Contribute to the Movenergy Campaign Crowdfunding
HeadFunder is a relatively new platform that has committed to focusing on the social aspects of crowdfunding. Users are encouraged to create profiles, chat with one another, and follow like-minded individuals. The platform also allows campaign owners to make use of its ‘crowdspeaking’ service, HeadTalker, which we covered at length here.
At the end of last year, co-founder Chris LaBonty reached out to inform us that HeadFunder has dropped all fees associated with its campaigns (save for the payment processing fees taken by WePay). It joins other platforms making similar changes, like Indiegogo and Tilt, which have also dropped fees for certain (but not all) campaigns.
Related:– New Platform HeadFunder Focusing on the Social Aspects of Crowdfunding
We reached out to LaBonty via email to get a better understanding of why the company decided to drop its fees. LaBonty was kind enough to provide his answers, which we are sharing below.
Anton Root, Crowdsourcing.org: Why did you decide to drop fees?
Chris LaBonty, HeadFunder: We have been thinking about making crowdfunding free on HeadFunder ever since we first launched the platform. At first, we were concerned about how we would generate revenue for our company, but we realized that there are other ways to monetize on our platforms without taking from the campaign creators.
If you think about it, campaign creators do all of the work for their crowdfunding campaign. The creator makes the campaign, then they market their campaign to everyone they know, then hopefully they pushed the campaign far enough so that more and more people help contribute to make the campaign successful. The whole time they are doing this, they are advertising the crowdfunding platform for free. Then at the end of the campaign they collect money from them as if they were the main reason why their campaign was successful. This did not sit right with the team here at HeadFunder, and we had to make a change to help the campaign creators who are keeping the crowdfunding industry growing.
There is still a credit card processing charge, as far as I understand, correct?
Yes there is still a credit card processing fee charged to campaign creators just like most of the crowdfunding platforms available for people around the world to use. Our platform collects no fees on our end to help the campaign creators keep more of the funding that they worked so hard to raise.
How do you plan to make money without this revenue stream?
We have huge plans in store to monetize from our platforms, but they are still confidential as of now since we are still working on them. We believe these plans will shake up the crowdfunding and crowdspeaking industries and make current platforms have to change their business model to survive. HeadFunder is excited to be bringing these plans into full effect in 2015.
How’s the crowdspeaking service coming along?
HeadTalker is growing at an amazing rate and allowing people all over the world to get more exposure when sharing their messages on social media sites. Since the last time we spoke, we have worked with some of the largest crowdfunding campaigns from Kickstarter and Indiegogo including Overlord and Flic. We are currently doing a giveaway for $50 for our HeadTalker campaign to announce that HeadFunder has removed their fees for all campaigns. This campaign already has a social reach of 3.1 million, [and it] will be shared by all of the supporters at the same time! If you’re interested in supporting HeadFunder and want to try to win $50 for adding your support, you can join here.
Anything else you’d like to share with our readers?
We have released the News Feed for HeadFunder! This makes HeadFunder the first free crowdfunding social network! We are very proud to be able to bring this feature to life since this has been one of our goals from the very beginning. We wanted to make a social networking platform specifically for crowdfunders to allow like-minded people to communicate about crowdfunding and help each others’ campaigns become successful.
Tags: chris-labonty, crowd-funding, crowdfunding, headfunder
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