Why reward crowdfunding never took off in India
, 1 min read
Kickstarter has been around since 2009. India has had its own attempts at the same idea. None of them became the default way to launch a product here. It's worth being honest about why.
Trust
Paying a stranger for something that doesn't exist is a big ask anywhere. It's bigger in a market where people have learned to be careful with online payments.
Indians prepay all the time — gold savings schemes, wedding vendors, property bookings, phone pre-orders. The problem was never paying in advance. It was paying in advance to someone unfamiliar, with no clear promise about what happens if it goes wrong.
Nobody brought new buyers
Most campaigns on early platforms were funded almost entirely by the maker's own friends and followers. When a platform doesn't bring new buyers, it's just a payment page, and a maker can run a pre-order on their own site for less.
Payments made it awkward
Taking money weeks before a campaign closed, then refunding everyone if a goal was missed, was operationally clumsy with the payment systems of the time.
What's different now
UPI is how most people pay. Backing a founder has become a mainstream idea. There are far more independent makers, and far more of them sell online.
The hard problems are still trust and discovery. That's what any platform attempting this has to solve first — and what we're building Banega around.
Have something you want to make?