Most of us have heard of the Pebble watch, Tesla museum, Amanda Palmer or even the Karen Klein bus monitor campaigns. These crowdfunding hits captured media attention across the world in 2012, and arguably catapulted crowdfunding into the mainstream vernacular.
Yet, the true revolution of crowdfunding isn’t happening in our newspapers or on our morning news shows. This revolution is being waged online by the thousands of crowdfunding campaigns taking place across the globe. Businesses, artistic endeavours and causes are steadily raising $1,000, £5,000, and €10,000 at a time to launch life-changing ventures from their customers, fans and supporters. With crowdfunding, ideas find their own niche audiences. Crowdfunding raises the funds needed for ideas to launch, grow and thrive without the obstacle of traditional investors deciding whether these ideas are worthy of existing or not.
As a result, crowdfunding is quickly becoming the world’s incubation platform, changing the role of gatekeeper and finally giving the world true choice in determining which ideas come to life. Such meritocracy has never existed in the world of finance before. Thus, crowdfunding is changing finance for the better.