Seth Godin made big waves earlier this year when he announced the crowd-funding campaign for his new book. He reached his $40,000 target in barely a few hours and passed way ahead of the set goal. Even though crowd-funding as a concept is not really new, the last few years have shown a spurt in the adoption of this concept.
Last month, I was in the beginning stages of writing a strategic plan for Kiva.org and was interviewing Matt Flannery for deeper insights on the business model. Kiva is the world's first and the largest person-to-person micro-lending website and has helped over 800,000 people through small loans from lenders. Since Kiva, a number of other philanthropic organizations have taken up crowd-funding as a way to collect larger amounts of money to help their causes.
Crowd-funding solves the problem of access to money by tapping into individuals for small amounts of investment rather than venture capitalists or banks for a huge amount. The ability for everyone to invest in projects anywhere in the world via the internet, with as big or as small an amount will open up opportunities that we never imagined. We are already seeing some great start-ups in this field such as Kickstarter.com, Crowdrise.com and Quirky.com to name just a few.
Crowd-funding is still in its toddler years. The concept has had a great burst of adoption in the last few years. But, with the number of people, businesses and organizations running to get a piece of the cake, its not long before we'll see the space with just too many choices. On the other hand, as more organizations keep on pouring in, some of the current problems will get more attention; which means we will have more sustainability, accountability and traceability in the future.
Crowd-funding solves the problem of access to money by tapping into individuals for small amounts of investment rather than venture capitalists or banks for a huge amount. The ability for everyone to invest in projects anywhere in the world via the internet, with as big or as small an amount will open up opportunities that we never imagined. We are already seeing some great start-ups in this field such as Kickstarter.com, Crowdrise.com and Quirky.com to name just a few.
Crowd-funding is still in its toddler years. The concept has had a great burst of adoption in the last few years. But, with the number of people, businesses and organizations running to get a piece of the cake, its not long before we'll see the space with just too many choices. On the other hand, as more organizations keep on pouring in, some of the current problems will get more attention; which means we will have more sustainability, accountability and traceability in the future.
1 comment:
hey Ruta, nice blog... thanks for sharing.
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