Our Story
How it got started
The story of Crowdspire regrettably begins—like many stories—with tragedy. In 2014, we started toying with the idea of building a crowdsourcing platform, which would have allowed organizations, corporations, or really whomever to outsource work to people on the internet. It was just the thread of an idea in the back of our minds. But in 2015, Wildcard Corp.’s lead developer Nathan Van Gheem learned that someone he’d known through church had been killed in a shooting spree. The church community rallied around the surviving wife and children, and they decided to start a crowdfunding campaign to help raise money for them.
The problem they ran into was the outrageous fee that these platforms take on each donation. Unfortunately it’s still a problem a lot of people with great causes encounter. Depending on the platform, it could be 8 or 9 percent of each and every donation that the beneficiary will never see. It’s frustrating. We wanted a platform that could support cases like this with either no cost or much lower cost, so that more money goes toward the causes that people really care about.
After this shooting, we knew that if we were going to build anything, it was going to be a crowdfunding platform. It would be the one that we wanted to use but couldn’t find. The one that didn’t exist but needed to.
Even though we had the idea and the means to build it, we had our hands full with a lot of other projects, so we kind of set Crowdspire aside for a while, working on it here and there and taking our time. In early 2016, we had our eye on a nice building downtown that we wanted to use for our new headquarters. We weren’t the only one with this idea, and we quickly found ourselves locked in something of a bidding war with a local nonprofit called Worldbuilders. Perhaps you’ve heard of them.
We didn’t win the building, but we did have a chance to speak with Worldbuilders Founder and New York Times Bestselling Author Patrick Rothfuss, who demonstrated interest in a new crowdfunding platform for the nonprofit. It sounded a lot like the Crowdspire idea we had floating around in our heads. A lot of us didn’t take it seriously. I mean, come on. Bestselling Author Patrick Rothfuss wants us to build something for him? We didn’t expect it to go anywhere, and for a while, it didn’t seem like it was going to.
But early in September, we learned that Worldbuilders wasn’t goofing around after all. They really wanted to use our crowdfunding platform. We had all the groundwork for it laid, but it wasn’t ready to be used yet. If they were going to use it for their November fundraiser, we would only have about a month to finish it. Now, if we said we weren’t at least a little bit intimidated by the deadline, we would be lying. But this was a fantastic opportunity to see our idea through and hopefully do a lot of good with it. There was no way we were passing it up.
Our team went to work by October and had both the new Worldbuilders website and the Crowdspire platform up and running just in time. We couldn’t be prouder of the work we did to get everything done. The best part of this whole story is that we were able to cut down the fees for Worldbuilders to 2%, saving them at least $6,000 for the duration of their fundraiser. Maybe $6,000 doesn’t seem like a whole lot to you, but let’s put it this way: it’s enough to buy 12 cows, or 50 goats, or 300 flocks of ducks. It’s enough to change dozens or even hundreds of lives. That sounds like a lot to us.
What's next
Another one of our grand ideas is to work more effectively with social media than other platforms. We’ll be adding a feature soon which will allow people to donate social media posts to a cause in place of—or as well as—money.
If you donate a post, you’ll let us post it to your social media account at a later date or time. We’ll send these out in a blast, which manufactures trending topics so that awareness can transcend individual social networks, giving your cause a better chance at reaching more people than ever before.