[Editor’s Note: Before you dive in and start playing around on the new site, please read to the bottom of this article... there's an important request at the end!]
“Hey Wayne, let’s just put up a simple page and see if anyone signs up.”
“Ok, sounds good to me – could be a fun project.”
That was the July 2013 conversation Matt and I had that led to the launch of Crowdability.
Six months, 1,600 deals, and thousands of subscribers later, Crowdability has become far more than a “project”
Matt and I have made it our mission to help educate and inform investors about the emerging $300 billion equity crowdfunding industry. We’ve dedicated 80+ hours per week to this venture because we’re so excited about the future of this space.
And we thought it was about time our website reflected that passion.
So today, we’re proud to announce the launch of a freshly-baked Crowdability website.
A Resource For You
When we sat down with our design team to figure out what the site should look like, we began with three key principles:
- Let’s listen to our readers – including you – and give them what they want.
- Let’s make the website a resource for education and information. The newsletters we publish do their job, but having a substantial web presence lets us do so much more for you.
- It should be easy enough for my mother to use, but sophisticated enough for a professional early-stage investor.
We still have some work to do before we can declare our “mission complete,” but we feel like this design is a good first step.
We’re proud of the work our team did to put it together. But we’re even more proud of the work you did. Let me explain…
We Owe You a Big “Thank You!”
You see, our first principle was to “listen to our readers.” That means you and the thousands of other Crowdability newsletter subscribers from around the world.
And thanks to the hundreds of emails and survey responses we’ve received since July, we had plenty of material to work with.
If you dropped us a line or participated in one of our surveys, we owe you a big THANK YOU today. We couldn’t have done this without you.
Most of the feedback we received fell into a few big buckets:
1. "Findability " – We did 3 things to make it easier to find our articles and reports:
- We moved all articles from our blog into a single section of our new site
- To make it easy to find specific info, we placed each article into 1 of 5 categories
- And finally, we added a “search” feature to quickly retrieve older articles
2. Access – Instead of requiring people to sign-up before they can see our essays, reports and deals, now anyone can head to Crowdability.com and begin browsing.
3. Action – This is the one area we’re still falling short on. Let me explain...
We know we save investors a lot of time each week. Our software constantly monitors dozens of equity crowdfunding sites and curates only the highest-quality deals for you each week. It would take you hours to do that on your own each day.
However valuable that may be, many of our subscribers want more. They're looking for more actionable research. In other words, they want specific guidance on which equity crowdfunding opportunities would make good investments right now.
But that's easier said than done...
You see, you can’t just invest in a few early-stage deals and expect to strike gold. You need a plan – you need a strategy. Just like any other asset in your portfolio (e.g. stocks, bonds, REITs, etc.), equity crowdfunding investments need to be incorporated in a measured, balanced way.
So before we can provide the type of actionable insights that we’d like to, we need to make sure we’re presenting that research in the right way. We need to be sure it's properly addressing the different types of financial goals and circumstances of our readers.
Your Goals
So while we’re grateful for all of the help you’ve given us thus far, we’d like to ask you for one last favor. It’ll help us deliver on that final "Action" item…
Please take 60 seconds to answer three questions on our Readers’ Goals Survey »
It’s a very short exercise, completely anonymous and will help us tremendously in 2014 as we strive to bring you better and more actionable research.
So again, thank you for all of your help thus far, we wouldn’t be where we are today without you. And please take a minute and fill out this survey »
