Why We Stopped Using Prefundia.com
Have you heard of Prefundia.com? At Prefundia.com you can create pre-launch profiles for your future crowdfunding project. The project profile enables you to build an email list, engage your target audience and create a buzz. Sounds like a great idea doesn’t it?
We thought so too and created a profile page for our current project, “A Kiss”. After our profile was approved & listed, we immediately ran into an issue. Finding our project was impossible. At the time, the navigation menu did not have categories like it does now so it would be nearly impossible for someone browsing the website to find the project. As the site grows, it will become impossible without a search feature which it currently doesn’t have. Users will need a way to search by keyword/subject to find projects that interest them.
However, the worst is yet to come. After a couple of email sign-ups on our profile page for “A Kiss”, I realized we had NO access to any of the emails we were collecting. I sent an email to Prefundia.com asking if we had access to the emails we were collecting. There was no answer to my email. Interesting since I’d received a quick reply before about something else. I immediately pulled our project off the site.
Let’s just rewind for a minute. I’d noticed Prefundia.com was also offering marketing services as well but I didn’t think anything of it at first. However, when I realized we had no access to the emails we were collecting and they were also offering marketing services a light bulb came on. No sir. Prefundia.com will NOT get a highly targeted list of email addresses from my efforts!
Think about it… you have a project that’s very specific and you are most likely paying good money to send highly targeted traffic to that page (as we were doing) just to be denied access to those email addresses you are paying to collect. So what if you can push a button and tell the list you’ve launched your crowdfunding campaign! What Prefundia.com offers is not worth what you’d be giving them in return. In the end, they are just hosting a landing page for you; nothing more.
I need to say it again… In the end, they are just hosting a landing page for you; nothing more. In return for hosting a landing page for you, they get access to your highly targeted email list (which you may be paying to build) and they get to charge you or someone else money for marketing services where they will use the highly targeted email list (which you may have paid to build). So not only will they charge you money to use your own list (which you may have paid to build) but they can charge others money to use your list (which you may have paid to build). I just had to bring that point home.
So what did we do? We made our own kick-ass landing page, hosted it ourselves and set it up to add the emails directly to our Mailchimp mailing list which we control. Now we can do more with the emails we collected (as intended) than just tell them we are ready to beg for money.
As an indie filmmaker, we must always seek to remove “the middle man” who may be offering something of little or no value under the guise of a good idea. We already had a website up for our project (and so should you). So it really didn’t make any sense to use Prefundia.com in the first place UNLESS they could offer good traffic to our project profile on their website (not possible with terrible navigation) AND access to the actual emails in the list we were paying to build (which they didn’t). Your list is gold to your project!
How could Prefundia do better? Simple. If people are collecting email addresses from their Prefundia.com profile, they should have access to those emails. In fact, there should be integration options in place to sync those signups to the campaign owner’s lists on popular list services like Aweber, Mailchimp, etc. Also, Prefundia.com needs a search feature, period. Otherwise, it’s nothing but a bulletin board and it becomes obvious Prefundia.com cares nothing about its site visitors. This would actually make a service worth paying for. It is unethical to deny users access to the highly targeted email lists they are building using their Prefundia.com profile and offer basically nothing but hosting a landing page in return.
Am I jumping to conclusions? No. If I pay Prefundia.com for marketing services once my crowdfunding campaign has launched (after building my list from a profile on their site), are they going to start building a new list or are they going to use one I’ve already spent months building through my Prefundia profile? … You know, the one I won’t have access to.
I’m just tired of putting in the work (and money) while others use tricks. Stay diligent. Cheers!
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