Looks interesting Luke. If it gets the traction it deserves I think this could become a very valuable tool for both content creators and people who want to offer their insight.
In particular I like the part where you write about attracting talent and how offering equity isn't super appealing unless you have already created something of value (or at least show you have the ability to do so).
Yes, having a past exit as a founder, money to back the startup yourself, etc all show "value".
I also believe that all startup founders need to show they have skin in the game. I.e. Put some cash and time into your startup before you ask for a VC's money or someone to work on your team for free.
I have written about this previously, but its a good point worth mentioning again
We have done detailed research on other products on the market and our solution is comparable on all of the core features. Perhaps this isn't articulated clearly enough on the landing page so I will definitely look into this.
We are launching our private beta in January 2017 and are already using it internally for our own task management so it is a functioning product. (Obviously needs ongoing refinement based on user feedback).
The purpose of the pre-sale experiment was to really take people who had already expressed interest in Task Pigeon and to test their receptiveness to paying for the product. As I'm sure you would know many successful founders/VC's do suggest trying to pre-sell your product as a form of validation.
While we didn't do this before starting the development work, we still thought it would be worthwhile to test our pre-launch subscribers with this campaign.
Thanks again for your feedback. I do appreciate it and will revise how we are articulating our feature set.