Crowdfunding FSAE projects

[murpia]

Hi all,

Recently I've been wondering about the feasibility of crowdfunding FSAE engineering projects. Examples could be 'troublesome' components such as steering racks, or 'flexible' components such as ECUs that can run open-source software. Kind of like group buying of engineering as well as components.

Putting the engineering and project management aspects aside for now, how feasible is it for your FSAE team to allocate & commit speculative funding?

As I understand the process, crowdfunding a project would require prospective financiers to commit to transfer money only once a certain threshold level is 'pledged'. If not enough is pledged, no one transfers any money.

There are some similarities to the first round of the Tyre Test Consortium, I suppose, which is now a very successful FSAE project.

Can you imagine your team committing to any kind of crowdfunded project?

Regards, Ian

[Dunk Mckay]

I believe something similar has been tried in the past, but didn't last long. How effective it was I don't know.

You'll struggle to find teams that all want the same thing, or to find anything that will offer a significant enough cost benefit to make it worth while. There's 400 teams worldwide, and I wouldn't count on more than 50 finding out, and then out of those fifty maybe 10 being interested.

If you wanted to do it could work, but you'd have to be very organised. First survey and research to find out what, if anything, multiple teams all want that can be done this way. Then plan it properly, work out all the costs involved, how long it woudl take how many teams would be needed to contribute how much, then come up with a marketing plan. You'll need to contact all the teams directly, send them direct messages, email probably, follow up by phone is you can. Prove to them that it will be worth their while and relatively hassle free, that you can do most of the leg work for everyone to make sure it gets done and inspire confidence that that is true.

Then, I think, you might have a chance.

[murpia]

Hi Dunk,

I agree with pretty much everything you say, on the difficulties of making it work.

Initially, I think I just have one question really:

How feasible is it to commit to a financial 'pledge', within the finance structure of a typical team?

FSAE teams are very transitional with personnel always joining and leaving. But someone has to authorise purchases and then write the cheques at a later date. Presumably only purchases that can be financed, get authorised? http://fsae.com/groupee_common/emoticons/icon_smile.gif That works well enough if you know your income and expenses quite accurately, which I suspect is not true for most FSAE teams.

Regards, Ian

[Owen Thomas]

I do not think it would be difficult for most teams to budget for this type of thing. It would be the same as allocating funds for any specific part that you know will need to be bought, or for things like R&D. The tough part would be getting people to buy in, especially if the funds are in any way tracked through the university. If the project is structured well enough to look promising you could probably pull it off.

To answer your original question, I can not currently imagine our team commiting to a crowdfunding project unless it were to:
A) Save us enough money and/or time, or
B) Provide quantifiable performance gains which translate to competition points
It would also probably need a quality and timeline guarantee of some kind. Basically, the same choice that comes up whenever deciding between buying a part and designing it in-house would apply to this type of thing.

All that said, I do really like the idea of pooling resources to get access to products which otherwise would not be available in a niche market such as ours.

[JWard]

This isn't quite what you're getting at here, but I remember we used to have supply problems with ali honeycomb for the IA. The minimum order values were too large (and thus expensive) for our budget. We had to buy thinner material and use 4 or so layers to meet the rqmts. If we could have pooled multiple teams together and shared a much deeper section of material and split this between 4 or 5 teams, we would have done!