Screenshot from dmjuice.desmoinesregister.com

Last week, Juice magazine‘s Brianne Sanchez wrote the latest article in the weekly free tabloid’s “Future of Des Moines” series. Titled “Collecting small sum seed money: Could the microfinance model work for jump-starting entrepreneurial ideas in Des Moines?” the article presented an interesting idea aimed at growing Iowa’s startup scene. Sanchez wrote:

What if we: Create a Web portal that could allow regular people to fund local startup endeavors of businesses at a level they can afford (be it $25, $500, $5,000) and also showcase some of the projects and ideas of local entrepreneurs.

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Excited to see Sanchez covering startups in Juice and proposing an idea that could possibly grow the startup community, we’ve invited her to author a guest post. When I spoke with her about doing so, I told her that we’d like her to tell us more about the idea and that we’d do our best to create a discussion around it.

If you have thoughts, feedback or questions about what you read below, please leave a comment. Sanchez will be keeping tabs on the comments and she may do a follow up article on what’s discussed. You can find Sanchez on Twitter, @Brianne_Sanchez, or contact her by email, brianne@dmjuice.com.

Here’s Sanchez’s guest post:

Juice magazine turned five this year, and we decided to make a push to offer more in-depth, serious content along with quick-hitting dining, entertainment, style and people stories the publication is primarily known for.

As part of that effort, my editor asked me to explore “The Future of Des Moines” in a series of stories that we hoped would inform and inspire the next generation of leaders. I’m personally interested in new urbanism (I’m a big fan of GOOD) and thought it would be cool to see how these trends are playing out a my local level. All of the stories in the series live online at dmjuice.com/future, beginning with a cover story about the city’s plans for a Market District – a yet-to-be-developed section of downtown, across the river from Principal Park.

In August, I invited a group of ten people who I felt were smart idea-generators engaged in Des Moines for a big ideas brainstorm. The object was to come up with five ideas that could improve Des Moines over the next decade or so. I’d flesh out and follow up on the ideas and write about what other leaders and community members thought of them, in an effort to get a conversation going and help bridge the gap between executives with experience and funding and up-and-comers with enthusiasm and energy.

I wanted to share the fourth installment of the brainstorm stories “Collecting small sum seed money: Could the microfinance model work for jump-starting entrepreneurial ideas in Des Moines?” with the Silicon Prairie News readership, because I’d love to hear your feedback. I’m not a tech writer, but I enjoy writing about entrepreneurs, ideas and startups, so I’d like to improve. It’s most likely not going to be me shepherding these half-baked ideas from words on a page to reality, so I want to hear what you think would and wouldn’t work about bringing a Kickstarter-like social funding concept to funding early stage startups and even small brick-and-mortar business goals. What regulatory hurdles could be preventative? At what contribution point do you think participants would expect a return on investment?