Use Case: Crowdfunding Events

For ease of reading and understanding the original concept and use case of Favourse, we have used coherent terminology and focused on a single use case being inviting a speaker to one’s hometown. We refer to the person being invited as the speaker and to the people inviting that person as fans or simply audience. The application of Favourse is not limited to the domain of public speaking or public events. Creators, teachers, coaches, artists, musicians, and anyone else could potentially benefit from the Favourse technology and platform.

Technical Quality

Background and concept

Favourse is a new business model designed to make in-person and online training, educational coaching with top-notch speakers as well as lesser-known speakers possible and affordable for everyone. Based on the steadily increasing demand for online learning, combined with the constant need for personal interaction, Favourse provides customised educational solutions by combining crowdsourcing and crowdfunding.

Main Use Case

Imagine you have an idol; let’s say it’s Vitalik Buterin. You regularly watch his videos on YouTube and read his articles, but your dream is to meet him in person. Since you live in Europe and he resides in Singapore, visiting him would be expensive. But you could afford to see him here, in Europe. Favourse allows you to share your dream with your friends and others from your region. Once enough people share your dream, you will be able to afford his travel and speaking fees.

Please refer to https://video.favourse.com for a 1,5-minute video about Favourse.

Please refer to https://sale.favourse.com#usecases for more use cases.

Model

By creating market transparency, Favourse enables speakers and organizers to identify educational demand in specific areas and simultaneously identify the best supplier to fulfill the target groups’ needs.

We started conducting numerous interviews, surveys and developed different prototypes to verify our proof of concept and review and improve our business model. See below for a summary of our activities and findings. Favourse benefits everyone.

For speakers and trainers, it can be risky to host seminars in uncharted waters. Booking venues and traveling are expensive and every speaker has to earn a profit. As many speakers are freelancers, their income often fluctuates. Favourse provides a solution for all these problems at once. In fact, it helps speakers to plan entire educational tours, ensuring that their travel is worthwhile and that they will get paid before the event. They can sell seminar participation, workshop, and consulting time months upfront.

For audiences, it allows them to have first-hand interaction with their mentor, trainer, or speaker without having to travel far away from home. It is far more cost-effective for the speaker to come to them, rather than the other way around.

Favourse is also an ideal market research tool for event organizers; it’s possible for organizers to see whether their event will be a success before having to commit to any of the details.

Also, people at remote venues who wouldn’t normally have access to big speakers now have the ability to create a business case for a speaker to come to a less known location because it is already a pre-funded event with people who have already committed financially to have the speaker there. This concept has proven itself with platforms like kickstarter.com and indiegogo.com. If minimum funding has been reached, the project will go forward. We apply this proven business methodology to a specific business and social need in the area of training and teaching.

Objectives

General Objective

https://www.Favourse.com

Specific Objectives

The Favourse website enables speakers and learners to initiate “geographical like maps” that display the number of interested people in one specific topic or speaker. Based on this information crowdfunding campaigns can be initiated for events in locations where the minimum threshold of paying attendees is reached. For ensuring long-term partnerships with speakers, trainers, and educators, we will test and adapt the business and commission model according to the needs and circumstances of speakers and audiences. The threshold for entering a business partnership with Favourse is low since we provide great market accessibility at no risk by utilizing crowdsourcing as well as crowdfunding principles. To ensure that speakers, trainers, and educators continue to use Favourse services, we experiment with different “bonus commission models” that reward loyalty. Different payment methods including fiat as well as cryptocurrencies are tested to ensure fast and easy access to Favourse services and long-term customer loyalty.

Technical description

Favourse is designed in 2 phases. The first phase, crowdsourcing, aims at spreading the word and collecting “likes” for a speaker or event. The second phase encompasses crowdfunding to make the event happen. For the MVP (Minimum Viable Product) we focus on the first phase, which enables us to test the initial concept, find participants, and generate awareness about the existence of Favourse.

Based on our past experiments and surveys, we have projected that we need 30 speakers that have 5x as many fans/audience members and 3x as many ‘likes’ per learner, to then be able to create 20 crowdfunding campaigns of which we expect 5 to run successfully.

Minimum Viable Product

Business Activity Description: Qualitative interviews with 30 speakers and 30 fans that want to initiate events; 10 speakers that are requested in different cities or online.

Custom Market Fit

To ensure early adoption, we will have well-known speakers that have influence within their niches to use our crowdsourcing and crowdfunding platform for their promotion to test new markets, topics they want to test demand for, as well new locations. On the other side, we will cooperate with popular bloggers, YouTubers, and social media influencers to invite speakers and use their market reach to crowdsource events and create a buzz around them. To ensure that the implementation of our concept is a success, we plan an iterative process of continuous improvement where diverse technical features will be tested during the early stages for different campaigns. Based on customer feedback, the most successful features will then be built as clickable prototypes and be tested with speakers and audiences. Ultimately, all the features that have received positive feedback will be implemented. Additionally, close collaboration with speakers and fans (especially during the early stages) will create a sense of community and ownership, building a stable base of Favourse ambassadors.

