Crowdfunding In a Crowded Place

Crowdfunding Help Comes in Many Sizes and Platforms

Crowdfunding in a Crowded Place (photo courtesy of Pablo by Buffer)
Just like the app market, the major crowdfunding platforms are over-saturated. Though, crowdfunding has changed the way were invest and micro-investing is the new stock certificate, crowdfunding today does have its issues - Promotion, Fraud, Order fulfillment to name a few.  Is traditional crowdfunding broken? Some think so. We list some alternatives or some different ways to go about funding your project. We talk with Sjoerd Geurts of Gambitious, who has an investment portal for Indie gamer developers, Nick Tommarello of WeFunder who does equity crowdfunding, Josh Lifton of Crowd Supply who manages development to fulfillment platform and lastly DMM-make who helps promote curated products via standard crowdfunding platforms and a provides a post-crowdfunding fulfillment store. These new platforms and their founders are different - humble, focused and pretty darn exciting.

Gambitious

Gambitious is a funding platform for indie game developers. They curate games to fund and if you are one of the lucky ones you will get their investment. They've signed 15 games, released 10 (see site) of which 6 became profitable within the first couple months. Sjoerd said " they are working hard to make the investing as easy as possible on our online investor portal." In their model, the first revenue generated goes is used to recoup 100% of investors investments. Gambitious encourages people to reinvest the recouped investment in another project to spread the risks as much as possible. Here are some facts to date:

  • Out of the 10 games released 6 have returned the investment + profit within the first couple months after release. Another three are 30-65% recouped with 4 to almost 5 years still to go... and and one is too early to tell.
  • The period between investing and getting a return is very short. Most of their game releases within 9 months after the game is open for funding.
  • Their most successful titles Train Fever, the first one, returned over 200% with still 3 years to go.
We caught up with Sjoerd Geurts, co-founder of Gambitious. 

WeFunder

SF has many companies in different places for startups and businesses. As I walked towards the WeFunded offices, I was surprised to find an equity crowdfund housed in a condo but these people run just like the startups they fund - agile and lean. WeFunder is an equity crowd fund with an attitude. Their attitude is to fund the people who want to change the world - called startups and entrepreneurs. They are not concerned about just tech but any company who can make a difference in different parts of the US. We caught up with Nick Tommarello, CEO of WeFunded, to get their take on equity crowdfunding. Check out his thoughts.


Crowd Supply

Crowd Supply is a "product development platform" as Josh Lifton, co-founder puts it. Crowd Supply also curates product for their platform but gives development advice and gets the money on the back side. If "you are successful their successful" model. Based out of Portland, Oregon, Crowd Supply has has raised an average of $63k per project.  We talked with Josh Lifton, Founder and CEO of Crowd Supply. 



DMM.make

DMM is a big advertising and promotion company in Japan. They launched DMM-make, a platform for marketing and fulfillment for crowdfunding projects on typical crowdfunding platform like Kickstarter or Indiegogo.






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