Campaign Creation — A total revamp

The challenges we’ve faced

When you go from a small founding team to a larger organisation you are faced with multiple issues. Scaling your product, people management, finding product-market fit and the constant challenge of striving to build a better product based on your users' needs, wants and expectations.

When FundedByMe started, the startup scene was very new and there were but a handful of co-working spaces and the word crowdfunding was unknown.

As the startup scene matured, so has the notion of crowdfunding and more and more established companies have been turning to crowdfunding for their financing needs. Early adopters are no longer the individuals sitting in hotel lobbies, rather more established companies seeing the benefit of converting their existing customers in shareholders.

Photo by José Alejandro Cuffia on Unsplash

With a new set of users comes new challenges

These more established companies often have marketing departments or collaborate with outsourced companies to work on digital marketing, copywriting, video creation and we found ourselves constantly getting feedback.

Some of the issues we faced included:

• Inconsistencies in data saved where people might be working on similar sections without them even knowing it.
• Sales team frustrated because their clients were losing data.
• Entrepreneurs wanting to collaborate with other media houses to create an effective pitch.
• Smaller companies not understanding their current company valuation.
• Inconsistencies in design across the platform and a lot of technical debt and legacy code.

These issues started to become more and more apparent whenever we had a retrospective with our clients so we needed to act.

Knowing this, we formulated a plan for what has been dubbed as Campaign Creation.

Campaign Creation — Creating the product of tomorrow.

Our goal for Campaign Creation was to make this:

1. Simplify the process of creating campaigns
2. Make it engaging
3. Make it architecturally less complex to deploy future iterations.

Some of our assumptions included:

1. People are used to working in a collaborative environment such as google docs.
2. People want to see who else is working on their campaign.
3. People don’t want to necessarily save information, this should happen automatically.
4. People want to see a live preview of their campaign as they are building it.

Having worked on this now a couple of months we are ready to deploy the first phase of Campaign Creation which addresses all of the above issues and we are excited to give you an early snapshot of what we’ve come up with.

This has been a nice challenge since there has been a multitude of new pieces of technology that we have added to our stack.

• We have further developed our API to make it simpler to write independent and isolated pieces of code.
• We use Websockets to identify when someone else is editing on the same section and therefore we can give people that feeling of collaborating and this makes it very engaging.
• On the frontend, we are using the latest Angular that plays really nicely with Websockets and the bulk of the elements are supported by Material

This is the first of a few phases that we are rolling out and we are excited to bring this functionality to our companies.