Business Activity Description: 10 speakers that run crowdfunding campaigns for specific events in different cities or online; iteration of business model; compared to the previous phase: 30% growth of speakers, audience members, and likes.

Growth Ready

The technical architecture will ensure easy adaptability to multiple languages. We will follow marketing strategies that have proven successful in the earlier stages of this project. For example, we will identify multipliers on different levels (personal and professional blogs or YouTubers, online/offline crowdfunding and online event magazines, etc.) that can use their market reach and credibility to help us reach a wider audience.

Business Activity Description: 10 new speakers (20 total) that run crowdfunding campaigns for specific events in different cities; 5 successfully run crowdfunding events; iteration of business model; compared to the previous phase: 30% growth of speakers, audience members, and likes.

Competitive Advantage

We have assessed the current market and have identified competitors and proven concepts: crowdsourcing (demand assessment) and crowdfunding.

As the above table depicts, existing solutions are narrow and as such focus on a relatively small number of hits (mainstream products and markets). For example, liveondemand.com is mainly specialized in large musical concerts and therefore limited to the “head” (mainstream). Favourse, on the other hand, serves the “long tail” by allowing smaller events to be crowd-sourced and funded as well. Thus serving a broader market and reaching more speakers and more potential audience members (please refer to visual below).

Favourse solves the problem of high costs for education and makes education and training affordable for everyone. We make education easier and affordable for everyone while providing market transparency and benefiting from crowdsourcing effects. Favourse offers advantages for all stakeholders: The audience/learner/participant (person who is interested in learning), the speaker (an expert who offers educational events, workshops, and seminars), and the event organizer (venue owners or promoters).

Technical Features

We have a demo version of Favourse.

The purpose of this demo is to give you a first insight into how Favourse works and show you some of the major use cases that we have also described in the explainer videos above you can find here.

We have restricted the creation of accounts and wishes/events on the demo version.

We also have a workable non-public alpha-version you are welcome to test and give feedback on.

Just send us an email at info@favourse.com requesting access.

Like Map

Our Like-Map feature enables users to like speakers in his or her town. Thus speakers can see where they are wanted. If a speaker profile has already been created, a user can easily like or follow that speaker and share it with his or her friends.

Impact

Value Proposition

We use the proven and clear crowdfunding business model that provides no risk for speakers.

Our future beta testers have agreed to a 10% commission fee upon the success of their crowd-funded events. We will adjust this percentage based on feedback, to reach the largest possible market while ensuring revenue for us. We offer reduced or no commissions for events that foster social change or have a positive impact on our environment.

Market scope

As explained in „Competitive Advantage“, existing alternatives are limited to large-scale crowdfunding events. Favourse, on the other hand, allows lesser-known speakers to find their audience as well. We, therefore, address a broader market. To accomplish our goal faster, we make use of well-tested and proven technologies.

TAM (Total Addressable Market)

Industry	2019	Projections	Source
Global E-learning Market Size	2019 US $144 billion	2026 US$ 374.3 billion	globenewswire.com
Global Motivational Speaking Industry	2019 US $1.9 billion	2025 US $2.0 billion	marketresearch.com
TAM: 0.01% for Favourse Based on 10% commission for fees	2019 US $146 million	2025 US $376 million	ㅤ
ㅤ	ㅤ	ㅤ	ㅤ
Part of the following market could potentially be part of Favourse’ TAM	ㅤ	ㅤ	ㅤ
U.S. Global Corporate Training Market	2019 US $332.93 billion	2027 US $417.21 billion	prnewswire.com

“According to the research study, the global E-learning Market was estimated at USD 144 Billion in 2019 and is expected to reach USD 374.3 Billion by 2026. The global E-learning Market is expected to grow at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of USD 14.6% from 2019 to 2026”

Source: https://www.globenewswire.com/news-release/2020/12/17/2146962/0/en/Global-E-learning-Market-Size-Trends-Will-Reach-USD-374-3-Billion-by-2026-Facts-Factors.html

According to marketresearch.com, the U.S. Motivational Speaking Industry was worth $1.9 billion USD in 2019 and may reach $2.3 billion USD by 2025.

Source: https://blog.marketresearch.com/u.s.-motivational-speaking-market-worth-1.9-billion and https://www.researchandmarkets.com/reports/4991598/the-u-s-motivational-speaking-market

Even though we don’t intend to focus on corporate in-house training initially, this may very be a great opportunity that could be explored later on.

