Show HN: Kickfurther – interact directly with small biz, cut out banks | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Kickfurther – interact directly with small biz, cut out banks

kickfurther.com

3 pointsdrewbix7 comments

Would love any feedback whatsoever on our site/business/etc.

Specifically: do you like the name? is it clear from our homepage what we do? would you use this, why/why not?

I would suggest forcing the SSL across the board. I know, I know, I can type it in BUT it is just nice to have the little things work all on their own, even when I am logging in.

Thanks, this is an easy change.

Your home page could be a lot clearer.

The word "inventory", which is what distinguishes your business from a Kickstarter-like reward model and all those loan and equity crowdfunding sites, is halfway down the page and since the summary is still too brief and confusing I still have to scroll down the bottom and click on a small text "how it works" link to actually understand what it is you do; "promoting them to help sell" turns out to be completely optional.

Your expected returns also look quite low relative to the risk (although I guess they're pretty good on an APR basis) and you don't provide me enough information to help quantify that risk - how much will the company's current sales have to change to hit that PSR would seem to be a pretty critical metric, for example. That's a criticism I'd levy at most crowd-"investment" sites though, including some highly successful ones.

Hey thanks for the reply, these are definitely some of the things we've struggled with the most. We have a message that is challenging to communicate clearly and succinctly. This is something we will continue to iterate on and test in the early stages.

We think the returns are excellent, "on an APR basis" as you said, which is another thing we need to communicate better. A 10% return in 6 months is kind of the same as a 5% return in 3 months, both of which are 20% in a year which is great. We don't think APR really captures this idea correctly though and may want to instead come up with some similar metric that will allow you to better compare the offerings.

We also need to better communicate the backers' responsibilities in that promoting isn't exactly optional. This is a similar transaction as buying goods on Ali Baba then putting them up for sale on Amazon and Ebay. If you do that but don't do any marketing, you can't have an expectation of profit. Some goods may sell naturally, and especially with the help of the other backers, but you should do your part to help with the marketing.

To clarify my earlier comment, the APR is the upside but you also could benefit from some metric which more clearly indicates the risk factor. If ACME Fashion needs to shift $6k worth of stock [representing half the consignment] in the next six months to repay their backers, is that substantially less, about the same or substantially more than the amount of stock they managed to shift over the last six months?

For example with Allegory Handcrafted Goods I can see they made $183,500 in sales last year, so sticking a couple of hundred bucks towards buying them $12k worth of stock to shift doesn't seem too risky; probably you could highlight that figure more... With some of the other products though, I'm left with numbers of social followers in lieu of any indication of whether they've actually sold comparable quantities of stock before.

And frankly, I'd want rather more than 10% to front up cash if these vendors' recognition was so low the actually needed my contribution to their social marketing campaigns.

I doubt I'm your target audience for this anyway :-)

Freakin' A - I love this.

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