[marcotm]

There's a Kickstarter for startups. It's Kickstarter. But looking at the current project guidelines, I think you are right that Kickstarter is not (or does not want to be) the right platform for pure software / SaaS / etc. startups (which I guess you are thinking about). So the equivalent would be something like backers pay x amount of money to get a lifetime, one-year, whatever license of the final product (in contrast to shares like in crowd investing). Funds will only be paid to the project initiator if they get above their pre-defined threshold (similar to Kickstarter). I definitely think that this could be valuable, but I'm also not sure if that space is not already covered by existing companies. Seems relatively straight forward. Somehow similar: Early access titles on Steam, etc.