Thundafund - Africa's Leading Crowdfunding Café

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Backstory

A year ago, we met Leonie. She was one of 140 entrepreneurs who had successfully raised funds for her idea on Thundafund. Unlike we may imagine, she didn’t have the luxury of filling out and submitting an online form to ask for crowdfunding.

To get her project live on Thundafund, she completed and emailed a 22 page Word document to Thundafund. After collaborating very closely with them via email to iterate on the idea, the document was then manually captured into the backend and then after a final approval, it went live on Thundafund’s website.

Following is the result of helping the Thundafund team and entrepreneurs like Leonie solve this problem.

Iterating Towards a Better Form

We started out by having 2 workshops with the TF team to better understand an entrepreneur’s journey to get funding. This lead to a series of 5 interviews with some of the entrepreneurs who had already successfully raised money for their ideas on Thundafund.

It gave us a very good understanding of the problem and became the basis from which we iterated towards a better solution.

Building a Seamless Experience

We used Google App Engine to build a web form that would capture and connect all the data with the backend.

This not only eliminated Thundafund’s tedious task of manually capturing all the information into their backend, but also enabled entrepreneurs to easily edit and iterate on their projects wherever they were - creating a seamless experience between Thundafund and the entrepreneur.

Designing The Front-End

We also designed & built a responsive front-end that displays all the projects submitted by the entrepreneurs.

Build. Measure. Learn.

We build products in a lean-agile way. What we're putting out there in the world is an experiment to learn and to change. So what we've built so far is far from complete. We're learning all the time.

Here's 1 interesting thing we've learned so far:

See this blob above the red arrow? It reads, 'FAQs'...

Believe it or not, this link in the footer of the website used to be the most interacted area on the whole website (even more than 'Discover' and 'Search')!

It turns out that there's still a lot of people having questions about crowdfunding. Knowing this is rather important. We can now use this understanding to gear the website in such a way that it help people better understand crowdfunding.

You can see Thundafund live here: www.thundafund.com