ungleich≠ | Crowdfunding a Data Center
This article was published by RonOrp on Friday, 13. April. You can read the article below or read in RonOrp blog here.
Realization
I admit when Nico, the CEO of our company, announced that we’re going to raise 250,000 CHF by crowdfunding I said out loud “No.” I think my answer was not taken seriously, I realized much later because, now all the goodies are sent out to the supporters (which I packed myself by the way), and we have received participate certificates from our supporters who are now also our shareholders. Yes, the campaign ended as a success, we even surpassed our goal.
How it started
We moved our company to canton Glarus attracted by its hard-to-resist low real estate price and friendly cows who stare at us when we walk to the train station. We only discovered that this region has hydropower from the Alps and many, unused industrial sites left from the time when it was rich with textile industry. And what about that fiber connection, used in measuring hydropower! It was just too good to not build a datacenter. So we did.
The goal
We had built our datacenter prototype in our co-working space (which we also built from a scratch) and then expanded to a big, unused factory hall. We had very competitive VMs to offer, the only problem was to gain exposure to our possible customers. There came the idea of crowdfunding campaign, for funding our marketing cost.
How we reached it
Some years ago we have started the project Digital Glarus, and although it ended up as a lot of doing-by-learning hardcore bootcamp for startup like us (which backed my personal reason for saying NO to crowdfunding idea in the first place - as I saw how much work it would entail), it did help us. Especially having done one crowdfunding with smaller scale helped us a lot in ramping up our goal for 10 times the next round.
What we have learnt
Probably like most startups, we are very much into what we do. But it also means that we prefer doing it than talking about it, and there comes the challenge. We’ve learnt that it is very important to talk about what we do, so other people can help us reach our goals and dreams, by either buying our shares (which was our crowdfunding goal) or by simply talking about us.
To learn more about our Data Center Light, or to order virtual machines from it: visit datacenterlight.ch
About the author
ungleich is a Linux system engineering company with a strong passion for bridging technology and community. The projects of ungleich include Digital Glarus, Data Center Light, Hack4Glarus, Devuan hosting and many more. This article is written by our designer Sanghee Kim.