 Hi Hey, hey um, I'm really so honored to be here because Actually my inspiration for this entire project was my Swedish grandfather who was an Engineer who was knighted by the Swedish King actually and moved to the United States and and was a very passionate environmentalist who Kind of started realizing towards the end of his life that a lot of the work that he'd been doing to to automate things and build silos and kind of create a lot of Things involved in our food system and in major scale engineering in our country was starting to actually erode The quality of life that people had And it was a conversation that he had with me very late in his life that actually was the impetus for this project so it's really really such an honor to be back here in his country knowing that I've been able to have an impact here and that actually window farming has become very popular in Sweden because of the desire to You know grow food during the winter you guys really get that so And and Nancy couldn't be here But he's a friend of mine one of the co-founders of Kickstarter and I've spoken with him before so I kind of know Why he invited me and that's because specifically this project is not a film or a book or You know an album which are kind of a lot of the the more traditional product of projects that get put onto crown fun and crowdfunding sites and so Yancey and Perry like to ask me to talk because they see this as an example of one of the kinds of projects that they think Represent kind of a new a new era of projects that are really possible because of crowdfunding so First I'll just tell you a little bit about the window farms project But I'm not going to focus on that because I want to again be able to talk more about crowdfunding and good strategies for that so Some of you all may have heard about the urban agriculture movement and Especially vertical farming so the idea of putting a farm into a skyscraper and putting that in the middle of the city to help out with the Problem of really supplying fresh food on those things that die very quickly and transit And lose a lot of their nutritional value By doing that inside of a city you can actually using very high-tech agriculture You can provide some of that fresh nutrition to the city locally and This is a This is a set of technologies that are actually very viable and Which are also very popular because who doesn't love a room full of plants Especially really fresh ones so I think that that's part of the cause of this idea just kind of spreading everywhere but there's actually still a lot of I'm Engineering work to be worked out and there's also a lot of experimentation With agriculture at this level, especially doing it in an environmentally responsible way and in a way that involves good nutrition That sort of it's a little bit of a chicken and egg problem of having to have the billions of dollars that it will take to Build one of these things and then also not knowing whether or not whether we're going to build it right so I'm Three years ago. I got excited about the idea of why should just the scientists be able to be in this awesome Big crazy building full of plants. What if all of us could actually have a small version of that experience? Right there in our own home so that we're getting to benefit from some of that quality of life And we're also getting to learn a lot more about where our own food comes from and actually become agriculturalists again, which is You know such a fundamentally human pursuit so What if we actually rethought what a window is and thought about actually our relationship with the environment and bringing some of that very in-depth relationship with Essentially transforming our relationship with with cities and with their role with ecology What if we actually were able to tinker with that on a much more personal scale? So I had been working in the open-source software movement And my idea was what if I take open-source software and that kind of structure of Collaboration and I apply it to these physical systems And so again bring it to the personal scale Focus on making some of these technologies organic because Hydroponics and a lot of these technologies tend not to be organic There are some issues involved there and to really make that open-source collaboration work for something physical And so now Three years later. We actually have very viable working prototypes all over the world that are being Tested and implemented by hundreds and hundreds of people using of all slightly different methods and they're all reporting back to our Central website where we have a social media site. Um, so a window farm is It allows you to grow a pretty wide variety actually of vegetables anything but root vegetables or things that are really tall like corn and wheat and It's really a mass collaboration project. So there are people all over the world like like David mentioned and Basically, it's the way that it works is that there's a reservoir of some kind down at the bottom which holds a liquid nutrient solution so it's water with The particular kinds we use have molasses ground up seaweed and seabird guano essentially dissolved into this water and it and there's a pump that's on a timer that sends some of this liquid Nutrient up to the top the plants roots are sitting in clay pellets. It trickles through and Essentially bottle feeds the plants so they grow differently than they do in soil actually and so you're able to fit a lot more Plants into a very small area And and so we're an open source project So we actually have available online very detailed instructions on how to make these systems Using any variety of containers, but the easiest thing to use is to reappropriate water bottles And so we have we now have over 20,000 people around the world who have downloaded the instructions and have been building their own systems And then we started supporting ourselves by actually making kits That we sold in the United States which were everything but the water bottles and now we're actually