These creators are putting Perth on the Kickstarter map

Many Australians sat up and took notice when New South Wales inventors Stuart and Cedar Anderson raised US$1 million in just three hours on Indiegogo, with their revolutionary beehive system called Flow Hive. They went on to break the record for the amount raised in a single day ($US2.2 million), and become the most successful crowd-funding venture ever outside of the US. The Andersons ended up raising over US$12 million by the time their campaign closed in April. They had originally set out to raise only US$70,000.

There have been many Perth-based success stories, though none on the same scale as Flow Hive. Leederville-based Cycliq is probably one of the better known local campaigns. Kingsley Fiegert and Andrew Hagen turned to Kickstarter in March last year to fund Fly6, a cycling camera/light combo, and raised AUD$266,594 from 1,780 backers. They returned to Kickstarter twelve months later and raised another AUD$668,721 for a front-facing version of the product.

Perth: a late starter

Despite Cycliq’s repeated success, it’s fair to say Perth remains a little behind the pack when it comes to crowd-funding. Based on the number of live campaigns on Kickstarter at the time of writing, we only rank second-last in Australia on a per capita basis.

Source: www.kickstarter.com, wikipedia

Statistics provided by Australian platform Pozible paint a similar picture, with Perth being the only capital city with a share of total campaigns less than its share of population (numbers weren’t available for Darwin and Hobart). Pozible’s General Manager Claire Merquita stressed these were estimates only, as “many creators don’t specify a city, just picking a country, so we’ve got a lot of ‘Australia, Australia’ projects.”

Notwithstanding the imperfections of the data, it appears that Perth is under-represented in the crowd-funding scene.

Recent Perth projects

So while Western Australia is perhaps a little late coming to the crowd-funding party, a recent flurry of campaigns appears to suggest Perth is waking up to the potential of funding projects and start-ups through the power of the crowd.

A project to open Perth’s first cat cafe launched on Indiegogo a couple of months ago, and raised a whopping AUD$150,000. I’m not a cat person, but understand the concept to be somewhere you go and drink coffee while stroking rescued cats. It followed in the footsteps of a similar project in Sydney which had previously crowd-funded about the same amount.

The combination of crowd-funding, social media and cats does indeed seem to present a recipe for viral success – at least based on my understanding of what’s trending nowadays… That being said, I have to admit to having been a little sceptical about a project raising over $150,000 in Perth for a cat cafe (can you tell I’m not a cat person?). The difficulty with very localised campaigns like this one is that you’re significantly limiting your audience, and so can’t rely on global reach and virality as so much as on a very strong existing supporter base. At the time of the campaign I noticed that ten donations of $10,000 each were placed in quick succession on one day, suggesting perhaps one rather generous benefactor, or some self-supporting activity going on… Not that I’m suggesting there was anything untoward about the campaign! At least one other person appears to have genuinely contributed $10,000, out of the charitable portion of his mother’s estate, according to Reddit. Then again, his “mother was a crazy cat lady” he explains.

Another very local-interest campaign launched last week on Chuffed, seeking to raise AUD$100,000 to open a new museum focussed on Perth. At the time of writing this they’d only raised AUD$2,785 with 13 days left to go. This is in spite of getting very good coverage in the local press, having over 3,000 Facebook and 6,000 Twitter followers, and a team which boasts a City of Perth councillor, Heritage Perth executive director Richard Offen, former MP and journalist Diana  Warnock – and the guys behind Two Feet and a Heartbeat.

This provides a cautionary tale to anyone considering a crowd-funding campaign – it’s not easy. That being said, I note that I have yet to receive any communications despite signing up for updates on their webpage, their Facebook page has been pretty quiet, and an earlier conversation about a cross-promotional opportunity and a plug in this article were not followed up. To a certain extent, you have to put in the hard work to  get over the line.