Kick Starter strikes again
 

A couple years back this forum hosted open discussion around an entrepreneur who was attempting to crowd fund a coffee shop in Alton Bay. He sought funding through a web site called Kickstarter.com

Things did not go so well then as the project was met by local resistance and did not get funded. My how things have changed. Leslie and I just submitted the pledge that put Herimit Woods Winery over the top for its project. This means it will be receiving the $28k in funding sought via Kickstarter.Congrats to Hermit Woods!! Is this the beginning to a new era of crowd fundng in the lakes region?

Congrats to Hermit Woods. We enjoyed our stop there during the lakes region wine weekend.

I may have missed this, but when does Kicksterter back an actual business? I thought they only did product ideas, non profit, movies, etc. Not an A-Z business?

Yes
 

The kickstarter concept is fundamentally to support nascent businesses by either paying for their product (which does not exist) or for some honorarium such as is listed for Hermit Woods Winery. The fundamental issue has been that investors in nascent companies had to be "accredited" meaning that you had to meet either income or net worth levels to qualify and own equity. This is a mechanism to get around that and open up to a wider population. I am an angel investor, entrepreneur and consultant....yes, I have kicked in to a couple of companies on Kickstarter too.

Jetskier:cool:

Kick starter!
 

Unfortunately Alton Bay is not the place to make things happen. Seems like Alton is okay with falling behind everyone. I remember there was a nice coffee shop open in the bay a few years back. was such a nice place to sit and talk. But it seems the town is resistant to anything but the Status Quo.

Great comments but I believe that Kickstarter / Indiegogo etc are specifically not allowed to offer any form of equity transaction and therein operate upon a 'gift' or 'perk' scenario... and they can work extremely well!

A number of promotions have raised multimillion $ funds (free of equity vest, interest or repayment) for their businesses via this form of crowd-funding as opposed to peer2peer / equity or donation types...

Kickstarter do not provide any funds... to the contrary, they take a percentage of monies raised! They are a promotional platform (to the general public) upon which virtually anybody can build their own project to seek to raise funds... but it's not that easy and a huge amount of grunt work has to be input to gain success!!!

I appreciate the input. I am looking at kickstarter/fundable, etc to boost a tropical brand I am in the process of build for a year now. Lots of research, hence the reason this post caught my attention.