Reflections on Early Traction and Building Trust

Over the last few months Macondo Club has been building a movement within Venezuela. The core ingredients of which are books and Trust, both currently in short supply.

We know that to create Trust, and to bring books to Venezuela; we must meet certain community expectations. For each stage that Macondo grows we need feedback and validation from the users, that our product is delivering its’ promise. Each stage of grow also provides the insights for building the next stage of solving some of Venezuelans’ most pressing wants and needs.

Incremental Improvement

Macondo iscurrently at the Minimum Viable Product(MVP) stage; which is the most basic form of the product that can be presented to users for feedback.

Our roadmap contains a lot of new features and improvements to rolled out over time. As we start to roll out our MVP we are also actively listening to our early users on the things we can improve on and what their priorities are.

Listening carefully involves picking what the users are saying explicitly and also what users are not saying. Actions speak louder than words and dead silence is the loudest message anyone can receive.

We have been lucky that from day one we have received overwhelmingly positive feedback.Very few projects go viral and get over a dozen interviews without a single dollar spent in marketing.

However, there are two messages that we are receiving that are calling for action:

1. The number of followers on social media has plateaued
2. The number of people requesting books has been high while the donations of money received to purchase those books has been very limited

An Analysis of Transactional Risk

So, we have thought about these messages and we have come up with a hypothesis that what really matters is Trust, which is the whole purpose of this blog post.

To come up with that hypothesis we considered the transactional risk involved for our two kinds of user:

• Users requesting books experience close to zero risk by using the platform. Worse case scenario if things do not work out, they have wasted a minute to fill out a form and will probably be a bit disappointed that they never received a book.
• People donating money experience a much higher risk. They want to know that their hard earned money will actually go towards the right cause. This is a particularly big problem as Venezuela suffers from an endemic cycle of corruption and opportunism.This is exacerbated by the fact that these users are often overseas, far removed from the organisation taking the money and the person receiving the benefits.

These issues are not uncommon at an MVP stage, the challenge is — how can we move past those barriers to continue growing while we develop the next stage of the tech platform?

The Nature of Trust

• Trust cannot be bought
• Trust cannot be legislated
• Trust cannot faked (fortoo long)

We innately know what Trust (yes,with a capital T) feels like. Trust is engendered by real actions. When people and their projects demonstrate great intentions, show a willingness and ability to execute on promises, and most importantly communicate clearly and transparently.

So we came up with a two stage plan to address our early traction problem.

1. We would have an initial fundraiser event in person and,
2. Focus on building accountability into our technology platform

The Fundraising Party

On Sunday 26 May,we held a launch partyin the birthplace of Macondo Melbourne, Australia.

The many rationales behind the partywere:

• To present the project to the local startup ecosystem, Venezuelans,and Australian community in general, and
• To raise money

Face-to-face interactions are crucial for Trust, especially when we find that the digital world is full of fakers and spammers. Holding our party was a unique way to begin to inspire Trust. It allowed us to foster a connection that cannot be easily faked.

The fundraising party was a success(and a lot of fun!). We were able to raise AU$565 and are now in the process of buying and delivering books. Further we are creating frameworks to be able to measure, capture, and share the impact those books have on their recipients and their communities.

The expectation now is that we will demonstrate that people’s donations are being used in their intended purpose. This will create momentum for Macondo and engender Trust.

We are also hosting a second Library Party Fundraiser in Melbourne on Friday 28 June as part of our ongoing efforts to raise money to maximise the number of book and the impact we can have. Click here to get your FREE tickets now!

Digital Platform.

The challenge in Venezuela is around Trust and access to goods. We strongly believe technology can be used to solve both challenges by serving as a means to distribute items, starting at books, and by creating a mechanism for measuring and capturing Trust.

We are also aware of the inherent limits of building Trust simply by sharing the work we do on social media. We want to make an impact.Which requires a higher level of commitment from users and ourselves. The next step for our platform is creating an account where users may have a record of their books, donations and transactions. We are super excited to share with you our dream.

Alejandro is the founder of Macondo.club, a peer-to-peer platform for the distribution and sharing of books in Venezuela. This article was originally posted on the Macondo Blog.