Kickstarter blazed the path to bring crowdfunding to a wider audience by creating the rules that have set our expectations of what a platforms should look like today. Kickstarter was founded back in 2009 and the crowdfunding landscape has continued to change drastically since then. Hundreds of organizations and companies have entered the market to run campaigns through their own crowdfunding platforms.
Companies like Tile, Soylent, Cruzu, and Lockitron were able to build their own crowdfunding platforms, run their own campaigns and raise even more funds than if they had stuck with one of the established platforms. Cheap and easy to use SaaS tools have broken down the barriers to entry for creating crowdfunding platforms. Here are some of the major benefits to building and managing a crowdfunding website opposed to just listing a campaign on an established platform.
Make Your Own Rules
Take a page out of Lockitron’s handbook and blaze your own path. Lockitron was rejected from running a campaign on Kickstarter because they were classified as a “home improvement” product. Instead of searching for another platform that would host their campaign they decided to create their own crowdfunding website.
Lockitron’s campaign raised $2.2 million through their platform. The company then launched an open source project called Selfstarter for other experienced Ruby on Rails developers to build crowdfunding sites from this skeleton platform. White label crowdfunding SaaS tools like Thrinacia on the other hand allow anyone to easily build and manage their own crowdfunding website regardless of whether they have any web development experience or not.
Control Your Own Branding
Running campaigns on a self hosted crowdfunding website allows for complete control of all branding and marketing. Instead of traffic being driven to a third party platform such as Kickstarter or Indiegogo, contributors visit the dedicated self hosted website where there are no other distractions. Independent crowdfunding platforms have the ability to direct branding efforts to focus on the campaign(s) that the site was built for.
Continuous Funding Model
By listing projects on your own site you have ability to run continuous campaigns. Crowdfunding campaigns are run as a single funding opportunity on most established platforms; however, when you build a crowdfunding website using a white label SaaS you have the ability to easily define the rules for how campaigns are run.
Multiple campaigns listed on established third party platforms can easily get lost in the sea of listed projects. Whereas with traffic being directed to the self hosted site new campaigns can be added that will be viewed by all contributors visiting that site.
Skip the Middle Man
Running campaigns through a self hosted crowdfunding website that is built using a white label crowdfunding SaaS allows campaign owners to keep one hundred percent* of the funds raised. Kickstarter and Indiegogo both charge a 5% fee for hosting campaigns, and that is on top of payment management service fees. So campaign owners only end up keeping 90-92% of the total funds raised.
*Minus payment management service provider fees, (e.x. Stripe charges 2.9% plus 30¢ per transaction).