Crowdfunding
The following post is from Fifi Shi ’18, a Butler Venture Accelerator team member.
The founders of Load & Road LLC, Kazu Kawanobe M’16 and Mayuresh Soni M’16, joined the Butler Venture Accelerator on December 3 to host a peer to peer session about crowdfunding. As this is quite a new way of fundraising, they shared what they learned during the process.
Load & Road LLC started with selling smart bottles that can help you heat up any beverage. The bottle can also connect with your phone. Their ultimate goal will be developing an app that selling customized tea to their customers.
When talking about why they chose crowdfunding over other fundraising channels, they said crowdfunding is actually a non-bias way to invest your startups. If you want some angel investors to give you money, you probably will need to get them on board. Or if you want to ask money from your friends and family, you could guarantee 100% that your project is feasible. So choosing crowdfunding, even though it is quite new, is actually the most realistic way to finance your startups. It can help you get instant validation of your product as well as test your market.
Kazu and Mayuresh shared the two main platforms for crowdfunding: Kickstarter and Indiegogo. They chose Kickstarer because it is better for consuming products. In order to start this campaign, one of the founders needs to be US citizen, and the company will need to provide financial information, landing page as well as a short video explaining your product.
Here some highlights of what they’ve learned from preparing for campaign:
- Get perfect financials
- Don’t expected for too much. Not expected to make a profit but to break even.
- Don’t underestimate the power of video.
- Hire professional graphic designers to design your landing page.
- Don’t push it! Have everything ready!
- Get it right and give it a chance!
- Talk to people about your ideas!
Here are some more crowdfunding or similar platforms that you can also take a look at: