Crowdfunding is designed to help people who are low on cash bring their ideas to life and finance big ticket items they couldn’t otherwise afford. It’s a valuable resource for innovators, creatives, and people who find themselves in a bind, but the five to nine percent service fee that most platforms charge can be a tough pill to swallow.
That was the experience of John Symonds, a Seattle developer who wanted to get funding for a short film a few years back.
“I wanted to avoid the fees on Kickstarter and GoFundMe, and knew that the success of the campaign was based on my network rather than the platform,” he said.
The experience inspired Symonds to build a site that allowed users to create crowdfunding campaigns without turning over a chunk of the returns. After a couple iterations, FreeFunder was born.
The site, which has been live since May, makes money from voluntary donations rather than a percentage of campaigns. When users contribute to a campaign, they’re prompted with an option to make a small donation to FreeFunder as well.
FreeFunder also donates directly to campaigns when they reach certain sharing milestones on social media. It’s a win for FreeFunder, as shares help the site gain exposure and it helps customers reach their fundraising goals.
Symonds shared details on FreeFunder for this Startup Spotlight, a regular GeekWire feature. Continue reading for his answers to our questionnaire.
Explain what you do so our parents can understand it: “FreeFunder is a crowdfunding platform very similar to GoFundMe, except there is no 5 percent platform fee. Instead of charging a fee to the campaign owners (who need the money most) we promote optional donations directly to FreeFunder when a contributor is making their donation to a campaign.”
Inspiration hit us when: “For the first version, it was when we needed to raise money for a short film. For the new version, inspiration hit when I saw that there were other crowdfunding platforms that had figured out different ways to monetize…