This Week On WPWeekly – A Roundtable Discussion On Crowdfunding

This Friday at 3PM Eastern, we’ll be joined by three individuals to discuss the topic of crowdfunding. Crowdfunding is defined as “the practice of funding a project or venture by raising many small amounts of money from a large number of people, typically via the Internet.” While some projects fail, others are exceedingly successful.

Our guests will share their experience, lessons learned, and what they would have done differently. We’ll also discuss the impact of crowdfunding open source software development.

Scott Kingsley Clark – Clark used Kickstarter to successfully raise enough funds to develop Pods 2.0 and the community website. Although he only asked for $1,500, he ended up with nearly $4,200.

Nick Haskins – Lead developer of the AESOP Story Engine plugin and hosted service, Haskins asked for $6,000 and received $6,572 using Crowdhoster. Crowdhoster is the open source version of Crowdtilt.

John Saddington – Lead developer of Pressgram, asked for $50,000 and received $56,500 using Kickstarter to fund his image sharing app.

Crowdfunding enables people to not only gauge interest in an idea or product, but also allows them to receive funding without having to deal with venture capitalists or banks.

If you have any questions for our guests, or about the topic of crowdfunding, feel free to post them in the comments.