Do you have a great new product idea but don’t have the funds to design and develop it? Crowdfunding the money might be an option. Places like Kickstarter allows entrepreneurs to post their project online and have it funded by hundreds or sometimes thousands of “pledgers” wanting to see the product produced.
These pledgers as Kickstarter calls them don’t buy ownership of the idea or your profits from the product, they’re just giving to see the product developed. The catch is that to encourage more people to give money for the project you will have to offer incentives. Depending on how much the person pledges, project starters offer things like the product when it is developed, or related memorabilia, or a tour of your factory, or I have even seen people offer hugs for $1 to have a project funded.
There really are a wide variety of projects being funded though, it’s not just products. There’s films being funded, music albums, art exhibitions, books, comics and almost anything else you can imagine. Amounts being funded range from a few hundred up to more than a million dollars.
Here’s a few examples of Kickstarter projects being funded at the moment..
MO-TO: Modern Vintage Toy Cars
Vlad Dragusin and Candylab Toys are looking to raise $20,000 for their wooden toy cars project. The incentives they offer cost between $5 and $2000. They’re offering different designs and quantities of the heirloom wood toy cars, essentially making this funding an effective pre-ordering system. So when the cars are produced they will already have at least $20,000 in orders to fulfill.
The project currently has 25 days left and has already raised $9,232 of their $20,000 goal. See the project page here. If they don’t raise the full $20,000 amount with Kickstarter, all the pledges are returned. So it’s all or nothing, which I guess encourages project creators to be reasonable. There are projects on the website looking to raise hundreds of thousands of dollars though.
Drawstring Backpack. Reinvented.
Some project raise much more than they first ask for, but that’s fine because it just means that more of your product is pre-sold. This reinvention of the drawstring backpack bag by Mochibags is currently 1,004% funded! Their goal was to raise $10,000 but they have currently raised $100,822 from 2,436 backers, and there’s still 9 days to go. See their project page here.
THE 10-YEAR HOODIE: Built for Life, Backed for a Decade!
This project is already funded, I just share it to show what is possible. Jake Bronstein raised $1,053,830 earlier this year, which is pretty good considering his goal was to raise $50,000 for his unisex hoodie. See more about this wildly successful crowdfunding project at his page here.
