Crowdfunding in Switzerland has evolved into a diverse market covering everything from personal fundraising and community projects to startup financing, crowdlending and crowdinvesting.
But not every crowdfunding platform serves the same purpose.
Happy Pot was created from a much simpler everyday frustration: collecting money from several people was often unnecessarily complicated. What should have been an easy birthday gift, farewell collection or personal fundraiser meant juggling TWINT payments, bank transfers, messages and manual tracking.
With a background in product management, consulting and financial services, founder Habiba Alami saw an opportunity to rethink online money collection.
Today, Happy Pot is a Swiss fintech platform for group gifting, personal crowdfunding and community fundraising. We spoke with Habiba about the different types of crowdfunding, how to choose a crowdfunding platform in Switzerland, and why local payment methods can make such a difference.
Crowdfunding can mean very different things. What are the main types?
That’s an important distinction because the term crowdfunding covers several fundamentally different models.
Crowdsupporting typically involves people contributing to a project, cause or idea, sometimes in exchange for a product, service or symbolic reward. Donation-based crowdfunding is similar, but supporters do not expect a financial return. For example, Happy Pot operates within this people-focused side of crowdfunding, helping individuals, associations and communities collect contributions for personal fundraisers, solidarity campaigns, group projects and other causes.
Crowdlending, including P2P lending, works differently. The crowd provides debt financing and expects the money to be repaid, generally with interest. It is often used as an alternative financing model for businesses, SMEs or real estate projects.
Then there is crowdinvesting, or equity crowdfunding, where investors provide growth capital in exchange for equity or another form of potential financial return.
There are also models involving mini-bonds, tokenized investments and other decentralized finance structures.
So someone using Happy Pot to support a family, raise money for a community initiative or collect contributions for a shared project has very different needs from an investor looking for a financial return. That’s why understanding the different types of crowdfunding is important when choosing a crowdfunding platform in Switzerland.
Where does Happy Pot fit within the Swiss crowdfunding landscape?
Happy Pot is focused on the people and community side of crowdfunding rather than crowdlending or crowdinvesting.
We built it for situations where people want to bring contributions together easily: birthday and farewell gifts, weddings, personal fundraisers, associations, community initiatives, sport projects, solidarity campaigns and other shared projects.
An organizer can create an online money pot, share one link and receive contributions. Contributors don’t need to create an account. In Switzerland, local payment methods include TWINT, card and bank transfer. Participants can also leave personal messages that are brought together in a digital greeting card, so there is no need to buy a separate card. And soon, the entire experience will be even more seamless, with the option to choose and buy the gift directly through Happy Pot, bringing contributions, messages and the gift itself together in one place.
The objective is to remove as much friction as possible from collecting money online.
How should someone choose the right crowdfunding platform in Switzerland?
I think the first question should be: what are you actually trying to fund?
If you’re raising growth capital for a startup, a crowdinvesting platform may make sense. If you’re looking for debt financing, you would look at crowdlending platforms. If you’re launching a creative project with rewards, crowdsupporting may be more appropriate.
For personal crowdfunding, community projects or everyday money collection, the criteria are different.
I would look at the payment methods available, the fee model, how quickly someone can contribute, whether supporters need an account, privacy options, trust, geographic reach and how much administration is required from the project starter.
That’s exactly the kind of experience we focused on with Happy Pot. In Switzerland, contributors can use familiar payment methods such as TWINT, card or bank transfer, without having to create an account. Organizers can choose whether their Happy Pot is public or private, share it through one link and manage everything in one place.
Ultimately, the right crowdfunding platform is the one that fits both the purpose of the campaign and the way people actually want to contribute.
There are already many crowdfunding platforms in Switzerland. How does Happy Pot stand out?
The Swiss crowdfunding landscape is quite diverse, with platforms built for very different purposes. What makes Happy Pot distinctive is that we bring several everyday uses together in one platform: personal crowdfunding, solidarity fundraising, group gifting, community initiatives, associations and shared projects.
We also designed the experience specifically around how people in Switzerland actually collect and contribute money. A Happy Pot can be created in minutes and shared through one link, contributors don’t need an account, and they can pay using familiar methods such as TWINT, card or bank transfer. Their personal messages are also brought together in a digital greeting card, so the experience goes beyond simply transferring money.
Other Swiss crowdfunding platforms tend to focus on more specific segments. Wemakeit and Crowdify cover project-based crowdfunding, Lokalhelden focuses on local and community projects, while I believe in you specializes in sport. Internationally, GoFundMe is widely known for personal and solidarity fundraising. On the financing side, platforms such as Cashare and swisspeers operate in areas such as crowdlending and business financing.
Happy Pot’s ambition is different: we want to make collecting money together as simple and natural as sending a payment, while keeping the human and social side of the experience. Whether you’re collecting for a birthday, helping a family, supporting an association or launching a community fundraiser, everything is brought together in one place.
That’s why I don’t think crowdfunding platforms should be evaluated as though they all provide the same service. For Happy Pot, the focus is on making personal and community crowdfunding in Switzerland simple, local and accessible, and then bringing that experience to other markets.
