I have a project that I am thinking I might need to try crowdfunding to get off the ground. Has anyone here tried crowdfunding for a project, and what did you do to make it succeed?
A small magazine launched their anthology - '10 Years of The Magazine,' asked for £1500 to pay the authors a small fee, plus other costs. This appeal went to their Facebook pages, home sites of other small magazines, regional arts charities. They raised the sum [£2 + £3 + £4 + £10] in two months from 'strangers,' maybe moms of the prospective authors in the anthology, maybe philanthropists, common day generous people. If they crowd sourced £1500, maybe that gives them financial leverage of £6000 for the project, what do you think? Okay, 1500 is 1500, but, but... I think Crowd Sourcing is a good scheme , though you need a well-composed submission, most importantly, most importantly eyes on the page.
Crowdfunding works best if you can figure out a great way to convince people to part with their money. There was a guy that made something like 40+ grand on the premise that his goal was 10 bucks for the supplies to make potato salad. So the lesson is in a nutshell crowdfunding is basically legitimate e-begging. Not that it is a bad thing if you actually plan on producing something with the funding, but I think a lot of people use it to just make large sums of money just because they can. As long as you have good intentions and are putting the funds towards something other than your pocket book, then I think it is a great way to get your idea/product out there with out the hassle of having to get a loan.
Well the problem lies in a situation that is much like the chicken and the egg. I have an invention idea that I need money to pay for getting the patent on, but in order to put it out there for crowdfunding purposes, I would need to disclose what the product is to all the people who peruse the website, which in turn would lead to me basically putting my idea out there to people who could then just use their own money to patent my idea. So in that type of situation what do you do? I can't just start a page asking for money saying that I have this cool invention idea I want to patent so please give me money. No one is going to contribute unless they no what it is.
Say it's for a starving orphan child. With one leg. And no shoe(s). Seriously - that's tricky. An acquaintance of mine did this and got about £2,000, but her funding page had details of her invention. How much is the patent? Isn't there some kind of proto-patent you can get, that'd maybe be cheaper and protect your idea until it's fully developed? I think I've heard something like that mentioned in Dragon's Den, but I'm not sure.
Well from experts I've talked to, going through all the red tape, you are looking at somewhere around $10,000 or more to get a patent unless you are lucky and get it the first time which rarely happens. You can get a temporary, which it's called something else, patent but that is still like $1,500 I believe. So it's still a bit of a problem. That isn't counting all the things you need to get in order to be able to file the patent in the first place.
