After recently going through the juggernaut of a 30 day campaign myself on the veritable monster that is Kickstarter it’s been very interesting to see a ton of new players that are entering the WordPress ecosystem as WordPress-centric alternatives.
Must be the soup du jour or something like that.
I have a few issues with explosion of the crowd funding space and these new niche-within-niche-within-niche crowd funding sites that appear to be cropping up nearly every day – got a fascination with pottery? There’s a crowd funding community and website for you! That type of stuff, if you will.
With the ubiquity of WordPress and the ability to use it very much as an application and development framework, the possibilities are near endless and the total cost of ownership for a fully functional “app” is being greatly reduced.
This is not a bad thing and I rejoice in the bar being lowered for entrepreneurs everywhere – I just wonder if the flip-side of running a legit and sustainable business and organization is on the minds of those that can throw down $55 and call it a startup.
Fundingpress is that $55 option which is now available via ThemeForest. It appears to be unapologetically similar to Kickstarter in both feature and form:
Which is fine I suppose but I would imagine that you should try to give it your own personal spin, but that’s a matter of sheer preference. Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery I suppose!
You can see that it’s not just the landing and front page but also the sub-pages as well:
The “Art” category in the first one via Fundingpress and Kickstarter in the latter image. Similar, no?
The entire experience of funding appears to be the same as well, but here you’ll be linking up with Paypal instead of Amazon payments which Kickstarter partners with.
Once you log in you can manage your profile and begin to submit your application for a new project:
Let me be the first to tell you that the experience of submitting a project to Kickstarter is like a dream. It’s one of the best user experiences that I’ve ever had. It’s so intuitive, fluid, and simple that I want to steal everything about their implementation and use it for my own projects.
Fundingpress’ user experience pales in comparison – in fact, most UX would, so that’s not a hard knock on Fundingpress. At least Fundingpress comes with some great documentation, color choices, and apparently some easy to administrate features for projects and such.
They do have an overview video that’s more marketing than anything:
Here are a few of the other helpful videos that the author has created as well:
Complete feature list:
- Paypal Adaptive payments
- Front-end forms – No more ugly backend for users!
- 3 different ways of displaying the projects
- 2 different project pages
- No external plugins needed!
- Custom admin panel for easy customization
- LayerSlider included! (15$)
- Custom projects page with statistics for easy control over the site
- Responsive design
- Unlimited colours
- Page builder
- Blog page
- Contact page
- Amazing documentation with video tutorials
- WordPress 3.5 ready
- Created with Twitter Bootstrap + CSS3 + HTML5
- Support forum
Overall I’m impressed with the function, not so impressed with the form (but if it works don’t break it I suppose). As I shared earlier, I’m more concerned with the abundance of crowdfunding sources which may hurt and challenge both the project creators and the backers.
A strong vision from the founder of the new site will help with a long-term strategy for sustaining the organization will definitely go a long, long way.
Is this something you’d use? Is this something you’re seeing more of in terms of requests from customers and consulting clients?
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