CrowdsUnite

» see crowdsunite.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

In 2012 the United States passed the JOBS Act, which among other things made it legal for a company to raise equity from people who were not accredited investors. The immediate effect was a land rush. Within a couple of years there were, by one estimate quoted at the time, more than a thousand crowdfunding platforms worldwide, most of them indistinguishable from the outside and plenty of them with eighteen months left to live.

Alex Feldman's answer was a review site. He had an MBA and six years of IT work at New York investment banks behind him, and what he built was deliberately unglamorous: a directory where people who had actually run a campaign rated the platform they ran it on. Five stars, scored on how the platform treated you and on whether the money actually came in. He described the ambition as becoming a Yelp for the crowdfunding industry, which is the rare startup pitch that describes the product accurately.

There was a filter on entry. A platform had to have at least ten successfully funded projects before CrowdsUnite would list it, which quietly removed most of the thousand and left somewhere around a hundred worth comparing. You could sort by country and by what kind of money it was, debt or equity or a donation with a t-shirt attached.

It stayed small. Entrepreneur put the traffic at about five thousand visitors a month with ten to fifteen percent monthly growth, which is respectable for a directory and nowhere near enough to raise a round against. The expansion plan was sideways rather than up, into listings for the accountants and video people who made a living off campaigns.

It never made a sound after that. No acquisition turns up in any database and no funding announcement does either, and the Wikipedia article still lists the site as active.

~ the record ~

~ the jobs act window ~

The thing a site like this depends on is the moment when a market is crowded and nobody has won yet. That window was open for about four years. By 2016 the shape of reward crowdfunding was settled, Kickstarter and Indiegogo had the volume, and equity crowdfunding had turned into a specialist business with a handful of credible names. Once a reader already knew which two sites to consider, a comparison directory covering a hundred of them was answering a question the reader had stopped asking.

From here the whole boom was legible mostly as other people's news. Kickstarter has never accepted project creators based in Turkey, so for most of this period the platform was somewhere you could put money in and not somewhere you could raise it. A directory built to help you pick where to raise is a different object when you are not eligible to raise anywhere on it, and I read those comparisons as reporting rather than as shopping.

~ the fortnight it went in ~

The ending is unusually well bracketed for a site nobody was watching. The Internet Archive holds a clean 200 for the home page dated 25 January 2022, 13,607 bytes, the same working directory it had been for years. The next capture, on 9 February 2022, is a 404 of 3,615 bytes. Fifteen days.

Every crawl since then has been the same 404, through 2024 and 2025, and the host has now stopped answering altogether. A review site for a gold rush outlived the gold rush by about six years and then stopped paying for itself in the middle of a fortnight nobody recorded.

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