Hernan Casciari is always on the edge of content distribution and business models for creative work. He released all of his works for free and most of his novels and short stories were first published on his blog, and yet he still makes money and sells a ton of books.
Hernan’s brand new project is exciting, he’s producing a movie and he’s selling bonds, for up to $600,00, which is the total estimated production cost, the bonds already sold out.
He explains it as following: if they sell the distribution rights of the movie for $1,200,000 and you bought a bond for $100 you will get $200 back, similarly, if the rights to distribute the movie sells for $800,000, you’ll get $133 back. Effectively you’re buying shares and they’re sharing the financial upside with backers of the project.
You might lose all your money and perhaps the movie might never get sold, or it might sell for less than the production cost, or worse, it might never get made—very unlikely knowing the trajectory of Hernan, which I’ve been following for over 15 years. Despite all these risks, there’s upside in other areas as well, you’ll get a seat in the front row to the whole process of creating the movie, including voting rights for picking the cast and how the story evolves, setting the stage, etc.
If you’d like to learn more about Hernan Casciari’s project, go here. I’m proudly backing it—not for profit, though it would be nice, I’m backing the project because I like Hernan, I like the story, and I like the idea of participating in this project and having a glimpse of how a movie gets made.
How are we going to fund movies or TV shows and get capital gains and/or dividends for them?
Right now it’s the right time to see emerging new online platforms that enable creators to raise money, while backers can also be partial owners.
I’ve never been bullish on a particular crypto project, however, at this point, I can’t ignore the fact that the internet is primed to be revolutionized and the underlying technology powering crypto and NFTs might play a big part in it.
Without getting overly technical, NFTs and smart contracts, both relative new innovations in a space that’s innovating really fast, can be the foundation of this mechanism, where backers of projects are not just backers but also partial owners.
You could potentially sell the shares that you own on a project, and earn capital gains, or you could keep the shares and earn dividends.
The key difference is how easy this could be.
This will overtake crowdsourcing
Platforms like Kickstarter allows individuals to back projects, usually in exchange for the product, and perhaps for other perks, but never for a stake in the business or any financial upside.
What if you could have both? As a stakeholder, you’d also be incentivized to let the world know more about the project and you’d be a small part of its word-of-mouth distribution.
The early signs
Projects like Hernan’s are magical and are proof that there’s demand for this and there are creators willing to sell a stake in their projects. People from all over the world are backing it, and I’m pretty sure that from a legal and financial point of view replicating this as an individual would be very problematic.
Republic wants to democratize investing which is also an early representation of this, this platform was only possible, however, due to some changes in US investment regulations. The crypto world right now feels like the wild west, and we might see regulation in the future, but for now, there’s nothing that’d prevent this from being built.
You’re crazy!
Yes, this is a wild prediction, but we’ll see in five years. Right now, on Opensea you can only buy things that exist, but what if you could buy things yet to be created and you could have a financial upside for stakeholders, aside from bragging rights? It’s not that big of a leap…