Are you lost about crowdfunding and curious at the same time? It’s a pretty interesting and potentially lucrative concept, and it can work for a group of people, a company, or an individual. When money is required to accomplish something, such as acquiring funds to create a product, a bit of software, build a community plaza, or see an invention created, they can put up a project on a crowdfunding site and ask for donations to get it done. Whether you realize it or not, you have without doubt already participated in crowdfunding. When the government collects sales or income tax… that’s crowdfunding. When a charity asks for your donations, that’s crowdfunding, or even when you put your weekly contribution into the church basket on Sunday, you have participated in crowdfunding.
Indiegogo (http://Indiegogo.com)
In the year 2008, one of the most popular crowdfunding sites was born — Indiegogo. Three partners (Slava Rubin, Danae Ringelmann,and Eric Schell), each interested in a different side of the business, got the site up and running. In less than two full years, Indiegogo has had people from 100 different countries participate in 3,500 different projects. The site says that “… as long as you have a bank account, you can participate.”
The crowdfunding site is free. Anyone can sign up to either post a project or to donate to some, and some of the projects are very interesting, ranging from filmmaking to inventing, charity fundraising, and dance. If your project is successfully funded at Indiegogo, you will be charged a 4% fee, so it’s a good idea to add that 4% fee to whatever amount of money you’re planning to petition from the crowd.
Kickstarter (http://Kickstarter.com)
Another very popular crowdfunding site is Kickstarter. Unlike Indiegogo, your project on Kickstarter will have a specific deadline. You have only that amount of time to collect all of the donations you’re requesting, or the project fails and you get no money at all. The upside for contributors is that their credit cards won’t be charged. The upside for the project owner is that deadlines usually help people to take action faster.
And that’s a differentiation that Kickstarter makes plain. People who donate to your crowdfunding project are not investors. They have no say in how the project goes from the time you get the funding until it is complete. They don’t get their money back for any reason, and it’s up to the person who put the crowdfunding project up to fulfill on the promises made in return for donations.
Kickstarter also has deadlines. If you set a deadline of two weeks out, and haven’t collected all the funds you need by that time, you get none of them. But the cool part is that if people like your project, they can continue to contribute and you may get more funds than you requested. One crowdfunding project that was recently funded at Kickstarter asked for $10K and got $181,535. That’s almost unbelievable!
Kickstarter allows folks from around the globe to participate. using Amazon Payments and they charge 5% of the amount you receive in donations.
There are also specific crowdfunding sites for people who want to do specific things. SellaBand,com is for musicians, Quirky.com is for inventors, and CreateaFund.com is for people who want to create their own crowdfunding site.
You can participate in crowdfunding on many different levels and you can get funding for just about any project you want to get funded. To learn more about any of the issues involved with crowdfunding and how it works, visit us at http://90MinuteCashAdvance.com.