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On this week of the TWiC, Jared Iverson, the cofounder and CEO of Healthfundr joins hosts, Zack Miller and David Stark, to discuss equity crowdfunding for health-related startups. In particular, pay close attention to some of the innovations Healthfundr has developed to help investors better informed investment decisions and how experts can influence this. Check out our archives and sign up for our newsletter on our website -- ThisWeekinCrowdfunding.com 

Equity crowdfunding is probably the newest form of crowdfunding, Kickstarter and Indiegogo's little brother. But the momentum is there -- OurCrowd estimated that upwards of $700M would be invested via equity crowdfunding during 2014. While thousands of investors have taken to equity crowdfunding platforms, there is a lot of runway for new investors to embrace crowd investing. In this week's episode of TWiC, we explore (and bust) 4 myths of equity crowdufnding. Check out our archives and sign up for our newsletter on our website -- ThisWeekinCrowdfunding.com 

In TWiC, David Stark and Zack Miller look at Reddit's recent moves into crowdfunding and about the recent Indiegogo campaign, Hour of Code. Backed by tech entrepreneurs like Gates and Zuckerberg, this crowdfunding project aims to train 10,000 teachers to teach 10 million students about computer science. Watson on crowdfunding wows us with another amazing fact about crowdfunding. Check out our archives and sign up for our newsletter on our website -- ThisWeekinCrowdfunding.com

One of the most exciting forms of crowdfunding is what's going on right now in real estate. Investment properties, which were once owned wholly by large real estate firms, are now finding crowdfunding investor interest. And vice versa -- individuals, who once struggled to get access to 'insider' deals -- can now invest in real estate via platforms like RealtyMogul. RealtyMogul's CEO and founder, Jilliene Helman joins us on episode #15 of TWiC to talk about how her firm got off the ground and is now working with both top-flight real estate development projects and attracting investor interest. Watson on Crowdfunding tackles the complicated -- but really important -- issue of accreditation for crowdfunding. The rules of who qualifies to participate on a crowdfunded investment are in flux and Prescott sorts things out for our listeners. Your hosts, Zack and David, discuss recent movement in Kickstarter's Terms of Use which signal the direction the rewards-based crowdfunding leader is taking in terms of addressing failed projects and the project creators' responsibilities towards backers. Lastly, in the Stark Tank, David Starkinator describes his favorite crowdfunding project right now, which, surprisingly, is an artistic endeavor. Check out our archives and sign up for our newsletter on our website -- ThisWeekinCrowdfunding.com

Neil Young may be a great rock and roller but he's an even better crowdfunder. Young ran a rewards crowdfunding campaign that raised millions of dollars. Young didn't stop there -- he went on to raise an equity crowdfunding campaign that was even more successful.  What was Mr Cinammon Girl's secret sauce? On this week's TWiC, we invited Rose Spinelli, of TheCrowdfundamentals.com fame and crowdfunding coach and teacher, on to the show to deconstruct his approach, what he did right/wrong, and what we can learn from his success. Watson on Crowdfunding examines a new world of corporations crowdfunding that raises money from the public.    Check out our archives and sign up for our newsletter on our website -- ThisWeekinCrowdfunding.com

As crowdfunding gathers more momentum, crowdfunding activities are becoming more mainstream. Our guest on this program, Hillel Fuld, is a technology evangelist and the Chief Marketing Officer of Zula. Join your hosts, David Stark and Zack Miller as they talk to Hillel about his experiences meeting with thousands of technology teams and what qualities and behaviors can make a crowdfunding project successful vs. a failure. Starkup Nation and Zack Attack discuss recently delivered crowdfunded products and the record-breaking Coolest campaign which just topped $10 million on Kickstarter. Lastly, Stark and Miller share the good news that a company they crowdfunded is readying an IPO -- a first for the crowdfunding industry. Check out our archives and sign up for our newsletter on our website -- ThisWeekinCrowdfunding.com

In 2012, Renaud Laplanche, founder and CEO of Lending Club, joined co-host Zack Attack Miller on his Tradestreaming Podcast. So much has happened in the peer to peer lending space since then (including the fact that they no longer call it “peer to peer”): Lending Club just surpassed $4 billion in underwritings, rolled out business loans in addition to personal, and filed for IPO. For Episode 12 of the TWIC, Chief Marketing Officer, Scott Sanborn joins us to discuss why investors are flocking to Lending Club and where his business will go in the near future. This episode was recorded in June 2014.   Check out our archives and sign up for our newsletter on our website -- ThisWeekinCrowdfunding.com

