PostrWall: When Hitchhiking Met Crowdfunding…

By Silicon Allee |

By Sacha Robehmed

An idea born at a hackathon is now using crowdsourcing to raise funds, and today it hits the road — literally. PostrWall’s seven strong team won July’s BeMyApp Music Hackathon with their idea of moving posters for concerts and music events onto a mobile app.

The team have continued to work on the idea, and are now seeking to raise basic funding of around $7,000. They have picked an increasingly popular method to go about raising the money: crowdfunding.

Max Warkentin is one of the people involved in PostrWall. He said: “We want to get traditional funding, but (only) in the future… Right now it’s project crowdfunding. We won’t share the startup.”

PostrWall is using Indiegogo to look for people to invest in their project instead of a startup-specific platform which gives shares to crowdfunder investors, such as Berlin Crowd and Companisto.

The team is hoping to run the campaign through Gründer Garage which would mean that any funds raised on Indiegogo would be matched by Google. Currently awaiting the go-ahead from Gründer Garage, PostrWall’s crowdfunding campaign is set to kick off in early September.

This coincides with a 30-day trip across the US being undertaken by Max, who will be hitchhiking 7,000 km. The ‘business and ideas guy’ of the team, he plans to take in seven cities along the way, meeting up with teammate Alex Ford in Austin, Texas.

Warkentin admits to being a little nervous about his trip: “I hitchhiked here in Germany before, in my school days, and in Malaysia. But I guess the longest hitchhike trip was probably 300 km, a couple hours.” He had long planned to visit the US, but in the meantime also decided on the crowdfunding campaign, and sees the two coinciding now as a “win-win situation.”

With the existence of other apps and sites already listing events, from Bandsintown to Live Nation, how will PostrWall differentiate itself? “The competition is indirect, they have a different focus,” said Max added. “We are more focused on local live musicians and bands.”

The emphasis on local gigs rather than international acts is what they believe will set them apart. As the name suggests, the idea is based very much on a visual experience as well, with the event posters you see all around you on any bit of spare city wall space on your mobile phone instead.

Max will be relying on the kindness of strangers to help him get from New York to Seattle – and also to take the PostrWall project to the next stage.

And what will he need to take with him during his trip to monitor the progress of PostrWall’s crowdfunding campaign? “Just this,” he said, holding up his iPhone.