The Biggest Crowdfunding Site You've Never Heard Of
You’ve heard of Kickstarter, Indiegogo, and a handful of other niche sites like them, but even crowdfunding experts might do a double take at this company if they were looking at an accurate list of the most successful crowdfunding sites out there on the web. Have crowdfunding news sources, like us, been missing one of the largest and fastest growing players in the space?
We will be the first to admit it; the answer is yes. Say hello to GoFundMe. Not only is the company of respectable size, it is in fact one of the most visited and fastest growing crowdfunding sites out there.
Check out the stats:
Source: http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/gofundme.com
How did we finally figure this out? Simple really. GoFundMe is one of our current sponsors, and they pointed it out (Our journalists blushed a little over this one). To our defense, our ignorance was not without good reason. GoFundMe isn’t like the other crowdfunding sites like Kickstarter. Inventors and filmmakers aside, this is the crowdfunding site for ‘the rest of us’.
Users of the site, (although they can & some do) aren’t trying to get their indie-film made or trying to mass produce their invention for some new fangled iphone stand; no, they’re raising money for personal causes and life-events like volunteer trips, a friend’s medical bills, school projects, youth sports - even beauty pageants.
It’s everyday needs like this that are being funded all the time on GoFundMe, and this, along with a dead-simple interface for starting a campaign (You could literally create simple campaign in a minute; I tried and succeeded.), that’s driving intense traffic towards the site.
Interestingly, the team that formed the company has been in the crowdfunding game for a long time. In the Fall of 2008, they launched CreateaFund, which later evolved into GoFundMe. Experts in funding, they have also been smart about how they handle the payment process on their site as detailed in this feature in WIRED magazine.
While we are still recovering from the realization that we may have been blind to one of the biggest things going on with crowdfunding, we are excited to see that, through GoFundMe, crowdfunding really is reaching the masses, and doing it faster and on a larger scale by the day.
Try it out, and let us know what you would want to crowdfund on GoFundMe in the comments. We’ll respond with some crowdfunding tips and pointers!