Crowdfund like the 90s
A new generation of crowdfunding needs more than just capital. It needs community, virality, and impact.
Crowdfunding isn’t anything new. Everyone by now has seen that one high school friend’s GoFundMe post on [add your social of choice]. And if you have no idea what I’m talking about, you should consider renting out that rock you’ve been living under.
Everyone thinks they know what crowdfunding is, but what actually comes to mind is their uncle’s RV fund or Star Citizen’s “final” release. Did you know modern crowdfunding was actually started by a British rock band from the 90s?
Crowdfunding can be traced back several centuries, but modern crowdfunding — the kind with more than just the village folk pitching in for a new well — was pioneered by the British rock band, Marillion. [🔴USE HEADPHONES for BEST EXPERIENCE🔴]
It was London in the 1980s. The streets lined with Farrah Fawcett hair while kids watched Dynasty on the telly, and punks were “bumming fags” in their leather jackets. All the while, Marillion was still playing progressive rock… long after it lost its popularity.
Despite this, “Kayleigh” and “Lavender,” from the 1985 album Misplaced Childhood, landed them on the Top 10 hits in the U.K. They maintained a level of relevance following this through all the 80s, much thanks to their cult following. But they were finally dropped by their record label in 1995. They continued to play and produce music for their fans through indie labels, but these were all bad deals for them.
It was in ‘97, with the early internet, that fans asked them to tour through the States. Marillion couldn’t afford the $60,000 price tag to make it happen. But that’s when their fans offered to raise the money. 💡
They knew a guy in North Carolina who could escrow the money raised for them (people just had a guy for that in the 90s, apparently). And in just a few weeks, they raised $20,000 on their way to their goal. As the keyboardist Mark Kelly tells it, “That was the beginning of crowdfunding for us — and for every band, really.”
The rest is a tale as old as time. They were able to continue crowdfunding for albums and events. Pledge Music even took the idea as their business model and worked with them to release another album in 2016.
Yeah, yeah. The point here is that crowdfunding started as an organic experiment of people who shared a passion. Crowdfunding today is much more sophisticated, with different types that include donation-based, debt-based, equity-based, and reward-based crowdfunding.
The common trait between them that’s still the same as Marillion’s first crowdfund is that the most successful campaigns always have a group of passionate participants. People who believe in the same goal and who want to be a part of it.
But there’s a lot of competition these days since crowdfunding has grown into its own fully-fledged industry. Even books and guides on the topic is an industry unto itself. And what you’ll learn by reading these books and guides is that there’s as much prep work involved as the the campaign itself.
Learning your market, practicing your pitch, appealing to your audience, and, most importantly, building your community.
This hasn’t changed since the 90s, but we recently upgraded it with Incentive-based Crowdfunding, the newest type. This makes it possible for any creator of any size to raise the funding they need and bootstrap enough community support to get their name out there.
To get to sharp end of the needle, when you raise money, your biggest supporters earn alongside with you. You can set aside 5, 10, 25, even 100% of the funds to redistribute to the top three fans who broadcast your crowdfund loudest. If you have a community, they have the chance to blast your name and earn a living doing it. If you don’t have one, you now have a way to incentivize anyone on the world wide web to get your name out there, even before your project’s available.
I wrote a separate article that goes into more detail on how you can set this up for your project today on MintGate. We want to create a place where anyone can get their project off the ground and build their community. Content is the resource that never runs out of supply but is always in demand, and there aren’t enough places online for creators to make a living sharing it.
Our goal is to be that place. A place where the algorithm doesn’t direct traffic, value does. A place where virality and impact boil down to community and passion. The place to launch your “Kayleigh” to your world.