starting to produce products So I'm a much more polished and finished System that's designed by really great industrial designers and that also supports the mass collaboration project once you get a window farm up and running you got to do a couple things to tweak it and to Understand how it's going to work in your own particular windows in your own conditions And it really is a farming project You are having to make the same sort of decisions as a farmer does about what you're going to plant where and what portion of your real estate is going to be used up for what kind of plant and You don't have to have a green thumb because you learn how to do this from other window farmers and we share We basically share information as we try out different air looms species and understand this particular species grows well under these conditions Versus someone else So we have all of these people all over the world who have been collaborating and sharing knowledge about how to do this and and at one point it just really Hit me that I was running out of money to to fund this project And I needed to figure out how to make it fund itself in this at this point. We had about 4,000 users and so You know, I had I tried all variety of things I tried getting funding from more foundation type Organizations as as an NGO in the United States and really because we were so Unusual we were having a hard time getting any kind of funding. So That was when I took my first crowd sourcing project and did a Kickstarter and this particular This was very pretty early on in Kickstarter's career and Basically the focus of the Kickstarter campaign was to really appeal to people's hearts so to have them have the experience when they're supporting the project of Really contributing to something and having a role that they were playing in this this project making it And the particular project was to fund us to be able to sell kits to support ourselves and Using the funding that we got from that we were actually able to launch a kit sales business Which we've now made a hundred and thirty thousand dollars from which does not quite cover all of the costs of the project in total But has generated a relatively good amount of revenue and at the time So this was a little bit before Simon's project about nine months before that and and there were a couple of Strategies that I used first of all because I was appealing to the heart I had it coincide with the time that many people are committing their philanthropic dollars for the year So it was right before right between Christmas and and New years that the campaign closed So that was really good timing for people who are writing their checks at the end of the year So it was more thinking strategically about when are people gonna have money available? The second thing is that I knew that we had to win We needed to nobody wants to jump on a sinking sinking ship People always want to join something that they can tell is winning So in my back pocket I had a funder who I knew was really committed to the project and instead of having her write the check earlier I said I went to her and I said how about we leverage this money that you're gonna that? I know that you're gonna be willing to commit to the project and have it be You know something that makes the project win so that other people will commit And that actually worked so about a week into the project I had her write that check and all of a sudden we had seven thousand dollars Towards our twenty thousand dollar goal and people were like wow what happened? And then all of a sudden we were starting to get a lot more commitments and donations um But so that was in 2009 the end of 2009 the beginning of 2010 And our community is actually a very long-term community if you build a window farm and you're growing things in it You are a really dedicated person in this community So we actually have to fund ourselves for a very very long time and my theory is that you actually cannot Do a crowdfunding project from the heartstrings twice you can only do it once Because you're going back and appealing to that same community again, and you just it takes a lot of kind of PR To get that those people's attention and you're just I think it's going to be a really tricky thing to do that twice so our next set of crowdfunding projects that we're doing to Forward the organization are going to be appealing to people's purses And so we've learned a lot about our business essentially over the course of selling kits And now we're going to follow a model for selling our new fancy window farms That's much more like the model that the tick-tock and Group used where they were basically they've they raised close to a million dollars on Kickstarter I'm selling basically just these plastic bands that let you stick an iPod nano in to basically make it a watch And they were doing pre sales of this product And if you look at their video compared to other people's videos What you'll notice is that basically their videos are just completely sales So the entire proposition is you are getting a great deal So they don't talk very much at all about their own personal story their own personal passion or motivation Except for to the extent that they're proving that they're going to be able to execute on it So I think that that's that's one thing that we're just seeing happen Between crowds in crowdfunding projects is that there are some that are really kind of focused on this You are getting a good deal versus you are doing a good deed And I think that there's a lot of blending of the two which is really really important on these funding sites But if you're going to do a crowdfunding project You really want to kind of come from which one of those is my leading strategy and use the other And use the rest of the story to kind of build around that but fundamentally make that that choice And That's it And this is my email if anybody I'm happy to help you with your Kickstarter strategy or your other crowdfunding strategy So please send me an email