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Executive Summary to avoid the "TL;DR" comments: "CardLauncher" - a website for CrowdFunding Playing Card Decks and related project will be available around the 1st of August and have a plethora of the biggest names in the business from "day 1". For details, read on.
I have formed a corporation or LLC = "Limited Liability Company" partnership with several people in the industry, and we are preparing to launch a new website that will be a CrowdFunding site for Playing Card Decks and related products. I can't post details of who is involved just yet, but let's just say if you've been following what I do and say here none of them will be a big surprise, but the BIG surprise is that we will be going head-to-head with you-know-who in the marketplace. We are going to be hosted on the Amazon Cloud Services platform, and operate with PayPal as our exclusive payment processor and payment partner. Being on ACS means that on "Day One" we are automatically infinitely scalable, meaning that we can handle from 1 to 1,000,000 people at a time without a problem, and I think that's key to the success of the venture.
The financial backers ("equity stakeholders") in the corporation don't all want to be publicly known at this time, although I can tell you that both Lotrek and Lorenzo are in this at a 10% equity stake in the company. Beyond that I can only say that someone sitting very close to me believes in it enough to fund a 25% equity stake (my wife, Donna Romine - she uses her maiden name everywhere online) and she's a member here but has never really participated much - yet), and I own a 30% equity stake myself, so just doing the math you can easily figure out that there is only another 25% to be spoken for. I'm waiting on that one key person to decide if they want all or only part of that equity position, until tomorrow afternoon, and then I have three other people that want to buy in at the 5% or 10% level that I will offer that portion to if it's not already sold.
Beyond that, we have partnered up with Bill Kalush and Expert Playing Card Co for production, and four fulfillment centers: Lake Michigan Mailers (Kalamazoo), Kings Wild Fulfillment (Memphis), KPak (part of Gambler's Warehouse, Dallas area) and Pacful (Rancho Cordero CA) still hasn't been heard from, but they are supposed to be the fourth shipping partner. That being said, unlike the other effort we are seeing burst into flames and crash & burn right now we OFFER those services, but do NOT require them, so deck artists/designers and project managers are free to go outside of our partners, but we encourage that for the sake of the backers they do not. I have also negotiated a partnership with Jamie D Grant to offer his "Impossible Bottles" on a company-wide basis to any project/campaign that wants them (minimum of 6 bottles required), at a very good company discount, which of course is being passed along to the projects. Before anyone goes accusing me of playing favorites, I offered USPCC ("Bicycle" brand) to do the same thing, but never heard back from them, and of course as I have already stated, you can have whomever you wish do your production, but Bill & Expert PCC will be providing quotes to anyone and everyone that wants them, and is our default production partner in this venture. If someone wants to use MPC, Carti Mundi, Lemon (Britain), or whatever, they are free to do so, with certain restrictions. You cannot offer something that you cannot prove to use you have to sell, and you cannot offer something on CardLauncher.com that is already being CrowdFunded elsewhere or sold already, simply because I'm not willing to set myself, partners or the company up for a lawsuit with you-know-who.
The projected timeline is for the completion of the software customization to be done in 3-to-4 weeks, and I am offering that contract on Monday, after interviewing the final two vendors left out of seven potential CrowdFunding providers today and tomorrow. Both of them offer ACS hosting for an additional $500/month, which sounds high, but understand that part about the infinitely scalable part - without us having to do anything, or move our hosting or change packages. I think it's a bargain myself! Quotes for hosting it on other services were coming in around $200-$250 with no scalability built in. If I needed to double the horsepower, I was looking at $300-$350/month (and it just went up from there). ACS gives us unlimited bandwidth and unlimited storage, both distributed and replicated around the US and the world. ACS is a very resilient system that historically provides more than 99.7% uptime over the past two years, and we have SLAs ("Service Level Agreements") to recover costs if they are down more than 1/2 of 1% of the time, or any more than 3 1/2 hours per month. At this time, they have been online without interruption for more than 6 months with one two hour exception.
