Chapter 1How Crowd Funding Works: The Basics

In recent years, crowd funding has become an extremely popular and viable way for entrepreneurs, inventors, artisans, small business operators, fund-raisers, musicians, charities, and people from all sorts of backgrounds and from all walks of life, to quickly, legally, and systematically raise the money needed to launch a new business, invent and sell a new product, fund some type of for-profit or nonprofit project, or somehow transform a business-related dream into reality.

Thanks to services like Kickstarter, Indiegogo, FundAnything, RocketHub, and Selfstarter, creating and launching a reward-based or presale-based crowd funding campaign has never been easier. However, it’s important to understand that these days, the term crowd funding is being used very broadly.

In reality, there are big differences between reward-based crowd funding and equity-based crowd funding (which we’ll explore later). What you need to know now is that the majority of this book focuses on reward-based or presale-based crowd funding, which is what platforms like Kickstarter, Indiegogo, and many others offer. That being said, the popularity of crowd funding is expected to grow a whopping 92 percent in 2014.

What creating and managing ...

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