Hello iCrafters,
I know, it's been awhile since we provided any updates on site redesign. I’ve been waiting for better news to share, but I also know that it’s important to provide regular updates and to be open and transparent about our plans, so I am going to try and do just that.
For the benefit of the new members, I'll provide some background information too.
So a few years ago, we came up with a new expansion strategy for iCraft marketplace, the strategy that didn't include polluting current iCraft marketplace
dedicated to handmade art and crafts, with items from manufacturers or new unrelated product categories, like vintage and crafting supplies. Our challenge is that people compare us to Etsy and other larger marketplaces, which also sell other product types and have more traffic. So we decided to build a new marketplace platform, which could potentially host an unlimited number of niche marketplaces and allow us to expand the business by adding new marketplaces to our portfolio. (I will write separately about the platform and it’s features)
It was important for us to preserve the purity of iCraft marketplace and to come up with a seller-friendly strategy that would meet the needs of niche sellers, like artists, crafters, collectors and other small businesses. These sellers are currently mostly disadvantaged on larger platforms that prioritize power sellers and mass manufacturers.
Our new expansion model doesn't force sellers to compete with large manufacturers, while allowing us to grow business through additional related marketplaces. This is of course easier said than done. This basically required us to completely rebuild our technology and to look for additional investment.
We are getting closer to a point where we could launch an MVP or a Beta version of a new marketplace (see
my post about Art & Craft Supplies Marketplace), but to relaunch iCraft on the new platform would still require more funding. It’s hard to migrate iCraft because this site has a lot of features that we might not have on the new platform initially. It also has a lot of content (14 years worth of content and historical data) and links pointing to it, so we need to be careful not to break anything that’s been working before and redirect old pages to new pages. It's important from SEO and user-experience perspectives.
With pandemic, as many people struggled financially, we also struggled raising money to continue work on the new platform. We are now looking at more creative ways of how we could raise funds to complete the development work and to raise marketing budget, so we could take advantage of the new and more optimized eCommerce platform, and to generate more sales for all of you.
CrowdfundingOne of the suggestions that we’ve got from our advisors is that if there is a strong interest in the community to keep iCraft marketplace focused on handmade, then we should be working with the sellers community and try crowdfunding. We’ve connected with a few people that ran successful crowdfunding campaigns in the past who could help us with it, but I still wonder what we could offer to people through this campaign, as we don’t have any products to offer. Not sure if this will work well for services. However, this could raise awareness about iCraft and what we are trying to do. What do you guys think? Do any of you have experience with crowdfunding?
Equity Crowd-fundingWe are also exploring Equity Crowd-funding options in Canada, and potentially, in the US. (we’d have to set up a US company for that though) This would actually allow many iCraft sellers to invest and become shareholders of the business (not just iCraft marketplace, but any other marketplace that we’d open on the new platform). In my mind, that would be ideal if people that sell on the marketplace, would also have a stake in it. Thoughts?
InvestorsIf any of you guys know accredited investors that might be looking for investment opportunities, please feel free to mention us. We are a SAAS eCommerce company. People can
contact us through the site. We read all emails and will provide more information to potential investors.
As always, we are open to your ideas and suggestions. Thanks in advance!