Crowd Funding your Community
Crowd Funding is the new hot rage, but what is it really?
Concisely: It's pre-selling a persons labor [1].
Be it not yet created CDs of your favorite indie band, a bowl or pot coming from a potter's next kiln run, paying for care of Darwin the "IKEA" monkey, designing the next best razor cleaner (seriously?), or pre-buying subscriptions from a site to help re-vitalize your community and meet some new people who share your interests.
Which is what we're doing.
We'll connect you with your neighbor, in a mutually beneficial transaction, around something you're both interested in.
How cool is that?
You want new friends right? You like your community? So, help build your community and find some new friends by supporting us while we build this thing and, if you're into that sort of thing, take a step on the road to stop supporting the man...
Footnotes:
[1] Of course Wiki has a much longer definition, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crowd_funding
[2] Alternative terms for the crowd funding: crowd financing, equity crowdfunding, hyper funding.
[3] Dan Solomon wrote a nice article recently about a firm called Heyride, it's a good read with some seriously cool take away quotes:
"it's hard not to realize that you're involved in some pleasant, neighborly transactions with a bunch of people who'd otherwise be strangers"
"I look at most of these things as tools to reacquaint communities with the lost art of sharing and peer-to-peer exchange" - Douglas Rushkoff
"users utilize the resources of their own daily lives to produce value for other people in their communities, and get to know one another better in the process"
[4] We waded through a slew of canned Crowd Funding sites, but, sadly none seem to offer the one thing that start-ups truly need, which is promotion. All will build you a pretty platform for taking funds, and take a decent cut for doing so, but everyone we looked through expects you to batter your friends and family for the actual donations. On the plus side, I did have a nice chat with the founder of one of these services. For those interested, here's the list of the ones we recorded:
| Keep it All | All or Nothing | Credit Card fees | Site's Help / Guidelines |
| 4-9% | 4.00% | 3.00% | http://www.indiegogo.com/learn-how-to-raise-money-for-a-campaign |
| no e-commerce sites, web businesses | http://www.kickstarter.com/help/guidelines | ||
| X | $99 per month | 3.50% | http://www.fundable.com/FAQ |
| ? | 3.50% | low? | http://cloudfunded.com/pages/how-it-works |
| ? | 6.00% | 2.9% + 3.25 SEK | http://www.fundedbyme.com/en/faq/ |
| ? | 5.00% | 2.2% + $0.30/tran | https://fundrazr.com/pages/services |
| ? | 3.50% | 2.9% + $0.30/tran | http://gogetfunding.com/page/faq |
| ? | beta | http://hivelaunch.com/ | |
| ? | 3.00% | don't state | http://invested.in/help |
