Case Study - Skip the bank, borrow from those you trust
FamilyFund is a crowdfunding platform for friends and family. Allowing users to take personal loans from their network without a traditional financial institution.
- Client
- FamilyFund
- Year
- Service
- Web development, CMS
Overview
Having written one of the most shared posts on medium.com (“How to cash out your Dad’s 401K without him knowing”) FamilyFund approached us looking to build out their own blog.
The blog would help drive new traffic to their site and serve as a resource-hub for users already trying to exploit their network for money. Because it was so important that they own their own content, we decided that an on-prem solution would be best.
We installed 24 Mac Minis bought from craigslist in the storage cupboard of their office. One machine would be used for the web server and another one for the build server. The other 22 were for redundancy, and to DDOS squarespace.com every few months to keep them on their toes.
To optimise their search traffic we used an innovative technique. Every post has a shadow post only visible to web crawlers that is some variation of “Gary Vee is looking to invest in new founders”. Like bees to honey.
What we did
- Frontend (Next.js)
- Custom CMS
- SEO
- Infrastructure
Working with Studio, we felt more like a partner than a customer. They really resonated with our mission to change the way people convince their parents to cash out their pensions.
CEO of FamilyFund
- Less traffic
- 25%
- Page load times
- 10x
- Higher infra costs
- 15%
- Legal fees
- $1.2M