ToGather, Asia’s first crowdfunding site, opens for business

Crowdfunding has taken off in a big way in the United States, with startups like Kickstarter, IndieGoGo, and Quirky getting huge traction.

In Asia however, crowdfunding is a foreign notion. But ToGather.Asia, a Singapore-based startup that claims to be the first in Asia, hopes this will change soon.

Their website essentially allows anyone to post up ideas for creative projects, social initiatives, and innovations and seek funding from the public to turn them into reality. The money will only be passed to the project creators once the target is met.

There’s no equity exchange involved, so the funding is the form of donation pledges.

The site has just entered public beta this month, and five projects are open to public donations.

One is an F&B company that is seeking S$30,000 to kickstart a healthy food concept to combat the negative perception towards vegetarian food. Another is asking for S$38,000 to produce Qubeee, a ‘herbal vaporizor’ that is a purportedly 100% harmless alernative to cigarettes.

ToGather appears to draw a lot of inspiration from Kickstarter’s model with its threshold pledge system and also the use of incentives — for instance, a poster for pledging S$99 — to entice people to donate.

The YES! Startup funded company is founded by Bryan Ong, a motivational speaker and author, and Mark Cheng, who previously started an environmental NGO.

While the idea is certainly groundbreaking, especially in Asia, gaining traction is going to be their biggest challenge, and the team knows it.

Mark has admitted to the Brunei Times that he “does not have a target (for how much the fundraising happens on the site) and wants to see how well such a platform would do in Asia.”

They will need to prove their ability to gain users in order to take their business to the next stage.

In recent memory, there has been some crowdfunding initiatives in Asia, including one by entrepreneurial reality show Angel’s Gate, but the public’s reception towards it has been tepid.

The problem could be execution. Expecting the public to fund a startup in the region of six digits is simply too much to ask. It’s like fishing in a sea with a bait that’s too big to nibble on.

ToGather seems to be on the right path, although I do wonder if an all-or-nothing system for S$30,000 seed funding is still too much from a market that hasn’t warmed up to the concept.

Even an established player like Kickstarter has said that their average project receives funding at around the US$10,000 region or less, and that’s their marketing copy. Many projects do raise much more though.