We modeled our business paradigm off the one you are already familiar with, and we take a 5% "off the top" fee from each funded project, with no cost for hosting projects. Funded projects managers/artists/designers - unlike you-know-who - are restricted from running another campaign/project until they have substantially fulfilled the previous project's backer rewards, except in certain cases where they can show a proven track record of repeated fulfillment without problems, so people like Jackson Robinson, ColectiblePlayingCards and the other "big boys" in the business are exempt from that rule except that they cannot go more than "two deep" at one time, in other words even they cannot launch a 3rd project unless the second previous one has been fulfilled. We have a great team of people here that will be helping with the startup of the website, including all of the mods and specifically Jay ("CBJ"), Pierre (badpete69), (Allan) Rousselle, Sher (Garcia), Kai ("volantangel") and others, but those five people plus myself and my wife will be overseeing the project approvals, serve as artist/designer Ambassadors, provide deck design and advice services, and similar duties. Lorenzo Gaggiotti and Lotrek are also in here serving as graphics artists for logos, branding, advertising copy, etc. - and of course, as always, everyone here at UC will always be the front line for free advice and design help, just like always. The question has come up: "What happens to ownership of UC?" Quite simply - nothing. I still own it free and clear, it's associated with the company, but not owned by it, nor will it ever be. Along with "FriendsOfUC" we will continue to provide the best forums worldwide for "All Things Playing Cards"! (for free - registration required only to participate in contests or create posts, as always)
This thread has been marked "Sticky" for 45 days so it will stay "in your face" for a while, but just to be clear - it will be another ten days or maybe two weeks before the website even starts collecting email names, and at this point if you try to go there you are simply redirected here. "MailChimp" is our email provider/partner. I will make another announcement when it is ready to start collecting names, when it is ready for beta testing (apply to me by PM - WHEN I ASK - NOT YET!) and when it goes "live" around the 1st of August or sooner - as long as we are certain that we have worked out all the bugs. I already have commitments from four of the biggest names in the business to launch projects on the first day, and I expect to have two more by the end of next week. It's going to be a gradual build-up, just to insure that we have worked all the kinks out of that aspect as well, adding maybe 6 new projects every week until we get to the end of the first month, and then likely unlocking it totally. If you are a project manager, artist or designer, expect things to basically work the same way you are used to doing, including building the project, submitting it for approval, being able to launch it when you want to, and providing updates to the backers as well as a running commentary system just like everybody is used to having. We're not going to provide everybody with the "in your face" type information that a recent "competitor" has - that I consider intrusive, like how much you have pledged, etc. Backers will be able to modify or cancel their pledges at will, of course - and we have a couple of tricks up our sleeve as always.
"Stay tuned!" I have already unlocked the flood gate and I thought I used to get email, but I'm fielding upwards of 250 message per day already - and I haven't publicly announced anything to this point. Please keep in mind that I am still only one person, and it's possible that you might not hear back from me personally like everybody is used to at this point, but I'm going to try to keep up - it simply might not be possible, even I have to sleep 4 or 5 hours per day.
Read on, you'll find that CL has "guaranteed delivery", shipping broken out for all backers with US, Canada
+ Mexico and "other" ("International") shipping, etc. All production and fulfillment costs are kept in escrow to eliminate fraudulent projects
+ Mexico and "other" ("International") shipping, etc. All production and fulfillment costs are kept in escrow to eliminate fraudulent projects
Actually, I'm not surprised, and I figure a lot of people will be reading it shortly. I do things big, it seems, and this one is a monster... 
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Right now, KS charges the project owner 5% with Amazon taking another 4% to 5% on top of that. Which in my opinion seems fair. The Dickstarter site by D$D looks like they take full control of your work and will pay you monthly royalities based on how many decks they sell each month. For some, this might be nice to have the stress and burden taken off them... but not for me. It's my work and I want to control it.