IG9, Vietnam's First Crowdfunding Platform Launches Today

Today, Vietnam’s finally got a crowdfunding platform. The full-time team of seven come from a motley crew of startups based out of Hanoi including Dynabyte and The Missing Corner. The company is founded by Nam Do, the current CEO of Emotiv, a US company now based in the Silicon Valley, which produces a piece of headgear that allows users to control objects on a screen with their brains. IG9, a cheeky version of the english word “ignite”, will be the first crowdfunding platform of its type in Vietnam - operating in Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh city.

Crowdfunding is not a new concept to Asia, there’s at least nine across the region from Japan to Indonesia. The IG9 team hopes to be at the forefront of this in Vietnam, so I talked to Lew Yin How, CEO of the project, to get the lowdown.

In a largely cash economy like Vietnam, how are you actually going to get projects funded online?

Since this is the first type of project of its kind, we want to open up the payment options as much as possible, so that payment won’t be a limiting factor. This includes the usual online payment, bank transfers, and also COD. We also allow people to pay at our office and designated partner.

Of course, COD would most likely be the biggest payment method for IG9, as this is how many of Vietnam’s e-commerce giants get payment.

In a nascent market like Vietnam where crowdfunding is alien, how are you going to get your name out?

Our strategy is working with projects that already have a huge community. One of our first projects is a dance group called St. 319, who easily has hundreds of thousands of FB likes and a lot more views on Youtube. When these projects work with us, it’s our mutual agreement that both sides will leverage on their existing community to promote it.

At today’s launch, IG9 will already have four projects to go and twenty more projects in the project pipeline to be launched over the coming weeks. How well it fares with these known projects will be a real test for the model in Vietnam and a big teaching moment for the currently non-existent user base.

How are you different from Kickstarter?

Kickstarter’s focus is mainly on creative projects; but for us, we see this model as very versatile - it really depends on the market response. There are two ways this can turn out: the first is similar to Kickstarter, with the main focus on creative projects; the second is more towards crowdfunding for startups (which takes some time for the market to develop). So our initial focus would be on the creative projects.

Currently, IG9 accepts projects under 14 Categories: Art, Comics, Dance, Design, Fashion, Film & Video, Food, Games, Music, Photography, Publishing, Technology, Theatre, and Community.

Will you be managing projects just like Kickstarter?

There are 3 main phases: pre-campaign, during-campaign, post-campaign. Pre-campaign, our team will work closely with project creators to package a campaign that provides great value and of great interest to potential supporters. From our experience, most project creators have no experience with fundraising, so, we guide them more than Kickstarter does - Kickstarter’s attitude is pretty much just screening, and then hands off. During-campaign, we make it easy for you to communicate and update supporters, sharing them milestones, or if there’s new rewards. Post-campaign, we make it easy for creators to contact and communicate with supporters, giving them updates, following-up on fulfilling the rewards.

Of course, the cool thing about crowdfunding platforms is they disrupt top-down big investors and publishers who are the content deciders. It allows the people to decide what they want to see in the market. This is potentially very disruptive to a place like Vietnam where content is largely top-down and monitored. A place where creative and content projects are largely regulated by the Ministry of Culture, and often vetoed when even slightly controversial.

Our current approach is to just start more conservative first, running with projects that are more within the boundary of their regulation. We will solve that problem as we go along.

We’ll see if this dichotomy will actually play out on the platform or if project posters self-censor before their projects go up. It may be alright, because as Yin How says, “the projects we have are things that are gonna happen anyway.”

Either way, I welcome more consumer participation in product and service development. The good folks at SGE has a neat list of crowdsourcing sites in Asia here. And if you’re looking to crowdfund, make sure you’re armed with a kickass crowdfunding plan before kick starting your campaign.

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