Microcosm - 2nd Seedrs crowd-funding round

No need for a business plan as such, but what are your vision, mission and (immediate) objective respectively?

#thinkbig

Let's define something first, when I say "interests" I mean stuff that people collectively care about, which tends to be hobbies and pastimes, but is basically comprised of one or more of "topic", "location", and potentially "time"... for LFGSS the topic is "fixed and single-speed cycling" and the location is "London, UK" and there isn't a time element applied.

So interests can well be just a place, such as a village group, and it could well be just a topic, such as knitting (globally), and it could well be a purely time based thing, such as the millenium event.

But to generalise, people don't generalise. If you ask someone to describe themselves they don't start by saying "Well I'm human", they might start by saying "I'm into road cycling and belong to a club in Twickenham". That is... people use specificity to identify themselves as different, and interest groups, that is communities, tend to form when the specificity is narrow enough to not actually end up being too large a crowd.

Got it? People self-organise into communities around niche interests. In fact, the more niche the stronger the community.

And that's what we're going on about when we use the word interest, and when we speak of communities. It's not just cycling, this is but the tip of the iceberg that comes from a glacier that is huge. LFGSS is but a speck of dust.

With definitions dealt with... and we've gone through this a few times and the answers change in words but never in meaning.

Vision: A world where people come together around their interests, and can pursue them with a fever, with the enthusiastic support of others.

We want to help you find people who share your passions, and for you to nerd out excitedly and thus help you explore whatever you're into even more.

You shouldn't find it difficult, you should be able to find people who share your passions no matter how far they are from your geographic location or social network. The childhood mantra of "follow your dreams" should be encouraged into adulthoods, and we should help people be excited about applying themselves to the stuff they love and sharing it.

I really love seeing people light up and get excited about the thing that rocks their world. Take one of us on a bad day and get us talking about the best ride we've had, and our love of bikes, and the strength of bond we share with other cyclists... you'll see what I mean.

Mission: To help people come together around their interests and to explore them together. To overcome all barriers that prevent these communities forming and sticking together.

That's the essence... we've got to push all the technical stuff out of the way and make it really easy to discover what you're into, to discover other people into the same stuff, and then give you a space in which you can nerd out and become experts in those areas.

We're smart fucks, let us do the tech, and you and everyone else can focus on just being into whatever you're into.

Values: Communities should be open, welcoming, trusted, supportive and forgiving, and the community comes before the individuals.

We need to make sure you can find stuff, we need to help individuals join and make communities vibrant, so we really encourage openness and public information. A bit like the difference between chifg.com and lfgss.com . And when we've got people together, well people will always take care of themselves, but communities do good and so we need to make sure we (collectively, everyone) take care of the communities first.

That trusted thing... the monetisation should never corrode that. You shouldn't be in the place of reading a games magazine and wondering why all reviews are between 80 and 95% because they've effectively been bought by advertisers. So we have to balance that as we go along, money will eventually matter a lot, but never at the expense of trust within a community.

Objective: We go for growth.

Bringing on board medium sized communities (250 > 5,000 members) to form a critical mass of strong interests that can drive us to an inflexion point and act as a gravity to pull all interests and groups/communities to us.

Well... you did ask.