Crowd Funding

[Del.Monte]

Anybody else into this? I have helped fund a couple of short movies and children's books through https://fundit.ie/ but nothing much recently as there precious little on the platform any more. I'm also on Kickstarter but have thus far not funded anything there as it's not Ireland based. Am I missing something, is there a platform that I should join? It's only a bit of fun but the rewards even for a small investment are nice too.

[Peregrinus]

Crowdfunding isn't, for the most part, investing at all. Investing in an enterprise usually involves buying a share in it, with a right to share in future profits, or lending money to it, with a right to the later return of your money with interest. With most crowdfunding schemes, people are making advance purchase orders for products or services to be delivered at a later date. They are customers, not investors.

They might be important customers, though. The advance orders mean that the enterprise has funds to proceed with development/production, and has locked in enough buyers to assure itself of viability, so this may enable the enterprise to proceed when it otherwise wouldn't. Not so much seed capital as seed sales revenue.