My Ideal Crowdfunding Site

All

Oct 142012

I’m putting this down mainly as a “note to self” — these are the key attributes I’d want to see in an ideal-for-my-needs crowdfunding site:

A social networking component to encourage discovery
Accessibility (in terms of payment processing) for international backers
Ability to adjust pledges while project is live
Separation of money put towards project goal vs. put towards shipping

There are other things that are good — metrics to help understand where funding is coming from and to gauge the effectiveness of specific promotional effort, etc — but these would be the real, foundational core for me.

Right now, crowdfunding sites that exist seem to be able to do at best two of the four things on this list. Kickstarter hits #1 and #3 neatly (which I feel forms the core of their success), but fails at #2 and #4. IndieGoGo is the leader for #2, but is weaker on #1, and outright fails at #3. And so on.

The advent of selfstarter.us makes me think at some point someone might build something that hits 2-3-4 based on that chassis, but any Selfstarter-utilizing crowdfund effort will have a hard time with #1 — at least until someone figures out a good clean way to provide a central clearinghouse for Selfstarter campaigns that people can use to browse an otherwise spread out and decentralized population of crowdfunding opportunities.

http://twitter.com/sblackmoore Stephen Blackmoore

I think the trick to #1 is to build an API that other apps can hook into and to take advantage of other companies’ APIs, like Twitter. The trick there, of course, is keeping everything up to date and not being too dependent upon other services. But if there’s a common enough framework for it, it would be relatively easy to build a service, or many competing services, that trawled through different crowdsourcing opportunities to create that clearinghouse you’re looking for.
- fredhicks
  
  That’s correct from the “network using existing social media to reach the people you already reach with social media” standpoint, but less correct in terms of how Kickstarter is itself a social media platform that aids discovery of what’s out there and what people you’re connected to are backing.
- http://twitter.com/sblackmoore Stephen Blackmoore
  
  Oh, I get that. I was talking about the roll your own thing. I think KS does it reasonably well, though it can be a little difficult to find new things if you’re not digging around. As more of these services appear they’re going to need to find a way around that problem and ways to better get the word out.
Eleri Hamilton

if KS could just add in #4, it would make me feel a *lot* better. In crunching the numbers for an Unwritten Kickstarter, adding in swag and shipping pushes the total pledge amount into a number higher than most successful RPG campaigns have asked for.
Simon Withers

Given that Evil Hat has a online store could you not at least partly solve #4 by (a) doing what some kickstarters have done for international shipping and ask that the buyer pay the extra shipping at their online store, and (b) apply that model to both domestic and international shipping?
- fredhicks
  
  Aside from the fact that that’d play havoc with our normal shipping operations (creating a bunch of phantom orders, and ones with contents potentially confused/cross-pollenated with other stuff not shipping from the same location) — as well as other implementation hurdles I might not be anticipating — there are some other elements of timing and finance in there that wouldn’t sit well with that. The more elegant and more correct solution is for the crowdfunding service site to provide the ability to make such distinctions.