I’m currently reading “the Lean Startup” by Eric Ries and have decided I may have done a common faux-pas: I’ve created something without knowing whether the public at-large even cares. The quickest way to test my hypothesis (i.e. that this isn’t a complete waste of time) is to put the project up on Kickstarter – the crowd-funding site.

In some ways, this is publicity stunt. I can gauge interest in the project solely by the number of people who pony up a few dollars to help out.

In other ways, this is the perfect test. The people on crowd-funding sites like Kickstarter are what I call “Consumer Investors” (somewhat different than “Retail Investors”) and its those people I expect to use my site.

Consumer Investors fund projects that are cool, or push boundaries beyond what’s offered today. They’re less focused on profit than on creating something new. Retail investors still believe the stock market isn’t fixed and it’s still possible to profit from it over time. Consumer investors have decided they don’t care – they’d rather use their money in small increments for something they can personally get behind before it becomes corporatized and overrun by greedy financiers.

So here’s Massive Rainfall. Let the testing begin.