Cloud Funding and a Short Note on Korea's Social Market
Cloud Funding superbacker
kickstarter & indiegogo
Personally the biggest reason I do crowdfunding is that I can do prototyping fastest, easiest, and at extremely low cost.
> How an idea actually takes concrete shape
> How the same product needs to be presented to catch early adopters
> Why some products fail despite huge amounts of backing
> By what path products that succeed at crowdfunding gain the attention of general users
> Why some crowdfunded successes get ignored by the general public, etc.
If you set aside the ambition to be first,
you can indirectly experience the whole process of planning and running a good product from the seat of a backer.
Thanks to that? Since last year I became a Kickstarter superbacker.
Thanks to that I was able to file related patents.
Thanks to that, pretty "trash" (just a metaphor ;>) fills a corner of my shelf..
Of course I also sometimes use Korea's Wadiz and Tumblbug..
But here, rather than a process of a truly penniless startup planning and making a product.. the tendency is closer to promoting existing companies' products.
In Korea, medium and small businesses actually pushing new business often fail not from lack of money but from lack of connection points with infrastructure or with infrastructure-related companies,
so I judge you can't gain any added value there beyond the product itself.
To buy a product, department stores are safest and cheapest. Because they take about 45% commission from most of the brands they host while guarding quality on the buyer's behalf.
As a result, overall retail prices rise..
From the standpoint of Korea's cloud-funding companies you could applaud them for finding a survival breakthrough or a differentiated business model,
but it's also undeniable that they're damaging the original spirit. The program running at Kakao is similar...
The awkwardness of it already being used by brands already in the business as a channel for launching new products lines up with the awkwardness of social commerce.
Domestic social commerce runs on debt. Most of them are no longer Korean companies. Their revenue model is external investment.
What foreign capital wants isn't the social commerce itself but their distribution network — to be more precise, their delivery network.
Thanks to those who are shrewd about crafting their own survival,
the recommended consumer prices from domestic self-employed sellers and brands will rise, bit by bit, to inflate the "ultra-special" discount rates.
And the logistics database — the backbone of nationwide bullet-fast delivery — is being quietly piled up as the confidential asset of foreign companies.
As time passes, these patterns
drive consumer price inflation.
And to use the distribution networks and related data they built, domestic companies end up paying fees.
Those fees in turn drive further consumer price inflation.
Despite that,
they sit near the top of Korea's job-preference rankings,
and domestic investors are all praising their foreign-capital fundraising.
So
as long as domestic investors' own capital is in,
whether social commerce is a Korean company or a foreign one, whether our national assets are leaking out or not — this kind of situation is just treated as sentimental? criticism.
And domestic job seekers or workers, with their livelihoods at stake,
have no bandwidth to worry about whether this market drives up consumer prices. If anything, a foreign-owned employer — thank you!
But a time for change will come.
An age of the true meaning of "social" — where neither social funding nor social commerce is simply a tool of incumbent companies — will come to Korea too.
Because the general public has already weathered similar situations.
The daycare issue was like that. Even when they had to go to work, our parents bore their own inconvenience and raised their hand for the right direction.
Ordinary consumers do, in the end, move.
(omitted..)
