About Fund It Together and My Crowdfunding

How “Fund It Together” Came to Be

Back in the dim and distant past, July 16th 2014 around teatime if you’re interested in the details, I received an email newsletter from a company called Focusrite.  Ordinarily I delete newsletters fairly rapidly but Focusrite had recently provided me with some quite excellent customer service and I felt I at least owed them the courtesy of reading what I assumed would be marketing literature.  That email turned out to be like a pebble in a pond with ripples that continue to have an effect almost two years later.

For those of you who don’t know, Focusrite manufacture high quality digital audio recording equipment so when their chairman, Phil Dudderidge, sent a message out waxing lyrical about his son Tom’s start-up company, Nude Audio, and their  new bluetooth speaker my interest was most certainly peaked.  The company was already established but the new product required capital for completion of the design and manufacturing so they were raising money on Kickstarter.

My Introduction to Crowdfunding

I had heard of crowdfunding but I just thought it was when students asked for cash so that they could galavant around the world.  What I was unaware of was the thriving crowdsourcing community and having pledged on the Nude Audio Super-M campaign I started flicking through the pages of Kickstarter.  At the time I was in the process of modifying a product which I was working on and had been looking for some wireless technology to provide additional functionality.  As luck would have it the technology section of Kickstarter was brimming with new ideas for cool stuff and if I pledged some of my hard-earned cash then as a reward people would send me some of their cool stuff to play with.  Now let’s face it, who doesn’t like to get cool stuff in the post?

The next step on my crowfunding journey was the realisation that actually there were a lot of projects out there that should get my support and by dropping a few quid into people’s tip jars I could do a little bit to help.  And this really is the essence of crowdfunding; it’s not about the rewards, it’s about helping people realise their dreams.  OK, so maybe my £1 doesn’t change their world but enough people with enough £1’s will definitely get the job done.

Most of my backing has been done through Kickstarter and the vast majority is in the technology category.  The cumulative effect of two years of investing in new tech is that I now have lots (and lots) of widgets and I thought it would be a good idea to share my experiences with the world at large.  My aim is to review every project that I’ve pledged money for, good and bad, successful or not and give some insight into the campaigns, the products and the process of pledging money to a crowdfunding campaign.

I hope you like what’s here but if not please don’t tell me… I’m a really sensitive guy……  Seriously though, all feedback, questions and comments are very welcome and who knows, maybe someone along the way will be inspired enough to stick £1 in a tip jar and help someone else take a step closer to turning their dream into reality.

Andy