Young Russian film makers, musicians, fashion designers, game developers and tech innovators are now offered a new way to raise the early stage financing they need. Several Russian language crowdfunding platforms have been developed lately, allowing would-be creators and entrepreneurs to advertise their projects and secure financing based on Internet users’ micro donations.
Backers are rewarded in various ways, from receiving a slice of the revenues generated by a successful film or music album to being able to enjoy the pre-release edition of a new product.
Only a few weeks after its launch, the newest of these platforms, Boomstarter.ru, is hosting hundreds of projects. For some of them, crowdfunding has exceeded expectations: a cartoon named ‘My Heart‘ has received 89,000 rubles, almost $3,000, or 149% of the sum that had been requested, 11 days before the deadline that had been set for receiving donations.
Few tech projects so far
Boomstarter’s technology section has not been the most successful so far. Currently, it contains just three projects, none of which has raised significant sums to date.
“This platform looks too young and hence risks being of little use to us,” a startup entrepreneur said in an exchange with East-West Digital News. “The US platform Kickstarter is more appealing to tech projects in terms of both financial and PR impact,” he believes.
Boomstarter, however, intends to develop strong cooperation with tech startups, co-founder Ruslan Tugushev told EWDN. “Tech innovation is an essential dimension of our project,” he explained.
Tugushev and Evgenyi Gavrilin – the other co-founder – come from the advertising industry. They have financed the project on their own so far and have hired a team of 15 people, half of them as volunteers.
Among Boomstarter’s competitors on the Russian market is Planeta.ru, a platform launched in 2011, which claims to have collected some 3.5 million rubles (a little more than $100,000) from almost 3,500 sponsors so far. The platform offers no technology section, however.
Smipon.ru (short for ‘S Miru Po Nitke’) displays 75 projects, including nine in the tech section.
Rustarter, which launched earlier this year, looks smaller. It also has a technology section, but it is empty so far.
These Russian sites have all copied Kickstarter to some extent – even down to certain website layout details.
Online crowdfunding started to develop in the mid-2000s with such projects as Artistshare.com (USA, 2003), Sellaband.com (Netherlands, 2006), and Mymajorcompany (France, 2007). Kickstarter, which was created more recently, has gained strong traction all over the world, with almost 70,000 projects funded since 2009. Some of Kickstarter’s projects have raised several million dollars in user donations.
Even though some remarkable works or even celebrities have emerged, in certain cases, from these platforms, crowdfunding also has its drawbacks. While many projects fail to raise enough money (in which case the backers are usually refunded), some do enjoy Internet users’ financial support but still fail to deliver their product as planned.
