Goal -- I guess any project can be lofty in its projections, but my understanding is Kickstarter gets directly involved in helping set appropriate targets for projects over a certain size.
Time will tell if that's actually the case. This is the first kickstarter project I'm following closely enough that it feels like watching stocks... wondering how much momentum a project needs in that first day to predict if it will succeed or fail.
To my mind there is a reason for that - kickstarter allows people who really want a thing to exist to pay the amount that thing is worth to them, and then get it.
No computer game is worth $10'000 just to play. What is worth $10'000 dollars is ownership of the IP, and a share of any profits.
Maybe this is against kickstarters rules, but I'm not sure it should be. I'd happily invest my savings across a spread of carefully chosen crowd funded companies, in the hope that one out of those hundred would make good the losses on the rest.
Why is there not kickstarter style crowd funding platform for investment?
I remember seeing a lot of heated debate on this topic about a year ago... part of the JOBS actin the US. I believe the SEC is currently drafting regulations on this, but haven't heard much on what that will entail.
No sign of similar legislation in Canada that I know of.
A crowd equity site doesn't exist in the UK, so I presume it is a regulatory problem, but crowd loans to businesses sites do.
I wonder if a specialist 'loans to businesses' site could loan to businesses that have not started yet, with interest proportional to profit, and a fixed 'interest only' term before repayment. Trading these loans would be a problem, and they would not give control, but for a small holder they would function a lot like shares. Sounds pretty viable.
I realize there are some incentives issues here, e.g. why would the board increase profit rather than increase management pay and break even. Conventionally this is because the shareholders would fire them, and because they are more shareholders than employees. But I believe an appropriate incentive system could be done via loans using contracts.
Time will tell if that's actually the case. This is the first kickstarter project I'm following closely enough that it feels like watching stocks... wondering how much momentum a project needs in that first day to predict if it will succeed or fail.