Why crowd-funding?

We need a crowd !!
"Loose Promises" : Handmade collage : Copyright © 2008 by Vivi-Mari Carpelan 

Crowd-funding is at the heart of the wowlookwhatigot.com concept. We need two things to make the idea a success: capital, for a start, to put the whole thing into practice - to buy a suitable printer, consumables (ink for these things doesn't come cheap - at least £250 for a set of ink cartridges), rent some office space, etc. Money on its own, though, would just leave us with a nice printer sitting in an office somewhere. The other thing we need to make it into a real sustainable project is a list of subscribers. To get a starting list of interested people would normally cost us a lot of expensive advertising (i.e. a lot more capital) and we'd be thinking, probably gloomily, in terms of return on investment, probably followed by "is the whole thing really worth it?". The beauty of a crowd-funding-fuelled start-up is that it not only gives you the capital but an instant list of interested people.

Note I say "interested people", not "subscribers" - there's no way to sell subscriptions on a crowd-funding site, indeed they're not primarily intended for selling anything, although, for instance, many tech start-ups offer gadgets as perks, but for raising money to fuel ideas. That, of course, is exactly what we're trying to do with wowlookwhatigot.com - raise money to fuel an idea. The friends (for they will all be friends to us!) who invest in wowlookwhatigot.com won't be buying subscriptions, they'll be receiving trial issues of artwork as encouragement for their support. It's up to us to send work which is engaging enough for them to want to carry on and subscribe to the service, so even after we're up and running the whole thing continues to be a bit of a gamble. Attracting investors is our first big challenge. Converting investors into subscribers is our second, but that, as they say, is a whole new ballgame. One step at a time, eh?

We've chosen indiegogo.com as the crowd-funding site to launch our project. The reason is that such sites work in two different ways - there's the 'fully funded' version, like Kickstarter.com, where you know exactly how much your project is going to cost, and it's basically all or nothing. In this case you set a target and only get the money if you reach it - no point in carrying on if you can't afford what you were trying to do in the first place. In our case, though, the project is scalable - if we only raise a few hundred pounds we can still buy as smaller second-hand printer and get started - it'd just mean we have a 'kitchen table' enterprise rather than a large-scale one. In this model you get whatever money has been raised and cut your coat according to your cloth. The trade-off is that you pay a larger percentage to the crowd-funding site, and that has to be figured into your costs.

Having got the website ready for launch, the next job before we can go live is to make a promo video for the crowd-funding site - so onward with the video editing. I'll talk a bit about that process soon...