Month 4 — Introducing FoundersKit

Fred Rivett
We Are Contrast
Published in
8 min readSep 21, 2015

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It’s pretty safe to say that our timescales have been a bit off compared to our original plans way back in December. Timing aside, we are please to say that we have now launched all 6 projects, including the last remaining project, Month 4 — FoundersKit!

What’s this FoundersKit then?

FoundersKit is a collection of exclusive discounts for the best tools & services to help founders get their startups off the ground. As it currently stands, we have over 70 deals offering more than $6,500 in savings. $6,500 sounds a lot, we hear you say? We know, we’re tired of bundles quoting unrealistic numbers in savings too, which is why we’ve made sure to calculate the savings based on a 3 person team, and not just the highest price plan.

FoundersKit is simple to use as well, just enter in your account details, complete your payment through Stripe and you’ll have a year’s access to all existing deals, and any deals we add in the future. Then, to take advantage of an offer, either copy the coupon code or click the ‘Get This Deal’ button, it’s as simple as that.

FoundersKit is a little different to our other 5 projects, it’s our first paid for product, and it was the first time we’d teamed up with anyone else to build something.

Teaming Up

When we were looking for the next project to get our teeth into, we were chatting to Dylan (founder of Motiv and the creator of a lot of other cool stuff) and he mentioned FoundersKit, a project he’d built a landing page for but hadn’t built out yet. It looked great, and when he suggested teaming up, after a couple of hours chatting it through on Skype, we decided we were in.

Step on board the rollercoaster

Any founder will tell you that launching a product is like nothing else. Some days you’ll feel on top of the world, that as soon as you launch your thing, everyone will fall at your feet and proclaim how wonderful it is, all the while throwing copious amounts of money at you. And then there’s those other times, when you hit a downward patch and honestly wonder whether anyone will actually care at all.

Often in a project there will come a time where you’re stuck. Stuck in between the beginning and the end, in no man’s land. Having started something and gotten far enough through that you’ve made promises to people and put in a sizable amount of work, you look up and realise you’re still nowhere near the finish line. This is the place where your resolve is tested. Will you push through and ship? Or will you wave the white flag and let another project drift off into the land of “what if…”. Too many people choose the latter.

For us this hit pretty hard a couple of months in. We’d made good progress on the site, but it wasn’t ready, we had a good number of partners on board, but not enough to launch, and we’d made promises to those companies that we would launch and it would be worth their time and effort being a part of it. It’s at times like these that willpower needs to kick in and push on, and having at least one other person either as part of the team or someone who can closely relate who can keep you accountable is invaluable.

Once you’ve pushed through however, if you can get past the hopeless middle ground when the honeymoon phase is long gone and launch seems a faint dot on the horizon, there can come a tipping point. For us that tipping point came about a month before launch, when we had finally got a good number of high quality partners on board. With those partners on board, we soon found others were much more willing to join; and most recently we’ve even had large companies emailing us out of the blue asking for their products to be included.

It’s at times like these that the realisation of what you’re doing kicks in, with the initial trough of sorrow slowly fading to the background and the pre-launch adrenaline taking full effect. “This thing could actually launch after all” we thought to ourselves, “and it may even succeed”.

Opportunities in the uncomfortable

Rarely do opportunities present themselves as such, and those that do often seem like they were destined for someone else. The last 4 months have been a hard slog, make no doubt about it. Manually finding hundreds potential partners, finding email addresses for decision makers at those companies and sending custom emails out for each has been no small undertaking. As a designer & developer team we’re most at home dreaming up future products, designing in Photoshop and coding in our favourite text editor. Spending every waking hour sending emails and jumping on Skype calls? Yeah, that’s not exactly our idea of fun. But that’s just it, not everything is fun, and not everything needs to be fun.

“Opportunity is missed by most people because it is dressed in overalls and looks like work.”—unknown

As the quote above says, opportunities are often disguised as hard work. Most people pass up on them, sticking instead to what they know, staying inside their comfort zone. Unfortunately no-one ever grew by doing what they’re comfortable with. Every great person you respect got to where they are by living outside of what they find easy and comfortable and that’s the best place to be.

Money changes things

When we started out with SixBySix we had one goal in mind, to break our Never Ending Project Cycle of Doom and finally learn to launch. As such we wanted to keep things as simple as possible, and launched each project for free.

For any wantrepreneurs out there the advice is often make your first dollar as soon as possible. For us our advice is a little simpler, just launch something as soon as you can. The earlier you’re able to launch the quicker you’ll be able to launch something that makes money. If creating a paid product will slow you down from launching then keep it simple and just launch something. It’s much better to be a creator that knows what it takes to get something out the door than one trying to launch an ambitious project on day one.

We always knew that soon enough we’d move into paid products and FoundersKit was the right time for that.

So how’d the launch go?

Whenever you launch a project it can be hard to know how well it will be received. For FoundersKit we’d lined up our Product Hunt launch and knew that would be our initial launch platform. We’d already seen hunts like Bram’s Startup Stash and Ben’s Marketing Stack go down really well so knew that the target audience was right but both of those products were free directories, whereas we were offering a paid product.

When launch day finally came around we were pretty nervous to see how it would be received. Soon after going live, we had our first failed payment, cue the does our payment system even work panic. They did, we’d tested them and knew that, but a failed payment so early on was worrying none the less. Thankfully as the morning continued, successful payments started coming in and those nerves were put to rest.

Initially the traction was a little slow, but after the first hour or two we picked up some pace and managed to grab #1 spot. We stayed pretty steady for a long stretch of the day, until Europe & the east gradually called it a night and the curve began to slowly levelled off. Play by play stats showing the curve throughout the day can be found at ProductRank.

ProductRank Stats for our launch

Ok enough of that, give me some stats

Pics or it didn’t happen.

Requests through Cloudflare
Bandwidth served by Cloudflare
Unique visitors through Cloudflare
Cloudflare Performance & Security
Cloudflare origin stats
GA FoundersKit Outbound Links

As you can see from the image above, we had quite a bit of traffic during the first couple of days, which has slowly been decreasing over the last month as the launch buzz wears off.

But how long did it take, homie?

As mentioned above, FoundersKit was a little different to our other projects inasmuch that it wasn’t just us working together, we partned up with Dylan. As such our time tracking hasn’t been quite as comprehensive as usual.

That said, in traditional fashion, we’ve exported our Toggl report for you to see here. In total, excluding Dylans work, we spent over 200 hours on FoundersKit (on top of our 9–5). Simply put, a lot of time.

Rounding Ups

Well, we’ve finally launched our final project of SixBySix and it feels good! The past 6 (ahem 9) months have taken a little longer than expected, there’s been ups and downs along the way, but overall it’s been a huge success. We set out with the aim to launch six projects to correct our continual failure to launch. Now, six launches later, things have gone far beyond our expectations, with over 60,000 unique visitors through to the projects combined and a tonne of lessons learnt along the way.

Most of all though, we’ve finally done it. We’ve broken our duck.

What’s next? We’re not 100% sure. We’ll be taking some time out at the UPRISE festival in Amsterdam to think things through and plan for what’s next. If you’re about around there let us know, we’d love to meet up for a coffee/beer/burger.

That's all folks

Between the initial draft, edits & publishing, this blog post took a combined total of 5 hours, 14 minutes.

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Developer 👨‍💻 • Hobbyist designer 🎨 • Maker 🛠 • Runner 🏃‍♂️ • Explorer 🌍