Crowdfunding is great. It’s changed the game. Last year it turned over $34.1bn, more than double $16bn the year before. It’s a beast — disrupting industries from film to consumer electronics to even the stock market. Crowdfunding destroys gatekeepers by connecting the crowd and creators directly. And with scale of the internet the potential of that is unimaginible.
But there’s a problem. This beast is almost too big. Too chaotic. The term crowdfunding covers too much. A person backing their favourite musician is different to someone buying a new product and very different to someone buying stock in a company. These are different crowds with different world views yet they all fall under the umbrella of crowdfunding. Perhaps it’s no surprise given the industry is so young but it means the time has come for this model to evolve. To progress. It needs to give birth to something else. To little monsters that are branches of crowdfunding fit for purpose. Tailored models serving tailored crowds properly. And the first of those is born today — crowdlaunching.
Crowdlaunching is the launching of a new product during a limited time period on a dedicated online platform. It’s crowdfunding for products only with the goal of obtaining customers rather than obtaining finance. Why? Because makers are not really interested in funding ‘tooling’. Really they want early adopters for their product. And backers for a product don’t really want trivial rewards, they want the actual product they can touch and feel in return. So it makes sense to call Kickstarter what it is — a launch platform for hardware startups and a discovery platform for early adopters. And that’s what crowdlaunching is all about. People pledging fixed amounts in return for tangible products from hardware startups around the world.
As crowdfunding matures, this model becomes more and more apparent. It’s a matter of a time before see the first dedicated crowdlaunching platform. Welcome to crowdfunding evolved.
