College community centric crowdsourcing platform that raised over $20,000 for its fundraisers in one week
The experiment has finished. Our fundraisers raised over $20,000 and brought joy with soccer to undeserved areas, started businesses, and more. That's pretty neat for an "app" built on sticks that was up for a month and change.
Once upon a time some friends and I had the idea of starting a crowdfunding site focused on small, tight-knit, college communities. Say you went to Williams College and wanted to fundraise for your idea from folks you knew in the Williams network. Great. So I built College Crowd, this Wizard of Oz app, in a couple of hours. All of the code is client side code (HTML/CSS/JS), and the backend "faked" with the help of Zapier, Google Sheets, and PayPal.
This isn't "real" code, but is just here to show business people and management how quickly they can whip something up to test an idea, which is still a foreign concept to managers at big companies in established industries. To you and me MVP, rapid prototyping, Wizard of Oz, Lean Startup means something. But when you're used to the smallest thing taking weeks and months, it's really eye-opening.
Fake it 'til you make it!
- HTML/CSS/JS (just barely technology because of JavaScript!)
- PayPal
- Zapier
- Google Sheets
None technically. As a business we experimented with the idea of implementing fees and folks did not go for it. Since they knew people closely (already likely had their email addresses) they'd just circumvent the platform and collect money via PayPal themselves. Can't blame them either. Absent ideas for how to provide more value to this community, or effectively monetize in a different way (ads for instance), we scrapped the idea.