How Equity Crowdfunding Campaigns Actually Give Voice to the Community
Alternative fundraising solutions empower communities to hold businesses accountable for their impact.
As part of our Future of Sex Expert Series, Lips‘ community manager shares her insights on equity crowdfunding for sex tech products. In November 2021, the social media platform raised over $87,000 through a WeFunder campaign.
Equity crowdfunding has proven to be a viable solution to the challenges of fundraising that many sex tech companies face as a result of venture capital (VC) sexism and stigma against sex and sex work by investors, banks, payment processors, and all throughout the financial community.
However, I think the irony is that equity crowdfunding campaigns—while extremely time and energy-consuming in the short term—actually boost, expand, and support businesses more in the long term than just receiving fewer larger institutional or singular angel investments.
I would even go as far as to say that over the next 3-5 years, we'll see that businesses (across industries) that raised money through equity crowdfunding will turn out to be more profitable and successful. The best part being that the community members who contributed investments will be the ones seeing those returns in their bank accounts as opposed to already wealthy outside investors.
Also, because of the financial industry biases, I anticipate that sex tech companies will continue to pioneer alternative fundraising avenues out of sheer necessity—i.e., crypto, grants, co-ops, and capped returns.
But again, these routes will ultimately strengthen our businesses.
Alternative fundraising avenues can strengthen sex tech businesses
Equity crowdfunding strengthens business because it strengthens community.
“Community” has become such a big buzzword in the tech ecosystem for a reason. It is extraordinarily powerful, but it is so often superficially thrown around to describe what is really just a disjointed, loosely-defined base of customers.
But equity crowdfunding forces business leaders to actually cultivate real communities, almost practicing a form of community organizing. They must spend time understanding their customer community on a deeper level, communicating with them meaningfully, and figuring out how they can best meet their real needs.
This work is not easy. It requires business leaders to ask tough, deep, even spiritual questions of not only their community but of themselves, like:
“What exactly do people need, and how badly do they really need it?”
Equity crowdfunding empowers communities to hold businesses accountable
In the past, the egos of mostly cishet white male business leaders and their easy access to capital allowed them to build products without ever asking these types of questions.
This has resulted in the proliferation of businesses and business models that have caused major harm to individuals' mental and physical health, our democratic institutions, and the planet. Community-centered businesses are probably our only hope for the future of capitalism.
So, to the extent that equity crowdfunding empowers communities to hold businesses accountable for their impact, I hope we see a lot more of it in the future.
Image sources: Unsplash
