Crowdfunding: "American model" will eventually acclimatized

【Analysis conclusion】

1. Crowdfunding can not only solve the funding problem of the startup team, but also be an important marketing channel. Sometimes the value of marketing is even higher;

2. Among the current crowdfunding projects, there are two main types of smart hardware and cultural and creative products;

3. Due to the internet environment and crowdfunding model itself, domestic crowdfunding still lags far behind the United States.

Preface · Both at home and abroad, crowds raise ice and fire

There are many forms of crowdfunding, the most familiar of which is "product crowdfunding." In 2012, as hardware products such as Pebble became so popular on Kickstarter, the hottest crowdfunding platform in the United States, it was well known that crowdfunding was used to develop and publicize the product model. Subsequently, many well-known smart hardware products passed the crowdfunding The first time we meet with people. Although few very smart and eye-catching smart hardware products have appeared on the US crowdfunding platform this year, this model has been widely recognized.

In China, although the concept of crowdfunding is widely known, the crowdfunding platform and the products released through crowdfunding are not as popular as in other countries. This is similar to the problems faced by domestic smart hardware startups: the concept of fire, but the product is unsatisfactory.

One said Kickstarter, the largest crowdfunding platform in the world

The hottest overseas crowdfunding platforms are Kickstarter, founded in 2009, and Indiegogo, founded in 2008. As a crowdfunding platform, their revenue comes mainly from the sharing of funds raised from successful crowdfunding projects, so the larger the platform, the more money raised and the more money the crowdfunding platform generates - a snowball effect .

Indiegogo was earlier, but Kickstarter was better known from its founding. Pebble, Ouya and other products are from the Kickstarter platform. In addition to technology, Kickstarter also produced many works of cultural creativity, and some even won the Oscars.

Kickstarter reviewed the year's projects in both 2012 and late 2013.

Some changes in the US crowdfunding industry represented by Kickstarter in the past two years:

1. From the statistics, all the data are better than 2012 in 2013, but the number of successful financing projects is not obviously increasing. To a certain extent, this reflects the bottleneck of Kickstarter - the number of successful products that this platform can support is limited.

2. If you look at the top 10 projects on the Kickstarter, you see that seven of them came from 2012, including two of the highest-funded projects: the smartwatch Pebble and the gaming platform Ouya. This is why crowdfunding will be so hot in 2012.

3. Only three of the 10 projects with the highest funding levels were generated in 2013 and none of the projects in the top 10 in 2014 were yet to be completed. Some analysis shows that many products deliberately depressed the amount of financing in Kickstarter, in order to avoid the risk of failure to meet the standards - such projects to board crowdfunding site not for high funding, but more hope through Kickstarter Market research and marketing.

4. In addition to the above-mentioned star projects, Oculus VR, a hardware company acquired by Facebook, Inc., which was acquired by $ 2.0 billion, has also released products on Kickstarter. This also shows the value of Kickstarter's platform.

Second, the dilemma of domestic crowdfunding platform

Most current platform for crowdfunding in China, most of them created in 2011-2012, a little more famous time, dream catcher and crowdfunding network. But compared to Kickstarter, domestic crowdfunding platform is still in its early stage, on the one hand there are not many good projects, on the other hand, the platform itself is hard to guarantee the revenue.

Specifically, the problems of the domestic crowdfunding market and crowdfunding platform can be divided into four categories:

Crowdfunding projects harder to obtain high financial support

Take named time as an example, there are very few projects that have received more than 1 million yuan of funds at the time of nomination, and there are few projects that raise more than 2 million yuan. There is a big gap between this and Kickstarter in raising millions.

The 1 million yuan is actually a drop in the bucket for smart hardware. Because it is difficult to raise a lot of money, so the hardware startup team, crowdfunding platform provides more limited value.

2. The lack of star projects, crowdfunding project exposure is low

Crowdfunding projects on Kickstarter include a host of games and movies in addition to smart hardware, and many celebrity projects. Domestic crowdfunding platform to intelligent hardware-based, but the lack of star products. This led to poor access to crowdfunding platforms and lower overall project visibility.

