Our portfolio company CircleUp, a crowdfunding market for equity investments in consumer products companies, launched something this week that I think is a something we will see more and more in the crowdfunding world going forward.
They have added filters to the left side of their company discovery page. It looks like this:
I decided to filter for food companies in New York that have more than $500k of annual revenue. That got me three results:
Whether it is equity for consumer products (CircleUp), equity for tech startups (AngelList), consumer lending (LendingClub), small business lending (Funding Circle), philanthropy (CrowdRise), or creative projects (Kickstarter), all of these crowdfunding marketplaces have a tremendous amount of things to fund. Drilling down to find exactly what you want to fund is becoming harder and harder. Discovery tools are becoming critical to the user experience.
So I think CircleUp is showing one good way (another is social discovery which Kickstarter does a good job with) to help funders find the things they want to back. My bet is we will see more of these kinds of tools cropping in up in the marketplaces in the coming year(s).
