Show HN: We're helping kids access capital | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: We're helping kids access capital

piggybackr.com

27 pointskeenahn10 comments

Fundraising for school groups, sports teams, etc. has always been such a challenging and tedious process for youth. How many candy bars and candles can you really sell to your friends and family?? PiggyBackr does a fantastic job making group fundraising FUN and "competitive" for youth. A much needed application!!

Cool idea, looks well-executed, and definitely serving a worthy cause. Do you have any evidence that this is better than the current way of doing things, which I guess would be candy drives and magazine subscriptions and all that?

Dig the idea, but what do you guys do that is different from going through other crowdfunding platform. What makes you more than just a kickstartr/indiegogo clone with an education theme?

We are the only platform that is 100% focused on kids. Kids have challenges that are not being addressed by the other crowdfunding platforms.

1) Kids under 13 need stricter privacy controls and need to give parents access.

2) Kids oftentimes don't understand how best to tell their story and engage their audience. We help them with that.

3) Kickstarter is fantastic for pre-selling products. While we do have a few young entrepreneurs on our site, most of the kids are not selling anything. We encourage them to give low-cost, high emotional value gifts like signed photographs of their team.

4) We are one of the few platforms that is built from the ground up around teams. The team leader has special abilities to coordinate the team members and can poke them and motivate them.

5) Kids also need a bit more prodding than adults do, so we've built in a bit of light gamification to make it fun for them.

How exactly do you help kids tell their story? I get your other points, pretty cool. Hope you can develop some good traction.

This project is awesome. I work with a wheelchair basketball program that raised a ton of money using Piggybackr and the platform made the whole process so easy. Thanks!

Wow, wish I had access to this when I was in school; this is orders of magnitude more effective than going door to door selling gift wrap.

Haha, thank you sir. That's what we were going for :). I had to sell magazine subscriptions and it suuuuuuuuuuucked. The funny thing is that kids are still using those tactics TODAY.

Great way to level the playing field for kids!

Thanks for the encouragement! Do you have any critical feedback for us? :)

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