The last half of the century has seen most industries we buy our goods and services from become concentrated in the hands of fewer, larger, often global companies. With this shift, employment has migrated to these companies. At the same time, individual people, regardless of age, socioeconomic status or gender are creating their own ventures to become self-sufficient and fill the voids left by these large businesses. The situation we are currently experiencing is both a global phenomenon and opportunity for any person that enters the marketplace.
If you want it, the world and opportunity is there waiting as access to the internet and technology has leveled the playing field – regardless of where you are located in the world. And for startup founders and micro entrepreneurs, being able to raise funding online (sometimes from complete strangers on the other side of the world) is one of those incredibly cool things that has been revolutionized thanks to the internet.
Thank you to Alan Earle and his team at MangaCorta for the inspiration behind this post. Good luck with raising funds for your current project. Also congratulations for being selected in the most recent round of Startup Chile!
MangaCorta pitch to Ideame (spanish)
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yZAEuoTx1gE[/youtube]
Argentina based, Idea.me, Latin America’s leading crowdfunding site (equivalent to Kickstarter.com, Indiegogo.com and gofundme.com) offers the Spanish speaking population a platform to raise money for their projects through an online platform where friends, family and even complete strangers can donate money online to projects they closely identify with and choose to support. Users pay an extremely nominal fee for the transaction and the remaining funds get deposited to their paypal or bank account. Kickstarter.com, works a little differently than the other platforms. On the other platforms listed, you can receive the donated funding, regardless if you raise a minimal amount or not. On Kickstarter.com, people can donate to the project, but the money is held in escrow until the total funding amount is raised. If the requested funding is not raised in the pre-determined time, all the money is returned to the respective donors.
Tips for Crowdsourcing Your Startup Project
As one of our AndesBeat community members MangaCorta (who we recently featured) is in the process of raising funds through the site we thought we would share a few tips for startup founders and entrepreneurs who are ready to begin their crowdfunding journey.
1. Create a short promo video (1-2 minutes): If a picture is worth 1,000 words, a video is worth 10,000 more. A video says so much about your company that written words or a photo simply cannot. It shows a part of your personality, how your thoughts and vision is organized and if it is clever enough, it can go viral.
2. Clearly state how the money will be used. The people who are contributing money (whether the money has to be repaid or not) are your investors. Share what you have created to date and be clear about where their investment will go – what you will use for marketing, producing the product, etc. And have a plan in place to follow up with them to share the success of your project after you have been funded.
3. Be clever with your incentives: Is there something interesting you can do with your product offering in exchange for your donations that also raises awareness for another cause? For example, maybe your ‘investors’ buy one of your products that in turn gets donated to a charity related to what you are offering and your donor can be listed as one of the sponsors. So with each purchase there are multiple beneficiaries.
[vimeo]http://vimeo.com/27592616[/vimeo]
MangaCorta pitch to StartupChile (english)
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=meDprPMSnLU[/youtube]
