In an article published in Forbes by Ryan Caldbeck, he lists Kickstarter as one of the top Financial Companies for 2012. The Crowdfunding site was first on the list with the others sites being; Lending Club (Peer to Peer lending), Motif (structured portfolio investments), Wealthfront (risk profile & portfolio recommendation). and finally WePay (underdog challenging behemoth PayPal).
In the donation based crowdfunding world, Kickstarter is the clear leader. Kickstarter has helped entrepreneurs of all sorts successfully raise $376 million since its inception. While much has been written about the company already, one thing (other than their product, which has help set the standard in the industry) we atCircleUp respect about Kickstarter is the importance they place on project’s hitting their funding goal. On Kickstarter, if you seek $10,000 for a project but only raise $5,000 or $500, the project gets nothing. Undercapitalization, whether in donation or equity form, sets projects and companies up for failure. We love that Kickstarter does not punish the $500 investor by allowing the company to accept their money and then do a lackluster job executing a project because they could not raise the entire amount needed.