facebook allows you to quickly build a crowd, I believe good communities deserve better a better place.
Too summarise the above, we believe our greatest problem to solve is the following:
It’s really hard to get the potential out of a community.
What makes this so hard?
There are no real simple products (if you know any, let me know) to build your own online community. Building a PHPBB forum feels like something from the previous century. Abusing Wordpress to act like a community is a pain, and well, there’s Slack. We love slack, but you know, it’s basically just chat.
My guess as to why there’s no well designed user-friendly service (like Squarespace) for Communities yet:
- Communities come in different shapes and sizes (more on that later as well) and are build around different kind of needs.
- Communities are often built around passion not commerce, so it’s hard to make a business out of hosting communities.
- Communities tend to grow organically and are not often strategically plannend or designed to become as bold and broad as they grow over time.
“So, you are solving this? Great, when can I sign up?”
Hey! Not that fast. I was telling you about Young Creators.
YC_platform_vs_5.3_def_final_FINAL_REALLYFINAL.zip
We wanted to solve this problem for just the Young Creators Group. We started building right away and have since the beginning of 2014 and have since then launched countless alpha and beta versions of the project. I’ll save you the long story, but we, being young and inexperienced, switched from PHP to Node and back, from Angular to Ember and back, costing us a lot of time. We were never satisfied with the current version and still had to learn the principles of building lean MVP’s and stuff.
The community still isn’t live as of today. But…
Validation!
During several of our beta’s we learned a shitload of things. One of those was very interesting:
You can actually make money with a community,
in a way where the members profit as well.
We called it Young Creators Challenges, a product we will be relaunching soon as a separate service. YC Challenges are basically the following: A company has a question, needs ideas or feedback and wants to get input from young, fresh and creative minds. They come to us, together we try to find the real question the company has, and we then post it online.
We ask the Young Creators community to discuss and brainstorm and we incentivise this by dividing rewards based on activity. Rewards range from a couple of euros to actually being invited to consult for this company.
We did this a couple of times, made serious money, made serious impact on a handful of members that we’re invited to consult, and gave a chance to hunderds to think along with big brands. One of these challenges was from Google, and is still up on a hacky MVP built with wordpress.
More validation!
While building our online community we got in touch with the Dutch ING Bank. They asked us to advice them on a hackathon they were organising, and we ended up building a community (that looked a lot like the one we’re building for Young Creators) for the freaking biggest bank in The Netherlands. Hooray.
We did this together with Boy and Guy Lokhoff. Two Dutch brothers and skilled entrepreneurs, a bit older than we (Bastiaan, 18, and I, 21), that have a great network and experience in the corporate world. Their natural drive for great service and unstoppable energy to sell and close deals combined well with our vision and dream to build a good product for communities. Before we knew it I left my failed attempt of working for a boss at Blendle and we started Crowded. And we already have our first customer: The ING.
At least 1 Fortune 500 company wants their own tailer made community and are willing to pay for it.
Well, that’s great news!
So, there we are
Now, a couple of months later, here we are. Trying to solve the above problem, looking for more validation, talking with potential customers, thinking of communities we could launch ourselves, but most of all:
Building Crowded.
So, what’s Crowded again?
We’re still not 100% sure ourselves. We’ll have to see what works and what doesn’t. We have paying launching customers, interest from many people, way too less development capacity and too many things we want to try.
One thing is for sure: We are building the best, most elegant, and most efficient place to host, grow and monetise communities.
You can find a bit more detail on our website. But I’ll sure be writing more in the coming weeks.
Coming up:
- What Crowded will be
- How communities can make money
- The roadmap of Crowded