What if you’re a recent Stanford college grad with a computer sci degree and need to borrow money? (crickets) What if you’re an investor and would like to be able to loan to these (future) high performers? (Upstart…) Dave Girouard, co-founder and CEO of Upstart, joins us on the Episode #11 of the TWIC -- This Week in Crowdfunding Podcast today to talk about how his firm is enabling lending to — and investing in — young, high potential people who haven’t had enough time to build out a long credit history. Check out our archives and sign up for our newsletter on our website -- ThisWeekinCrowdfunding.com

David "Starkup Nation" Stark and Zack "Attack" Miller are your hosts for episode #10 of the TWiC. We spend a lot of time talking about the richness of crowdfunding and its commerical applications. Sometimes, we forget just how powerful this new funding mechanism is when applied to the non-profit world. Enter Molly Lindquist. She's the founder of Consano and she shares with us a very moving personal story and why she's dedicated to building Consano into the leading crowdfunding platform for cutting edge research.   Check out our archives and sign up for our newsletter on our website -- ThisWeekinCrowdfunding.com

Real estate crowdfunding is one of the hottest investments right now and Fundrise is leading the charge. Lead by co-founder Dan Miller, the firm recently chocked up a $38M investment round and many top real estate personalities participated. Why? Have you ever asked yourself why it's easier to invest in a stock in China than it is in an office building around the corner? It just is, but if Fundrise's brand of real estate crowdfunding takes off, that all will change. Dan Miller joins us on TWiC to discuss the case for real estate investing and how Fundrise is building a crowdfunding platform and service for the future. Check out our archives on our website -- ThisWeekinCrowdfunding.com

We've all read stories about successful crowdfunding campaigns that shipped months late because of "manufacturing problems". I'd bet a nickel that was because these crowdfudning campaigns didn't work with Dragon Innovation and Scott Miller. Scott, an MIT grad who ran the team that developed and manufactured 3 million units of the Roomba, has built an impressive team in Boston and China. They're the people behind serious hardware crowdfunding campaigns, working with entrepreneurs to effectively plan and execute on a manufacturing stragegy that can take them to production of millions of units. Scott shares a multi-step crowdfunding production plan with Zack and David, backed by decades of experience. This episode is a must-listen if you're thinking about launching a crowdfunding campaign for a consumer electronics product or if you're thinking about backing/investing in one (Scott also gives listeners a couple of powerful resources to learn more about the manufacturing for crowdfunding campaigns). David and Zack talk about crowdfunding in the news, including Naked Wines (subscription commerce) and Tilt (payments for groups). Prescott shares his data point of the week in Watson on Crowdfunding: $321 million (how much hardware crowdfunding campaigns have raised after Kickstarter from venture capital firms). Listen in to this powerful trend and how to take advantage of it, like Oculus did when it sold for $2 billion (!) to Facebook after a successful crowdfunding campaign. Lastly, David Stark-up-Nation shares his favorite crowdfunding campaign going on right now: The Scarecrow Project that aims to gather and protect the world's largest collection of videos imaginable at its store in Seattle.

This episode of TWiC is a new variation on the podcast -- a short experiment. It's just 20 minutes long and it's me (Zack) riffing on the different types of crowdfunding (there are essentially 3 different flavors). My goal was to provide a general overview of the crowdfunding market and then give some explanation on how each is growing and certain trends in the crowdfunding marketplace. Please let us know (you can tweet me at @newrulesinvest or email zack@tradestreaming.com ) what you think. Would you like more of these or something else? Thanks and stay crowdy, Zack and David

Probably the hottest sector in crowdfunding right now is real estate.   Investors are flocking to real estate crowdfunding platforms to get access and invest in real estate and they're doing it in different ways: some platforms focus on investments in loans, others in equity, and others in professionally-lead large scale real estate projects. Grounbreaker.co, a new player in the real estate crowdfunding space, has taken a different approach. The company works closely with some of the largest global real estate firms to use crowdfunding to raise money from its existing investors and to attract a whole new class of investors. Co-founder and CEO Joey Jelinek joins your hosts, David and Zack, to talk about how the real estate industry is adjusting to this entirely new model for fundraising and what the future looks like for the entire real estate industry now that crowdfunding is proving itself viable. (Joey also shares some good resources with us to learn more about investing in real estate). In our news segment, we talk about whether or not there exists a new crowdfunding bum class -- and whether we need to donate or back every Tom, Dick, and Harry who throws up a crowdfunding campaign. Watson on Crowdfunding talks about $4 million -- the size of the recent investment in Spotify that occured on crowdfunding site, Microventures. Lastly, Starkup Nation delivers on his favorite crowdfunding campaign of the week and (not) surprisingly, it has to do with water balloons.  

