14 Days Later: What I’ve learned in the first 2 weeks of my startup
(Originally published on Sept. 13, 2011)
Two weeks ago, I launched Bellstrike. We let nonprofits setup a good-looking, donation-enabled website in about 1–2 minutes.
Here’s what I’ve found to be true for Bellstrike:
Getting a little recognition is better than launching to crickets
In the 2 weeks since we’ve launched, we’ve received a little over 26,000 visitors (almost 22,000 of them unique). We’ve had about 173 signups. I think a little under half of these are actual US based nonprofits that we can consider customers. We’ve had a fair number of foreign nonprofits signup (which technically don’t qualify but hopefully will in the future) and we’ve had some designers get on and test the system out. We went from about 5 Twitter followers to 166 (and have been mentioned about a thousand times on Twitter). We went from about 25 Facebook fans to 141. And to cap it all off, we’ve had $275 donated. That means $16.50 in revenue — woohoo! Enough to get a couple Chipotle burritos. In all honesty, we realize that it’ll take a while for revenue to ramp up. We need a lot of nonprofits to sign up, they need to have time to add content, and then they need time and help promoting their website. Fortunately, we’ve got some cool stuff coming to help make that happen. Hey, the metrics aren’t spectacular now, but it’s a start.
Paul Graham is right — obscurity is a good thing
I can’t remember where, but Paul Graham said something to the effect that in the early days of a startup, obscurity is a good thing. It helps you work the kinks out and improve your product. We haven’t launched to total obscurity — we’ve gotten some halfway decent press — but we also didn’t jump out of the gate in every major publication like Chris Hughes’ Jumo. We have users giving us feedback but we’re so small right now that we’re able to fix the bugs and add some key features without a lot of trouble. Of course, we hope the obscurity ends sooner rather than later.
Impeccable design is worth it
We didn’t follow the whole lean startup methodology. I still don’t’ know if that’s a mistake. But I knew what the product needed to look like and how it needed to function in order to make sense to nonprofits. I wanted to make this super simple for nonprofits. The simpler it is for them, the more difficult and time-consuming it is for us to develop. Also, I honestly don’t think we would have been on the front page of Hacker News or Swiss-Miss or FastCo Design if we had “decent” design. We even got a call from a big venture capital firm — it doesn’t mean anything and it’s not something I’m interested in but it was still pretty cool for a no-name entrepreneur from South Carolina. He said the aesthetics were what drew him.
The front page of Hacker News is a badge of honor, not a sales boost
We’re a small team based in Greenville, South Carolina. I’ve never even been to Silicon Valley. I think of Silicon Valley as people in far flung areas of the Roman Empire must have thought of Rome. Surely it’s a mythical land of people who hack apps together in a weekend and sell them for $20 million on Monday. That being said, I read Hacker News all the time and it was just plain cool to be on the front page for a day. In total, we’ve received 1,910 visits directly from Hacker News. 1,670 of those came on the first day. I’ve got to imagine that word spread to other locations because of Hacker News but the truth is that the readers on Hacker News aren’t exactly our target market — small nonprofits. But I’ll take what exposure I can get.
No matter what price we charge, some people won’t like it
Out of the gate, we charged 9.5% on all donations and covered the credit card transaction fees. A lot of people thought this was way too much to charge nonprofits. In reality, we’re really charging 6% for our services. WePay, the company that handles our credit card transactions, charges 3.5%. I think 6% is pretty reasonable considering everything we offer.
I found myself responding to tweets, comments on blogs, and on Hacker News about the 9.5%. When I explained what we do, people were very understanding. Most small nonprofits that do online fundraising raise about $3,500/year, which works out to $17.50 a month. About half of all US nonprofits don’t even have websites and of those that do, the majority don’t accept online donations. So, it’s not like I’m planning on making thousands of dollars off of any one nonprofit. Problem is, I’m not always going to be there to explain all of this to everyone.
We’ve got to re-frame our price so that it makes sense to our users
Today we announced an alteration to our pricing policy. It was really more of a psychological alteration for users. Now, we don’t say anything about an all-inclusive 9.5% fee. We say that we charge 6% and WePay charges 3.5%. We also put a cap on the fees that we charge. Once a nonprofit reaches $80 per month in Bellstrike fees, we drop our 6% and they only have to pay the WePay fee. From the initial feedback we’ve received, this will go a long way in a) convincing everyone that we’re not out to take advantage of nonprofits and b) allowing medium sized nonprofits to use Bellstrike and allowing small ones to grow with us. For us, it works out about the same. We’re still receiving the same percentage and we imagine most nonprofits will fall under the $80 cap. If they reach the cap, that’s great too.
People do notice the details
Holy crap. We received emails about all kinds of minute details. Some were expected — people played with the little easter eggs we carefully put on the site. Others were pointing out errors and bugs. I even had multiple people ask me about an error deep in our Terms of Service — one of them even sent a screenshot! I wasn’t even sure if people read those.
The real work has now begun
A lot of people who don’t know much about the software as a service industry have asked me, “Well, now that you’ve got Bellstrike launched, what are you going to move on to” My response: “ummm, Bellstrike.” We’ve got a ton more stuff we need to do to make Bellstrike better. We’ve got a ton of stuff to do to get the word out about Bellstrike. And we’re constantly fixing bugs and helping our customers out.
Originally published at blog.doddcaldwell.com.