According to Statista.com, “Knowledge-based training such as teaching a company’s compliance policy are often provided via an online platform. However, many employees believe traditional forms of face-to-face training are more effective than technology-driven solutions.”

Source: https://www.statista.com/topics/4896/training-industry-in-the-us/#dossierSummary

“Use of technology: One component in the growing market size of the workplace training industry is the increase in the amount spent on training per employee. Given the increasing availability of technology-based learning, this may seem surprising, as the use of technologies could be expected to decrease costs. However, technology-based learning methods are generally less popular amongst workers.”

Source: https://www.statista.com/statistics/738399/size-of-the-global-workplace-training-market/

This shows the importance of in-person training.

“The global corporate training market size was valued at $332,931.1 million in 2019, and is projected to reach $417,212.5 million by 2027, registering a CAGR of 9.4% from 2021 to 2027.”

Source: https://www.alliedmarketresearch.com/corporate-training-market-A06445

Potential customers

The focus target group is composed of:

Audience: People who want to learn from speakers, trainers, and educators, i.e. people who have an idol or expert they admire, but cannot afford to or are not able to physically travel to meet the person.

Public speakers, trainers, and educators, who are looking to reach new markets or new locations and who would like to be able to create a stable and predictable income by planning their time more efficiently.

Additional stakeholders include

companies aiming to have their employees trained by top-notch speakers,
people who are mobility impaired,
organizations hosting and organizing events,
universities and MOOC organizers
event venues and event management agencies
training and educational institutions and association
special interest groups
intentional Communities/Ecovillages

intentional communities that currently operate their own complementary currencies or have planned to do so, could use
FavourseCoin or the Favourse Creator Coins as the Community Coin
Wanting to invite certain teachers

venues can make public tenders looking for topics to be taught at that venue or offer available workshop spots
corporations and organizations looking for in-house trainers

Market Strategies

How we plan to reach customers:

Top-down: Influencers (trainers) endorse our product by using it

Bottom-up: Fans demand trainers in their cities

Directly addressing speakers who want to test out new markets without risks

Having fans initiate events through social media and the Favourse platform

Through agencies that want to promote speakers

Venues/locations that want to test demand for certain speakers in their locations

Impact

Not only “higher” educational and personal development needs could be met more effectively, but also more common or basic needs that a certain part of a city or neighborhood may have. For example, through Favourse, citizens could easily find like-minded people for their “transition town”-initiative or a group of engineers and entrepreneurs could invite Steve Wozniak to their hometown. Favourse enables citizens to actively pursue their learning. Favourse democratizes decisions as a type of e-participation and creates a sense of shared responsibility for finding solutions to common problems and needs.

Collective intelligence: Favourse’s technology ensures the consideration of the constant dynamic, maybe unexpected growth of cities’ needs in certain areas, i.e. the needs of individual citizens and groups of citizens - for learning, health, and well-being.

The social impact of Favourse aims at helping those with mobility difficulties. Our solution facilitates inviting speakers and trainers to your hometown, instead of traveling to see him/her. It allows people with restricted mobility or other difficulties like cultural or language barriers, to attend training online at reduced prices or for free. This leads to better social integration and aids participants to attend or live-stream crowd-funded events and training from home. Online solutions reduce traffic and therefore CO2 emissions.

Measures to Maximize Impact

Once the platform is developed and widgets are in place, the business model is easily scalable worldwide.

The widget allows online platforms that promote educational and personal development courses to integrate events from our platform into theirs.

Potential cooperation with other start-ups:

Agencies and venues can provide workshop rooms and locations that are “reserved at no financial risk” for the time the crowdfunding campaign is running (30 or 60 days); the benefit for the venues would be exposure to speakers that haven’t used their services yet

Venues and workshop rooms can be curated and we could partner with existing platforms and create additional revenue through affiliate commissions

We could collaborate with educational centers: If a trend is identified, these would benefit from initiating a demand and later create a crowdfunding campaign for a local event

We originally didn’t plan to serve conferences and conference organizers as well. But as we were approached by conference organizers, we have taken the chance to collaborate with them and to create new products and solutions we haven’t thought of before.

Crowdsourcing and crowdvoting speakers to see which speaker is the most popular for a certain event is an idea we have not had before but that has come from organizers and agencies that organize bigger events. This feature results in more user engagement and can lead to interaction between users, i.e. potential participants, and speakers, and the organizer as well.

An additional business potential lies in creating a list of speakers that are demanded at conferences and creating or including these speaker profiles on our main site as well. These speakers can then be approached by other conference organizers or companies for in-house corporate training.