Why was it important for Happy Pot to be built specifically for Switzerland?
Because payments are surprisingly local and trust as well.
You can build a technically international platform, but if the payment experience doesn’t match local behaviour, you introduce friction.
In Switzerland, TWINT is part of everyday life. People also use CHF, cards and bank transfers and expect a high degree of security and transparency when money is involved.
We therefore built Happy Pot as a local-first Swiss fintech rather than simply copying an international fundraising model.
For someone contributing to a campaign, familiarity matters. If they recognize the payment method and can contribute without creating an account, the experience becomes much easier.
What problem originally led you to create Happy Pot?
It was much less ambitious in the beginning.
I was constantly involved in collections for birthdays, weddings and farewell gifts. Someone would pay with TWINT, another person would make a bank transfer, someone else would pay cash, and the organizer had to remember who had contributed and chase everyone else.
My career had been in product management, consulting and financial services, where a large part of my work involved understanding complicated processes and making them simpler.
Eventually I looked at this very ordinary problem and thought: why are we still doing this manually?
That became Happy Pot.
You built the company without external funding. How did that influence the product?
It made us very disciplined.
After years of building products for established financial institutions, I put my own savings behind Happy Pot and built the company without external investors.
That meant moving far beyond a traditional product role. I had to work across technology, digital payments, compliance, customer experience, fraud prevention, operations, partnerships, marketing and finance.
When you’re bootstrapping, you become very careful about what you build. A feature has to solve a genuine problem rather than simply sound impressive.
That has kept us very close to what users actually need.
When did you realize the opportunity went beyond group gifts?
Our users showed us.
We initially thought primarily about birthdays, weddings and farewells. Then people started creating Happy Pots for personal causes, associations, community initiatives and solidarity campaigns.
That changed our understanding of the market.
The underlying problem wasn’t group gifting. It was that people frequently need to collect money together, and existing solutions don’t always fit these smaller, more personal situations.
That’s when we began thinking about Happy Pot much more broadly as part of personal crowdfunding and online fundraising.
Is crowdfunding in Switzerland different from other markets?
There are certainly local characteristics.
Switzerland has different languages, strong expectations around financial services and its own payment habits. It also has a varied crowdfunding market, ranging from crowdsupporting and personal fundraising to SME crowdlending, equity crowdfunding and real estate financing.
For us, one of the most important lessons has been that a financial product cannot be localized simply by translating it.
Payment methods, trust, fees, regulation and user expectations all influence adoption.
That’s something we’re taking with us as we expand internationally.
Why expand Happy Pot beyond Switzerland now?
Because the behaviour we’re solving isn’t uniquely Swiss.
People in the UK, Europe and the US also organize group gifts, support friends, create fundraising campaigns and bring communities together around shared goals.
What changes is how they pay and what they expect from the platform.
Our international expansion is therefore not about assuming that the Swiss model can simply be exported unchanged. It’s about keeping the simplicity of the product while adapting to local markets.
That is also why London is particularly interesting for us. Being selected for Venture Leaders Fintech 2026 and joining the Swiss National Startup Team gives us the opportunity to engage with one of Europe’s strongest fintech ecosystems.
What do you think the future of crowdfunding looks like?
I think crowdfunding will become less about the word “crowdfunding” itself and more about making different forms of collective financing invisible and easy.
Someone organizing a birthday collection doesn’t necessarily think, “I’m launching a crowdfunding campaign.” A family raising money after an unexpected event may not think that way either. They simply need an easy and trustworthy way for people to help.
At the other end of the market, businesses may use crowdlending, crowdinvesting or equity crowdfunding as alternative financing alongside traditional sources of capital.
These are very different needs, even though we group them under the same term.
For Happy Pot, the ambition is clear: when people need to collect money online, whether for group gifting, personal fundraising, a community initiative or another shared project, we want Happy Pot to become the platform they naturally think of.
A word on the founder
Habiba Alami is the Founder and CEO of Happy Pot. Before becoming an entrepreneur, she built her career across product management, consulting and financial services, working at the intersection of banking, fintech and technology.
That experience became the foundation for a very different challenge: building a fintech company from the ground up. Habiba invested her own savings in Happy Pot and developed the company without external funding, taking it from an everyday frustration to a profitable Swiss fintech.
Her role has gone far beyond traditional product leadership. She has led decisions across product strategy, customer experience, technology, digital payments, compliance, operations, partnerships and commercial development, combining strategic thinking with a highly hands-on approach to execution.
Her approach is particularly product-driven: understanding the bigger business problem while paying close attention to the details that determine whether people actually use and trust a product. That can mean questioning a business model or international expansion strategy one day, and examining a payment flow, a customer journey or a single unnecessary step the next.
Under her leadership, Happy Pot has grown from a bootstrapped idea into an internationally expanding fintech and was selected for Venture Leaders Fintech 2026, making Habiba part of the Swiss National Startup Team representing Switzerland in London.
For Habiba, building Happy Pot has ultimately been an exercise in turning complexity into simplicity, and proving that a product born from a very ordinary problem can become a much bigger business.
