there is a market for this. “It allows you to test your market, test your pricing, test your features, discover new revenue streams, get vital feedback,” says Ringelmann. With her Wall Street background and the experience of helping 100,000 businesses and services raise finance, Ringelmann has fine-tuned her advice for the budding entrepreneur. “Ideas are a dime a dozen. It’s all about the execution and, if you are afraid that your idea will be stolen by someone who could execute it better and faster than you, then you are not the right person to execute that idea. It’s all about confidence to move fast and to learn,” she says. For Ringelmann, the expansion into Europe and a deal with a web transaction provider, which will allow payments to be made through local card services like Maestro in the UK and Carte Bleue in France, as well as PayPal, are part of a dream to democratize finance. More than 7,000 campaigns for finance are live on the site. While crowdfunding as an alternative to banks has grown, it has limited appeal to big-bucks investors, who don’t settle for anything less than a stake in a promising business. That could start to change in the UK with the launch of InvestingZone.