Bootstrapped Crowdfunding Platform Reaches Nearly $2 Million a Month
As we know here at the Daily Crowdsource, San Diego is a great place for crowdsourcing. Not only are WE headquartered here, but a number of crowdsourcing start-ups also share this city with us, a city with some of the best weather on earth. Jealous much? Move-over San Francisco; today we are happy to write about crowdfunding giant GoFundMe, and put them on our list of our fellow successful startups.
As you can see in the picture above, GoFundMe, currently one of our sponsors, will be responsible for having helped the average Joe raise nearly $2 Million dollars in the last month alone. This $2M mark is the tip of the iceberg that is the culmination of their past 8 consecutive months of 20% growth (as seen in the picture above). For the full infographic (see below).
There is no other way to say it, the company is set to explode. GoFundMe is expecting to exceed $37 Million USD for 2012, making them one of the largest crowdfunding sites in the world. And, the money coming in is not just from the US. These totals also represent donations from Canada, Australia, the United Kingdom, and any European Union countries that use the Euro as their official currency.
The company’s success has recently been covered by Tech Crunch, and with crowdfunding becoming big in the media, we think it’s great when the large crowdfunding companies, like GoFundMe, can come forward with their numbers like this. It helps us in the crowdsourcing market understand the phenomena of crowdfunding that much better.
Something rather remarkable about all this is that this company was not just a cool idea pushed forward by venture capitalists. GoFundMe is entirely self-funded. Yes, that means it is entirely bootstrapped, with no investments, and no outside capital. How do you go from a startup idea in May 2010 to a million dollar business in May 2012?
Here’s some insight from the CEO of GoFundMe, Brad Damphousse:
We’re extremely fortunate to be in the business of doing good... Our growth reflects most people’s desire to make a positive impact in someone else’s life.
One popular example we have covered on Daily Crowdsource is Igor, America’s tallest man raising over $46,000.00 USD for custom-tailored footwear. This is a great example of one popular use of the platform, medical fundraising. Medical fundraising is where people raise money for medical expenses by reaching out to friends and family as well as the crowd at large. Igor had a medical need for good shoes to prevent him from hurting his feet and back, and he got that help from an inspired crowd. GoFundMe’s crowdfunding infographic (seen below) reveals its most popular areas of usage with medical fundraising campaigns accounting for 17% of user activity.
After medical fundraising, campaigns for school tuition costs and volunteer trips round out the top three categories with 11% and 10% respectively. That is why you will see so many of these types of projects on the site, but the site is really open to any kind of of fundraising for personal, business, or creative needs.
To give you some perspective as a person who is trying to fundraise online, some things making GoFundMe unique for crowdfunding is that, unlike other crowdfunding sites (who have time limits and put restrictions on how your receive the money you raise), there are no time-limits, and each payment you receive is yours to keep.
Take a look at the graphic below (or view the original infographic here) to see more of what the average user of GoFundMe is up to when they crowdfund on the site, and leave a question in the comments below if you want to know more.
