Catarse and crowdfunding in Brazil
About two years and a half ago Catarse was born in Brazil. It came to the world as a reflection of the wishes of a small group of people willing to share knowledge online about what was at the time a strange and foreign word: crowdfunding. All of it was so newsworthy, and intriguing, and seemed to be the perfect solution for a kind of agony in which the cultural sector found itself in. I will explain below.
Brazil has a national financial support system for cultural projects that enables common people and companies to financially support cultural projects in exchange for a Income Tax exemption proportional to the incentive. On 23rd december of 1991, the Lei Federal de Incentivo à Cultura (Federal Law for Cultural Incentive in a free translation), was enacted. When it came out, at first glance, it gave the impression that the concept would work perfectly fine. Looking back nowadays, and superficially analyzing it, you could almost say that the law was based on principles very similar to those of crowdfunding. Taxes are widespread and paid by everyone here in our country. If common people had learned how to operate the mechanics proposed by the regulation, and if a better understanding had been facilitated by the government, perhaps the history of criticism towards the Lei Federal de Incentivo à Cultura would have been very different. But instead of it, the mechanism applied by the law has proven efficiency to be used for, lets say, other means.
Companies, mostly the huge ones, soon enough perceived that the best option would be supporting well established cultural products, from already well known cultural players in the country, and it turned the law into a good cost — benefit mechanism in terms of marketing. By applying your resources in a more “secure” cultural “investment” you could relate your company’s image to a recognised project, benefiting from the marketing value generated by it.
The lack of complementary laws ensuring a better resources distribution and directioning, associated with a slightly conservative mentality regarding the kind of projects that should be supported, lead to a process in which a standardization of how a company should direct its resources occurred, and therefore implicitly defined what kind of cultural products those resources would support.
Companies turned themselves into gatekeepers of Brazilian culture. You can assume that implications of this behavior leads to the act of neglecting “risky projects” , or the “disruptive ones” , in order to avoid relating a company’s image to a potentially controversial, experimental or simply not well known initiative. What followed is very predictable since that kind of conduct kills some of the most valuable aspects for iteration process and debates: diversity of opinions, a more varied nature of works being produced and exclusion of some points of views, usually the ones representing minorities, or delicate matters.
The explanations above are a brief and summarized portrait of how some niches in the cultural sector face the Brazilian laws for cultural incentive. And with all above being said, it is not difficult to understand why crowdfunding seemed to be the perfect fit.
So, in 2011, we entered the scenario. We wanted, and still want, to disrupt the operating dynamics of financial incentive for projects here in Brazil. We strongly believe that Brazil’s population has so much more to offer in terms of cultural, artistic, entrepreneurial and scientific products. In fact, we strongly believe that Latin America, as a whole, is so underestimated and has a huge unexplored potential.
We don’t want to deny previous systems, not at all, but we do really want to find common paths and pursue a less bureaucratic system and develop an agreement for how things could be done to enrich the iteration process and arrive at a better solution for all people involved. One that has space for everyone, and is divided by intense layering, where the communities, and niches, and a more local approach becomes more important and relevant than the masses. One where we could say that both newcomers and well established agents can have opportunities suited and adapted to their respective conditions and contexts. We don’t know if it is possible, but we are working hard to contribute to this achievement.
And in order to change things that we are used to, we just might need to do things differently. That is why Catarse operates slightly different if compared to other companies.
First, we created a forum, to understand, have an idea, on how general public and enthusiasts perceived crowdfunding, crowdsourcing and other crowd related activities. The online forum made all the encounters that formed Catarse possible. None of the partners actually knew each other at early times. It was only an idea waiting to be hatched, that even had different names. Soon enough the three first Catarse founders, Daniel Weinmann, Diego Reeberg and Luis Otávio Ribeiro joined forces, with the help of the forum, with a complimentary group, formed by me and my brother, Thiago Maia. We were working parallely on other platform (Multidão, one of the possible translations for Crowd in portuguese). We merged Catarse and Multidão and the rest of it is what is today known as Catarse.
We are the leading crowdfunding platform in Brazil. We do not have the broader reach in Latin America, but what we do have is the largest sums mobilized if compared to all other platforms in the region. There are some key aspects that we consider pillars that lead us to our situation today.
