Are You Ready To Crowd Fund Your Start-up?

by Randy Shipley
April 26, 2012

CrowdFundConnect.com is accepting early applicants for donation based crowd funding. The site is currently behind firewalls, but will be active for early sign-ups June 1, 2012.

We are looking for companies with early stage consumer products, mobile apps or other tangible products to create a funding page with our unique social media marketing pages. Our goal is to become an equity based intermediary as recently approved and signed into law by President Obama as part of the JOBS Act on April 5, 2012.

Crowd funding is made up of financial contributions from online investors, sponsors or donors to fund for-profit or non-profit initiatives or enterprises. Crowd funding is an approach to raising capital for new projects and businesses by soliciting contributions from a large number of stakeholders following three types of crowd funding models: (1) Donations, Philanthropy and Sponsorship where there is no expected financial return, (2) Lending and (3) Investment in exchange for equity, profit or revenue sharing.

Over the past few years, crowd funding has become a dominant source of revenue for charity contributions and political campaigns, with the Obama campaign in 2008 leading the way.

Kickstarter is the world's largest crowd funding platform for creative projects. Every week, tens of thousands of amazing people pledge millions of dollars to projects from the worlds of music, film, art, technology, design, food, publishing and other creative fields. Recent projects have received over $3 million in donation based funding that includes a reward for the investor.

Equity based crowd funding is tied into the JOBS Act which allows for a wider pool of smaller investors with a lot less restrictions. The Act was signed into law by President Obama on April 5, 2012. The SEC is going to have approximately 270 days from the enactment date to set forth specific rules and methods that funding will actually take place.

CrowdFundConnect is ready to process, however it will take time to understand the regulations and environment that will be dictated by the SEC. Rather than sit and wait, we are looking for early adopters that will work with us to create a stronger system for marketing early stage companies, using a donation process similar to KickStarter. 

Our goal is to get 100 companies up and running with crowd funding campaigns. As a thank you for helping us – we are going to do this with no funding fees charged, only charging back the processing fees for payments.

We would like to launch as early as June 15th with live campaigns if we can get the right alpha users.  We think the best candidates will be people with prototypes and software that can be demonstrated, along with early stage companies with a strong team that are looking for early stage seed capital.

We will begin a series of workshops around crowd funding in June, you can join our Meet-up group at http://www.meetup.com/crowdfundillinois/

If you are interested in becoming one of our first 100 companies, please email [email protected] with a summary of your company and your crowd funding goals.

Chicago startup guides

LOCAL GUIDE
Best Companies to Work for in Chicago
LOCAL GUIDE
Coolest Offices in Chicago Tech
LOCAL GUIDE
Best Perks at Chicago Tech Companies
LOCAL GUIDE
Women in Chicago Tech