Crowdfunded Cards and Postcards
So a couple months ago I posted in here about the idea of doing crowdfunded t-shirts. That idea is not dead, just on hold, for a number of reasons.
I thought it might be easier for me to start with something I'm familiar with doing, to prevent the unexpected pitfalls of doing something new.
So I've got a couple of other ideas, that will soon generate a couple of polls to determine the exact direction I take things in.
Now, for the details!
I'm in the process of opening an etsy shop called Creative Composites. This shop will be focusing primarily on paper and print products. Cards, post cards, prints, a few originals, etc. In order to make any shop successful I need product, but in order to get the products I need money for material and printing costs. (Something that everyone seems to be lacking these days.)
Through personal experience doing my own wedding invites and a custom postcard design for a client I've got a pretty good idea of how much it will cost to do everything, and about how long it will take to do it. Since I don't have a printer myself, I use vistaprint for all my printing. They do a REALLY good job, and when I've ordered from them I've been REALLY happy. The turn around time from start of design to receipt of printed product is 2 - 3 weeks, give or take a few days. The cost will mostly depend on the quantity of items ordered, which I will determine once I've got all of this set up.
The things I am most curious about are what sorts of items would people want most? Blank inside note cards, or regular post cards? I have ideas for incentives, such as a pack of cards for each person who donates x amount. Or one card for each person who donates anything under x amount. Or a computer background for anyone who donates anything + the card(s).
I know most people use paypal, but my paypal account is on lockdown because paypal is ridiculous. They also have a lot of fees associated with each transaction. So I'm using dwolla instead. There are fewer fees (only .25 per transaction, ever, of any kind), has stricter security than paypal, and it's gotten a lot of good reviews from several different places and people. HOWEVER, in order to make a deposit into someone's dwolla account you have to have a dwolla account. I'm not sure how many people have dwolla, and of the ones that don't I'm not sure if they'd be willing to create a dwolla account just to support one crowdfunded activity. Thoughts?
Once I get more feedback, I'll create a couple of polls for each of these scenarios.
Thanks!