Why I’m going to support a new crowdfunding project every week for a year

Just over a year ago, I benefited from a remarkable piece of internet altruism. My friend Jim and I had been sketching out an idea for the media product we wanted to see in the world: MATTER, a digitally-native publisher of deep, long-form journalism about science, technology and the future.

We knew that the mathematics behind our idea might work. What we didn’t know was whether anyone else would be interested… so we decided to float the idea on Kickstarter.

As we launched our crowdfunding campaign, I was trembling. Would we make it? Were we crazy? I had no idea.

The result, it turned out, outstripped every dream I had. We’d given ourselves a month to hit our fundraising target: instead, we broke through in 36 hours. Soon after, we smashed the record for the total raised by a journalism project on Kickstarter. Then we became the most successful publishing project the site had seen, full-stop. It was dizzying.

That remarkable leap of faith by so many people helped us get started; a few months later we launched; a few months after that, remarkably, the company joined up with Medium.

And so here we are.

Over the last year or two I’ve heard plenty of people declare that crowdfunding is the future.

But whenever somebody asks me whether I think crowdfunding is the future — even after everything — I have to admit that I am circumspect. It’s one possible part of the future, yes. But just one possible part.

Still, there’s no doubt that it’s an exciting experiment. I certainly know that I’ve given to all sorts of projects, and they have given me a lot of enjoyment. So what next?

It was my girlfriend who suggested it first. Crowdfunding has changed the trajectory of our lives, she said. So why don’t we start doing it in a more organized way?

As usual, she has the best ideas. So that’s what I’m going to do.

Over the next year, I’m going to sit down each week and support a new crowdfunding project, put money into a micro-financed investment scheme, or throw a few dollars towards an idea I like. The point is not to give pots of cash, or spray-and-pray, but to understand what’s really going on: so much of the truth about crowdfunding is about the relationships between backers and creators, and what happens after a project starts, and yet it all gets shoved out of the way by headlines about the money.

So, here’s the simple idea: I’m going to write about the projects I choose, and document what happens to them afterwards.

I’m making this collection open: feel free to post your own reflections, choices or thoughts on the projects I decide to back. I’m going to add updates to my own picks, keep track of different projects and try to understand what it is that makes crowdfunding so interesting to millions of people around the world.

We’ve already seen what it can do right now.

Let’s see where it can take us.