The Venture Edge

Crowdfunding through sites like Kickstarter.com and Indiegogo.com has been all the rage lately, but I have long suspected that the excitement (and the hype) has overtaken the reality. If you poke around these sites, you'll see some remarkable examples of companies doing extremely well pursuing their crowdfunding dreams. But look past those few examples which tend to be prominently displayed for all to see, and you'll find that the vast majority of these crowdfunding efforts don't do much at all. 

I love, love, love trendwatching.com and their ongoing efforts to stay on top of the latest-and-greatest consumer and business trends. So it was with great excitement that I looked in my email in-box a few days ago and found their latest list of 12 new mini-trends. If you own or run a business -- or if you have plans to start one up -- it will be worth your while to check out these trends as they may have a significant impact on the markets in which you do business, or plan to do business. Here are five of my favorite mini-trends from the list:

Don’t you just love hype cycles, aka bubbles?  I do because they’re so predictable and yet we all go along for the ride.  What's funny is that you can see them coming, but they’re hard to resist because the excitement that surrounds them is so palpable.  Even if we realize that  all bubbles eventually pop, we still seem taken by surprise when they do.  The dot com boom, energy, and the rise in housing prices (I’ll admit that one lasted a long time) to name a few recent ones that made a lot of people rich and then took it all away.

I have been a fan of the Kickstarter crowdfunding platform for some time -- it seems to me to be a great way for entrepreneurs with good product ideas to raise the funding they need to get their ideas off the ground. However, while crowdfunding holds great potential for entrepreneurs, the appeal to date is I'm sure limited by the amount of money that platforms such as Kickstarter have actually generated for their clients. A quick look at the Kickstarter "Discover Projects" page, for example, shows several projects hovering at just a few thousand dollars, with some under $1,000. 

I've been a full-time professional writer and author for about 15 years now. When I started out in the business, if you wanted to get published, you had to convince an established publisher to take on your book. In return for giving them the rights to publish your book for as long as they wanted, they agreed to pay you an advance and royalties. Aside from some marginal vanity publishers who you would pay to get your book published, this was the way the game was played. 

It’s not often I get to write about proposed legislation that will actually make something less regulated, particularly when it comes to the SEC.  But, it’s true.  Read on. 

A bit more than a year ago, I wrote a blog post about a relatively new way to raise money to start up or grow an enterprise: Kickstarter. As I mentioned in my post, Kickstarter is "...a funding platform for artists, designers, filmmakers, musicians, journalists, inventors, and explorers." Kickstarter leverages the power of online crowdsourcing to gather together potential investors for new creative and business ventures. As it turns out, Kickstarter is still around, and an increasing number of companies are getting the funding they need from the organization. According to a recent article, design company Studio Neat used Kickstarter to successfully fund two projects. The first, a miniature iPhone tripod called the Glif, raised $10,000 in just 30 days while eventually landing the company almost $140,000 -- far exceeding its original request. Studio Neat was able to ship the Glif to customers just a month and a half after the funding period ended. The second product -- a pen stylus for the iPad -- also raised about $140,000 via Kickstarter. Says company cofounder Tom Gerhardt,  “If Kickstarter wasn’t around I don’t think the Glif, or projects like it, would have even gotten off the ground. It’s probably naive, but we had more fears and perceived more risk going the traditional [VC] route.” 

 Don't ask for investor money unless you're in business in a serious way. If you're going to ask investors  to risk their hard-earned money, you'd better be worth the risk. 

Continuing with our recent discussions about angel investors and FFF (friends, family, and fools) money, I just heard about an interesting new way to raise funds for new ventures: Kickstarter (www.kickstarter.com). According to the website, Kickstarter is "...a funding platform for artists, designers, filmmakers, musicians, journalists, inventors, and explorers." Kickstarter leverages the power of online crowdsourcing to gather together potential investors for new creative and business ventures. Current projects include someone building a Bussard fusion reactor ($3,099 pledged from 71 backers), a cinematic exploration of Calvin and Hobbes ($21,369 pledged from 302 backers),  a new video game by the name of Glorkian Warrior ($10,417 pledged from 109 backers), and 8-Bit NYC, a map of the city rendered to look like something out of Zelda ($3,374 pledged from 54 backers -- pictured at right).