You simply can't do it in the U.S. There are very, very strict regulations against it. Many have tried different angles but it's amazingly airtight.

Malta isn't appealing, I'm sure, to those outside of the EU. But the way I mentioned makes at least possible what otherwise is impossible.

We originally wanted to do something similar to what you are proposing. Since crowd-sourced investment was out in the US, we decided to just set up the site pitchups.com to allow people to get feedback/comments on their startup idea and connect with others, and just develop it as a community. There may be some value and synergies in combining what we are doing at pitchups with your site - maybe it can serve as a funnel for great ideas to get to the crowd-sourced funding stage. Let me know if this is something that would be of interest to you, by emailing [email protected]

check out profounder.com they do just that

Not really. You must have a substantial, pre-existing relationship with the investor and you may only have a few investors. Even then, because these are non-accredited investors, you may have trouble raising financing in later rounds.

The idea of OpenStarts is that you can be funded by thousands of people you've never met and there's no penalty later.

while i can't speak to the 'penalty later' part, profounder does make it possible for kickstarter type fundraising from strangers. however, those people can't make more than their original investment back (sort of like kiva, which is not surprising, because Jessica Jackley, the pro-founder CEO, was one of kiva's co-founders)

Hi all,

My name is David Lang, I'm the Community Manager at ProFounder. I wanted to weigh in on the great discussion above. ProFounder does, in fact, allow for equity investments and is legally compliant. As mentioned above, it's SEC compliant due to the fact that investors have prior, substantial relationships with the entrepreneurs.