Idea: Kickstarter as Venture Capital
Kickstarter‘s pretty cool. For example, their platform enables you to follow organizations seeking funding, and see the number of people invested in it. That’s great for its target audience. But to really turn loose the power of micro-angels, you have to focus on the other side of the equation and build a platform that’s focused on the investors.
This means building a new, companion platform. It would be pretty cheap and a lot of fun with plenty of payoff. Some key features:
- Empower investors to collect influence and reputation for their investments. Encourage this through enabling people to see investor profiles. The kinds of things you’re interested in, how they’ve done.
- Enable partial payments. Rather than all-or-nothing, staggered benchmarks for iterative development. For example, if I’m building a shed, slice it into a few different chunks – foundation, walls, roof, finish. Price out each step, show results, garner feedback, then solicit funding for the next step.
- Biggest difference is you have enforce tangible returns for their investment (feel-good entrepreneurship isn’t sustainable) – even though returns will, 90% of the time, be long-run and low, it’s something, and it reinforces people’s attraction to a particular cause. Now they’ve got something to win in addition to lose. More people will play ball.
-Shlok
Sign up for my newsletter.