It may look easy to launch a crowdfunding campaign, raise hundreds of thousands of dollars, and hit your targets...but it ain't. The secret behind many of Kickstarter and Indiegogo's largest and most successful crowdfunding campaigns is that they have professional help behind them. They hire guys like Command Partners' Roy Morejon to run integrated Internet marketing campaigns, outreach with guerilla PR, and produce awesome crowdfunding videos. David and Zack bring Roy on to TWiC to discuss what's tips and techniques are working for project backers. In our news roundup, we talk about the growing internatlization of crowdfunding and the Kickstarter Film Festival 2014 in Brooklyn and the rising importance of platform branding in crowdfunding. Lastly, co-host Zack Attack Miller digs deep into his experience producing over 20 crowdfunding videos and takes us through the 5 steps to make a captivating and successful crowdfunding video.

On this week's TWiC podcast, we interview the guys behind Crowdability -- a great resource for investors thinking about getting a bit more serious about equity crowdfunding. Matt and Wayne are 2 extraordinary entrepreneurs in their own right and have a bold vision of providing an educational and decision-layer to help investors make better decisions when investing in startups online. In this week's news roundup, David and Zack look at the differences between raising money via crowdfunding or turning to more traditional sources of capital. BitTorrent is using its massive network of 170 million users to crowdfunding new forms of content. Lastly, is beer the most perfect of crowdfunding projects? David thinks it just may be... We review CrowdBrewed, a crowdfunding site that encourages (you guessed it), funding of beer-related enterprises. 

Listen to this episode on Stitcher and on SoundCloud. Creating a new consumer product used to be a somewhat solitary process. But what if you could throw thousands of your closest from around the world into a virtual room to harness only the best ideas for the names, designs, and functionality for really cool, new consumer products? And (here’s the kicker), what if you could get paid for your contribution? Quirky is a community of hundreds of thousands of passionate people from around the world who enjoy ideating, designing, and producing novel consumer products — collaboratively. Quirky’s Nethaniel Padgett, Community Director, joins us, David Stark and Zack Miller, to talk about how developing products and making money selling them has changed forever — on this episode of the ThisWeekinCrowdfunding Podcast. During our News segment, we discuss whether we’ve reached peak crowdfunding. Are you being hit up to contribute to all your friends’ weddings via crowdfunding? Co-host David Starkup Nation is and he’s pretty sick with it. Lastly, we review Kicktraq, an analytical tool backers and project owners use to determine strategies to optimize their campaigns and participation.

On Episode #2 of This Week in Crowdfunding podcast, we invite Prosper's president, Ron Suber onto the program to talk about how he's built Prosper in a multi-billion dollar peer to peer lending marketplace. In the news, we discuss why crowdfunding is catching on in Japan and how it's actually contributing (already) to changes in the country's macroeconomy. We also look at Google's moves into crowdfunding with recent changes to accept money via YouTube. Lastly, we review Crowdability, a great resource for equity crowdfunding. It's a free weekly newsletter that educates investors on how to best approach equity crowdfunding by comparing it to best practices in venture capital, angel investing, and private equity. The newsletter also sends out a weekly aggregated list of some of the best crowdfunding deals online, across platforms.

On the inaugural This Week in Crowdfunding podcast, David Stark and Zack Miller discuss all things crowdfunding. First up, we do a hard-punching news roundup. We chat about Kickstarter's recent rule changes, why the real estate crowdfunding industry is currently receiving so much PR, and a recent study that sheds some light on optimizing crowdfunding campaigns. We interview Peter Renton of LendAcademy and the Lendit conference, who's a true pioneer in the marketplace lending industry. We ask Peter on where the industry is headed. Pay attention to Peter's description of the rumored, upcoming Lending Club IPO and how he expects this to be a seminal moment in the crowdfunding industry. Lastly, in our produt review section of the podcast, we take a closer look at NickelSteamroller which is a great site to both analyze the marketplace (p2p) lending industry in general, as well as analyze individual securities at the portfolio level. That's a wrap for the first of what we hope to be incredibly engaging and informational podcasts we'll be publishing weekly.