[Crowd Leader: Jonathan Moyal] Why Cloning Can Kill Crowdfunding
Crowdfunding is hot right now. You know it – you wouldn't be reading this website if you didn't. Everyone is talking about it. Whether it's the JOBS Act or good ol' fashion Kickstarter-style, everyone wants to get in on the craze. The easiest way is to perfect the art of niche cloning.
Don't do it. Please. We don't need a Kickstarter for dogs and a Kickstarter for cats. We don't need a Kickstarter for singles, a Kickstarter for brunettes, a Kickstarter for babies, for mommies, for daddies, or for French expats. Please don't turn this into the fiasco that was the Groupon craze of 2011. Don't make us need crowdfunding aggregators.
These are not businesses and they do a disservice to the industry as a whole. They create clutter and make crowdfunding less attractive to users. When that happens people get tired of the industry and start tuning out. Do you remember when you used to get 20 daily deal emails every day? How many of those did you end up reading? The answer is none!
If on the other hand you have a truly disruptive crowdfunding idea then by all means welcome! We need innovation, not cloning. We need crowdfunding entrepreneurs to figure out how to move capital towards projects that are in need in the most efficient way. These are the types of startups that we desperately need, not just as an industry, but also in general.
At the peak of the Groupon craze there were hundreds (maybe thousands) of clones whose only purpose was to "dominate" some absurdly small niche market until Groupon bought them out. How many of those websites are still around today? Almost none! Their only legacy is that they made people wary of daily deals.