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I just got off the Demo Stage at the LAUNCH Festival in San Francisco, where I had the immense pleasure of introducing Miigle to nearly 10,000 attendees. Following our demo, there was a short Q&A session with an impressive judge panel that included: Adeo Ressi, Jay Levi, Joyce Kim, Don Dodge, and Vivek Wadhwa.
One of the more relevant and less snarky comments/questions they made was the following: There’s already AngelList and Gust. Why would people want to hop on a third platform like Miigle?
Here’s a more elaborate version of my answer.
First, AngelList and Gust are funding platforms. Their primary purpose is to connect startups to investors. This is based on their belief that the greatest barrier that entrepreneurs face is money. Yes, money matters, but it is not the greatest barrier that innovators face. The challenge all innovators or startups face is an easy and quick way to connect with people interested in their product or idea. Unless someone is interested in your product or idea, they will not want to work for you, fund you, or use it. So how do you find those interested people? Until Miigle, you’d have to spend a lot of time, energy, and most likely money, looking for them online, attending networking events, and the list goes on. That process hasn’t worked for most people.
Miigle changes that - we focus primarily on connecting you with those interested people, then allow them to contribute whatever they can e.g. their knowledge, talent, money, and even just emotional support.
We had at least two dozen people walk up to us following our demo to tell us they loved the product and our vision. To us it felt great to receive that emotional support, but following Adeo Ressi’s thought process - it’s not money so it shouldn’t matter. There are countless startups that have received a lot of funding and still failed. What happened? Here’s a great post by the founder of Sonar, a VC backed startup that FAILED.
But please, allow me to take a moment to tell you why it’s dangerous to propagate the false belief that investors in Silicon Valley are the “only” path to building a great company. I’m using the word “only” because many of them here in the Bay have developed a very cocky attitude about it. Just as an example, a comment made to us by Vivek Wadhwa was that “we’re not part of the Boys Club up here and it would require us millions and millions of dollars to make our product successful, and we will never be able to take it off the ground.”
Why would anyone trying to add value to the world and solve a very big problem need to be part of Boys Club to have a chance to succeed?
Anyways, let’s stick to the point. Here’s why these institutions are wrong.
Every year 400 million innovators globally set out to create better products and services for us and economic opportunities for themselves and their communities.
However, only 1% of them receive help from institutions like VCs, Incubators, and Angel Networks. The remaining 99% are left to their own demise, which reduces their chances of success because most don’t have access to the intellectual, practical, or financial resources they need. With numbers such as 1 prospective investor per million entrepreneurs, it’s pretty evident that there’s a significant mismatch of supply and demand.
Imagine the state of global innovation if every innovator was given a true chance? Too ambitious? Ok, scale it down to just 2%.
We believe the world can provide such an ecosystem. But doing so requires a paradigm shift, not only on how we think about innovation, but how we execute it.
That’s why we created Miigle, to make it easier for innovators globally to showcase their work (startups, projects, apps, etc) and be automatically connected with people interested in using, contributing, or fostering them. That’s right. We remove the legwork, time, money, and energy innovators WASTE to find the help they need. Instead, we allow them to leverage a global human network of innovators like themselves or people interested in innovation.
Here’s a fact: Collectively those two groups have more intellectual and financial resources than all the VCs, Incubators, and Angel Networks in the world combined.
Think about this: There are over 5 billion adults in the world from all walks of life, professional experience, and financial status; most of them yearn to contribute to ideas that match their passions. However, they’ve been ignored because when it comes to innovation we seem to have developed the thought that value primarily comes from serial entrepreneurs or super angels.
This thinking is wrong.
A great example of that, albeit accidentally, is Wikipedia, where matching a simple idea and the passions of millions of people created a world-defining innovation. This is better than the very same idea, but with highly paid experts (Hint: Ask Microsoft about Encarta).
Wikipedia currently has over 20 million contributor accounts and there are many more unregistered contributors. If you’d asked most VCs to invest in Wikipedia, they would have said “NO” because there’s no business model. Think of how many people today benefit from the contribution of regular people keeping Wikipedia alive simply because they were given the opportunity to be part of something they believed in.
We developed Miigle to allow people and innovators to overcome their challenges, access resources they need, and/or find customers by tapping into the passions of those 5 billion humans. The beauty of it is, we’ve automated that process and removed all the legwork for both parties.
Why should innovators have to abandon their homes and flock to San Francisco for a chance? Not only can they get the same chance if not better on Miigle, but MORE of them can, regardless of their geographical location.
As all the trends show, the world is getting more connected thanks to the Internet, and social innovation is attracting a lot of interest. Now, a PhD student at MIT can learn about a 13 year old Sierra Leonean boy (Kelvin Doe) with no training in electrical engineering, but who is picking up trashed electronics to build a radio so he can DJ to uplift his war torn community. Amazing! Right? How would a VC or Incubator find and help Kelvin? They can’t. But we, as part of global community of people who truly care about fostering innovation, CAN!
This is why Gartner estimates social innovation’s current market size of $1B will exceed $7B by 2016.
The current platforms, most of them crowdfunding sites, also understand this, but they just are taking the easy way in. They focus on money because it’s a tangible good. You can take a 5% commission on a $100 pledge, but you can’t take commission on knowledge transfer through an advice.
Giving every innovator a fighting chance may sound utopian, but it’s not make-believe. What it takes is a globally accessible technology with a diversified offering, passionate people, and a sensible business model. These are the fundamental blocks of Miigle.
Miigle is free to use and accessible anywhere in the world with an internet connection.
If you care about living in a world where people are empowered to live to the fullest of their potential, then please join us and spread the word! We need your help!
Fight on!
Luc Berlin, CEO at Miigle.com
