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Despite Emily Brindley's love of food, it was a friend's passing comment which made the ambitious vegan decide to open her own cafe. The big question was, how best to fund such a project? For Ms Brindley, crowdfunding provided the answer. Along with partner Russell, Ms Brindley now owns and manages Sweet Bones, a vegan cafe and bakery in Braddon that has a strong following among Canberra's vegan and carnivorous community. According to Ms Brindley, it was the couple's decision to use crowdfunding platform Kickstarter, which raised more than $12,000, which gave her business the funds it needed to become the fully equipped, bustling cafe it is today. "Without the crowdfunding campaign we would have had to put in a lot more hard hours to become as successful as we have," she said. Whether hoping to fulfil a childhood dream, or simply looking for a creative outlet to offer respite from a public service job, more and more people are flocking to crowdfunding websites, such as Kickstarter and Pozible, in the hopes of creating a successful business or product. The platforms give users complete control. It allows them In April Trish Smith, a former recruitment officer, saw her Airpocket travel bag reach its funding goal of $15,000 in less than nine hours and go on to generate almost $50,000 in pledges. The O'Connor woman will use these funds for refining the Airpocket's design, manufacturing and shipping the product internationally. "People were just really excited by the fact that I was just a regular person who had a good idea," Ms Smith said. These online platforms have seen hundreds of thousands of dollars pledged worldwide, with Kickstarter alone generating more than $1.8 billion for upwards of 86,000 projects. Despite this relatively high success rate however, prosperous crowdfunding projects can still be an intimidating, time-consuming process. Wes Knight, co-founder of Erroyl watches said his campaign for the accessories label became a second full-time job. "It was a long and tiring process," Mr Knight said. "About eight weeks of work went into the campaign before we even launched it online. "There was a lot of correspondence with media nationally and internationally and a lot of planning and marketing." Belconnen Arts Centre's business and operations director Jack Lloyd, whose 40-day Pozible campaign saw more than $8000 raised for the centre, said he invested a lot of time into the project, but the effort was worth it. "It's not something you can set up and forget about," he said. "You need to engage with the campaign and with your audience of potential pledgers."

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