First, we bootstrapped ourselves. This was a measure to ensure independency, to give us the freedom to maneuver Catarse as we pleased. We sold cars, put money from our pockets and savings accounts, and, of course, we invested our own workforce without knowing for sure when we would have our return over investment. There was no solid way to predict how long would it take for Catarse gain traction. But it didn’t matter. We were driven by passion, and willing to try it, with or without certainty of ROI. If our gut feeling was right, Catarse would be just the beginning of a wave that inevitably would reach Brazil at some point. Then, we made our most important choice of all: we trusted people and chose to pursue and open culture.
We relied on a very simple premise: By forming a solid community, one that really trusts us, we would be following the right path. If we really wanted to be trusted, we needed to trust first. Today, this value can be noticed all over Catarse’s operations.
- Our code is open source, under MIT license.
A lot of platforms are based on Catarse’s code, some examples are: - Impulso (BOP niche crowdfunding platform);
- Medstartr (health projects and fitness);
- Urban Kit and Neighbor.ly (crowdurbanism)
- We The Trees (environmental, education and social change)
- Nós.vc (some like Us.you in a free translation, crowdlearning)
- Our roadmap and work progress are public. Everyone can follow what we are doing. There is a Pivotal Tracker available
- Catarse Application (to follow our development progress and status)
- We really believe that building relationships is better than treating people solely as consumers. They can not be reduced to that mere function of consumption. They provide valuable feedback, they criticize, they can even turn out to be friends. With our core business, every person is a potential project owner, a person who can turn from a mere backer to a proponent. Thats why we try to expand our universe to offline actions, and that is why we are moving towards a co-working culture since we are based in Estufa, in Sao Paulo and planning to move from our office in Rio to a larger one, alongside with Materia Brasil and their allies, who are piloting this movement.
- We work remotely, across Brazil. We have people in Rio, São Paulo, Porto Alegre and Belo Horizonte. All of them were crucial to spread the word and initiate local word of mouth strategies to acquire projects to the platform.
- We try to manage our people based on principles of autonomy, leadership and satisfaction. If you want to do something, agree or disagree with something, be my guest. But be prepared to debate. No bossy behavior allowed. The more collaborative and debated a decision is, the better. And this doesn’t mean that everyone is involved in every process on going. Humans tend to organize themselves around common interests, and we only fine tune it to improve team dynamics.
- Regarding management, yes, we are emotional and we like to ponder numbers, efficiency with emotions, affections and heart. Continuous feedback is the golden rule. ;)
- We are part of a major scope of initiatives, that naturally and organically gathered during the past two years. Engage, Imagina na Copa, Shoot the Shit, Simplicidades,Estaleiro Liberdade and so many others… We extensively trade experiences and share knowledge all the time. Comum is the most recent aspect of this.
- In a way, we want to stay small and lean — agile — and rely as much as possible on the network, empowering people to occupy some eventual gap that is noticeable within the ecosystem we are helping to form.
We see Catarse as a byproduct of something that is happening in the world. A kind of systemic change of mentality, that manifest itself through local actions and initiatives, and contaminates others due to the extremely connected world that we are living in. Maybe we are a few in terms of numbers if you consider a broader spectrum. Yet, all these connections forming between a large variety of nodes, ultimately, and perhaps unconsciously, will provoke a more generalized disruption. Who knows. We are following the road without knowing details about the destination. Thats why is important to share, and to stimulate collaborative attitudes and transparent administrations.
Despite the fact that Brazil is a huge country, with an immense territory, we try to empower people to deal with local issues. We do it via crowdfunding. This is one of the ways. And that is the point. We sincerely feel connected to lots of small groups, all of them dealing with their own local matters with the tool or mechanism.
We can see, or maybe only feel, a rise of civil society awareness starting to grow in Brazil, and all over the world. Instead of relying on the government as a solution finder, we are empowering ourselves with this mission. We are responding to governments gaps creating services, new dynamics and proposing new visions of how things could be done.
In the end, governments will have to make a choice. Probably, they will need to do something similar to what we have done. They will need to trust us, and act as supporters, assure our ability to experiment, to try, even to fail and learn from the process. Creating more bureaucratic barriers or trying to do things like the old ways won’t help. We need to adapt, and in order to adapt, we need to trust. We really expect the governments to trust us. And by “us”, I mean the civil society.
