While enjoying a frosty cold adult beverage with Jimbo, my brother-in-law, almost five years ago, we were overtaken with a moment of inspiration. What started as a funny thought quickly rolled into a way to revolutionize fundraising at a school/non-profit and small business venture level.
Our idea started simply enough, “What if we could get every American to give us a quarter.” Sure, some might call that panhandling… but what is fundraising? What is soliciting venture capital? Call it what you will… but it’s all panhandling. Not everyone with a great idea has access to the big fish that has the money to invest… some times; people only have access to loose change… and the idea of giving away loose change is something most American’s can live with, thus, our idea of ‘microfundraising’ was born: solicit little from a big pool, rather than lots from a small pool.
We quickly abandoned our idea of building a website to soliciting quarters for our own personal gain… because… well… because we couldn’t figure out how to accomplish two things:
1. Why would people come to our site?
2. Why would people be compelled enough to give us a quarter?
So, our idea quickly morphed into something a little bit bigger in hopes to generate more web traffic: Create a website where other people who are in need of money/capital could solicit quarters… people wanting to get out of debt, make a movie, travel around the world in 80s, or buy all new musical instruments for their high school band.
Then, to answer the question, “why would people be compelled to give’?” we turned our idea into a competition for status and prizes. Because as we all know… people like status and prizes. Give more, win more.
Well… as most seemingly interesting ideas steaming from a couple of beers, it didn’t go very far. We didn’t really get any further than registering a domain address… although Jimmy and I had a fair amount of experience designing websites, neither of us had the skills to design the type of site we mapped out… and we couldn’t afford to hire someone to do it for us… we were living in a proverbial Catch-22. However, I’ve kept the idea in the back of my head for when I had the capital and time to invest.
So… why am I telling you this? Am I just giving a good idea away? Not really.
You see, a few weeks ago Time magazine published an article profiling the 50 greatest inventions of the last 10 years. The 3rd invention profiled is only a year and a half old… and it’s called www.kickstarter.com. And it’s pretty much the same idea Jimmy and I came up with five years ago. And after doing a little more research, there is already, at least, four copycat sites that have popped up. So… it’s safe to say the market is saturated. Although… none of them are doing quite like I had envisioned. ;)
Now I know how Nikola Tesla felt. DANG YOU MARCONI!
