Fundstak: Crowd Funding Comes to Pakistan

Fundstak is a crowd-funding platform for Pakistan where ordinary people, teams and organizations can raise money online for anything and everything. Creating a short movie, developing a video game or making a new product are all possible options.

If you have a good idea about a new product, service or anything that might be useful to people, you can post it as a new project. Fundstak provides three major categories for projects: Social, Creative and Equity. Once your project has been screened and approved, people can then pledge money towards your goal amount. If you reach your goal, funds are released to you.

Payment Options:

At the moment, the payment options for people who want to contribute are: Bank Wire / Deposit, Telenor Easypaisa and Credit or Debit Card.

Available Project Categories:

Here’s a list of categories in which a project can currently be submitted.

Equity Project Projects:

The really interesting part is that Fundstak will soon allow equity projects. In equity projects, you can raise money for starting or expanding your business in return for a percentage of the company’s ownership. There’s a reason why other crowd-funding platforms don’t let projects offer equity. The whole concept is fraught with legal headaches so it’s going to be interesting how Fundstak deal with it.

Right now, they provide a peer to peer equity raising platform through which is completely online. Investors would have access to a dashboard where they can manage their portfolios for all companies they have invested in. They would also be able to give regular input into business decisions and have a part of the dividends and profit sharing if the company sells itself. It’s certainly an innovative concept and we for one, cannot wait to see how it it executed.

Creative and Loan Projects Platform:

Other than Equity, fundstak will also be launching its Creative crowd funding platform and Loan crowd funding platform. We’re all game for choice but we have doubts about how effective Equity and Loan are going to be, specially in a country like Pakistan where due judicial processes can take years to resolve in case of disputes. To deal with those cases, an iron clad dispute resolution process is needed and Fundstak will have to provide that safety net in order for people to trust them.

Fundstak Charges:

Here are the charges for projects using Fundstak as their crowd-funding platform of choice:

• fundstak Fees: 5% on the amount you redeem
• Payment Processing Charges: Approximately 2.9% + USD 0.30 per transaction for credit card donations
• Redemption Processing Charges: Approximately USD 25 per redemption depending on your bank’s country

Conclusion:

Overall, it’s about time a crowd-funding platform came to Pakistan. While the whole concept has its fair share of critics, it has led to some truly amazing products like the Oculus Rift (virtual reality headset), the Pebble (first smartwatch) and countless others which never would have made it otherwise. We have some questions about the categories on Fundstak but otherwise, the platform looks well built and solid and we can’t wait to see how they progress.

You can visit fundstak at http://www.fundstak.com.