WPWeekly Episode 156 – A Crowdfunding Roundtable

In this episode of WordPress Weekly, Marcus Couch and I are joined by three gentleman who have gone through the crowdfunding experience.

• Scott Kingsley Clark is a Senior Web Engineer at 10up. He’s also the lead developer of the Pods Framework and a number of other WordPress plugins. He used Kickstarter in September of 2011 and asked for $1,500.  He ended up with $4,177 with 91 backers.

• John Saddington is best known in the WordPress community for his work on the WordPress news site, WP Daily, which was acquired by WP Engine last year. He’s the lead developer of Pressgram, an iOS app to capture, edit, and publish mobile photos to your site or blog. He used Kickstarter in April of 2013 to raise $50,000. He received $56,500 from 498 backers.

• Nick Haskins is the lead developer of the AESOP Story Engine platform plugin and service. Haskins used Crowdhoster in early 2014 to try and raise $15,000. He received $6,572 from 45 contributors.

There are two important lessons I learned from today’s show. First, always ask for more money than you think you need. Having more money is better than running out. Second, structure gifts to backers so that it works towards completing the project versus being a distraction. Although it’s a long show, there is a lot of great information.

Stories Discussed:

Jetpack Rebrands with New Logo, Adds Custom Post Types in 3.1 Release
First Vietnamese WordCamp to be Held in Hanoi in September
LaunchKey Plugin Adds Biometric Authentication to WordPress

Plugins Picked By Marcus:

Kickstarter Tracker Widget – This widget uses cURL to fetch and parse the summary of a Kickstarter project’s funding metrics. With the widget, you can display the number of backers, current amount funded, percentage funded, and days left on the project. This also displays a large call to action button in order to promote and help drive traffic to your Kickstarter page.

Fundify Crowdfunding – This plugin integrates with Easy Digital Downloads and the Fundify theme. An extension that seamlessly integrates with Easy Digital Downloads, this plugin lets you crowdfund films, games, music, art, design, and technology.

All-in-one WPML Crowdfunding Campaigns – Unify WPML translation versions of a crowdfunding campaign so that contributions to each language version count towards the main campaign. If you are running a multilingual crowdfunding website and you want a single campaign to have multiple language versions, this is the plugin you need. It works alongside WPML and Fundify Crowdfunding, ensuring that when you have created translations of your campaign, contributions to each language-specific version of the campaign count towards the same campaign. This plugin is easy to use and requires zero configuration.

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