Marketing is the second most important part of crowdfunding beyond raising funds, and it is hard for domestic crowdfunding platforms to help project the cause of concern.

Crowdfunding platform survival difficulties

Due to the limited funding available for domestic crowdfunding projects, the crowdfunding platform has also had very limited share of funds raised. Due to the small amount of funding, the sponsors are reluctant to divide the platform. This has made it difficult for crowdfunding platforms to generate substantial revenue.

In order to attract projects, such as the time of nomination, a zero-commission system was introduced in July last year. No splits were made from the projects funded, and other profit-making models were explored.

III. Reasons for the huge gap between domestic crowdfunding markets and foreign countries

The gap between domestic crowdfunding and foreign markets is very clear. On the one hand, it is related to the mode of crowdfunding and the internet market in China on the other hand. The specific reasons are the following four points:

1. "Old problems" repeated in the Chinese market

One of the most serious problems with crowdfunding is the completion of the project. On Kickstarter, while many projects have been successful in fundraising, they have been difficult to accomplish or have been diverted to other uses after successful funding. These problems have subsequently gradually changed with the maturation of project sponsors and supporters. However, in the domestic crowdfunding market, the problem is still very serious due to the lack of accumulated experience due to the relatively small number of projects.

Crowdfunding mode acclimatized in China

Sponsors of foreign crowdfunding projects tend to have very good creative ideas and have a complete implementation plan or already have an engineering version of the product, just lacking funds. While domestic entrepreneurs have not yet been fully released in terms of their flexibility and creativity, many projects and products appear to simply follow and imitate foreign countries.

Proponents of crowdfunding projects need to be passionate about an independent project, trust the project team, and help them. However, the degree of trust among domestic strangers is relatively low. People's trust in crowdfunding platforms is also very low. More people are still willing to believe in big companies and trust in authority.

So from the project sponsor to project supporters, there is a big difference between the domestic crowd and the United States. This means crowdfunding patterns are not well suited to today's domestic market and may need to be self-regulating.

3. Domestic large company-led Internet environment

The success of Kickstarter is also tied to the open internet environment in the United States, so that Kickstarter can get a lot of traffic and exposure, creating a positive loop. However, the domestic internet environment is dominated by the giant and not open enough. Internet giants control traffic and entrances, and crowdfunding platforms find it hard to get enough attention.

Another result led by the giant is that start-ups face greater competition. If the project is good enough, start-ups may not be willing to expose the crowdfunding platform, worried about causing intense follow-up and imitation.

Over-reliance on intelligent hardware

Although the domestic crowdfunding platform also has projects in the fields of music and movies, it focuses more on intelligent hardware. This allows the development of crowdfunding platform by the development of intelligent hardware industry. Initially there are many startups in the smart hardware tide, but after the boom has entered the innovation bottleneck.

Big companies in China are also beginning to get involved in the field of smart hardware, but large companies often think from an ecosystem point of view, and their products do not need crowdfunding platforms. On the contrary, in the process of establishing a large-scale corporation system, some projects that originally required crowdfunding also entered into the ecosystem of large companies through cooperation and no longer needed crowdfunding.

Conclusion · Find a new model of "Chinese crowdfunding"

Crowdfunding is an option for small teams to validate product ideas and get money quickly, producing products, but not necessarily for all teams and all markets. For teams that want to get funding and attention through crowdfunding, the first is to be attractive enough to get a lot of supporters. After the project is supported, it is also necessary to launch the product as soon as possible to achieve its commitment to supporters.

For crowdfunding platforms, serving the needs of crowdfunding is key. This includes getting traffic and attracting users. The US crowdfunding model is not necessarily well suited to the domestic market, which requires a platform to localize crowdfunding innovation and find a crowdfunding position in China's internet environment.

Although it appears that the mainstream US crowdfunding platform and several domestic founding time are basically close, they all seem to have started at the same time. However, in fact, crowdfunding is an area very close to entrepreneurs and highly dependent on entrepreneurial ecological maturity - and the overall maturity of the Internet entrepreneurial ecology in China and the United States, as well as the gap between social cognition and resource allocation, has resulted in Our crowdfunding industry lags behind.