Great concept - may I suggest changing the landing page marketing copy? I do not mean this as a negative comment, if anything, your concept and mission goals are so strong that the copy should be unique and stand on its own. Clearly, Gandhi is an influence here, but that quote is so attached to his political activism and I feel that your brand is going for a different tone.
Best of luck!
Great concept. I remember Neighborland working in a similar arena. Couple questions:
1. Why do you think other companies that have tried this have failed?
2. What are you doing to bring in the members of the local communities and connect them with each other?
@davidspinks thank you for reaching out. We are huge fans of @neighborland and their work in the civic engagement space. To our knowledge they don't work on anything in the realm of financing projects, so a different and very complementary space.
To your questions --
1. To our knowledge, no company to date has attempted to bring crowdfunding to the $1 billion per day municipal bond market. If you know of any we'd love to learn more about them.
2. Individual investors join to invest in the places they love, and eventually communities will be able to turn to Neighborly to handle the entire financing project.
@jase We need this for Atlanta. We have an amazing pedestrian/bicycle project called The Beltline (http://beltline.org) which will connect all of the in-town neighborhoods together. It's a huge boon to health, happiness, & the urban environment. It's used for transportation & leisure. There's already been over $1 billion in new development along the 3 miles already built. The sections already built are a huge success, however lack of funding is preventing faster progress on the project as a whole (will be 26 miles total).
With Neighborly, the community would quickly and eagerly provide the funding needed to complete the project. The city would have plenty of revenue to repay the loans from all the new development along the trail.
@michaelpatzer awesome to hear. We are fans of Points of Light and the crew at @villagedefense in Atlanta. The use case you mention illustrates the exact kind of project we hope to enable local-first finance for.
@jase Love the idea. Couple questions come to mind. How you guys are planning on making money? Are investments only in San Francisco right now? What do you project returns to be and what sort of time horizons?
@ekryski wonderful questions. We're less focused on revenue / business model at the moment, more focused on doing something revolutionary in a market where there are lots of little evolutionary fixes happening. Fortunate to be well supported and to have lots of persistent team members in it for the long haul :)
First deals will be all around the bay area. We'll be looking at CA deals outside the bay later this year, and elsewhere in the US early 2016.
Expected returns vary depending on project, investment duration and financial situation of each individual investor. While I can't state expected returns in general terms, the table in this independent article about Taxable Equivalent Yield is a reasonable approximation of what folks might expect from some opportunities on Neighborly.
@diligentdil yes worldwide eventually. Nearly turnkey capital formation for civic projects that matter. Every community should be able to do local-first finance, without loads of middlemen.
@jase Also, I'm in mobile engineering with a background in finance. Not looking for a job, I'm happily employed, but would love to help in whatever capacity I can. I'm friends with the guys at Groundfloor here in Atlanta (http://groundfloor.us) who've been doing real-estate crowd-funding and navigating a lot of the legal hurdles.
Been fortunate to see this space develop over the years. I met the Neighborly while they were going through @500Startups. Very impressive team, with a smart angle on where the market is today, and a vision for how the platform can grow as the space evolves. As @davidspinks referenced, there is a real social component to community based initiatives; and local support around projects is becoming ever more vital to usher them to success.
Q - @jase How do you see the interaction with local city councils, government officials, etc helping/hurting growth in the short term, as they become more accustomed to a "new model"?
@jonathancordeau thank you for the kind words and support.
As a double-sided marketplace we've chosen to focus on buy side (individual investors) for the start. Muniland is enormous, with around 50 or so unique new issuances per calendar day. We won't necessarily need support or buy-in from communities to access the buy side of the market, but eventually want to be helpful as a one stop shop for communities doing finance. By which time we need to have figured out the answer to your question :)
Although we've been astonished by the number of communities who reach out to see whether there is a chance to use the system now. Charter schools, low income housing, shipping container community retail parks... really innovative and inspiring stuff that gives us hope about the future of the nation.
The WalkScore team never did anything with crowdfunding, but they were very connected in the world of urban planning / civic projects. Might be useful to chat with them at some point down the line.
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