format_quote Originally Posted by
muslimah_B
Right whos gonna buy us an islamic airline :)
It would need some initial seed capital to start, but that can to an important extent be solved using
crowdfunding. The
two top crowdfunding sites,
www.gofundme.com, and
kickstarter.com managed to collect 470 and 444 million USD from the public in general.
The BBC has researched exactly the issue of how much total capital it would take to do it. They are talking about
as little as £5.5m ($10m). Others say that even that figure is a little high.
Therefore, this project could stretch the funding capacity of the existing crowdfunding platforms a bit, but it may still be possible. Not sure. We would need an insane amount of word-of-mouth in the Islamic community to get lots of individuals to part with $50-$250 each or so, and get the project actually funded.
It would be useful -- but not an absolute requirement -- to get 3 to 5 larger core shareholders who would own at least half a million dollars each in the airline. There are obviously enough Muslims who would have that kind of spare change, if the plan sounds credible. It would bring a bit of stability to the board. Otherwise, there is the risk that the board would be too unstable with people incessantly moving and in and out. That is not good.
One possibility is to make use of something like the
StartupBoeing service. They insist on the following plan documents for a new airline:
- BRAND & NICHE: Analysis of the market and competition, Brand positioning, Description of the business and opportunity, Brand development
- CAPITAL: Pro forma financial statements/projections, Capitalization plan
- RISK: Discussion of risks and obstacles
- PEOPLE: Management team biographies
- DOING IT: Details about the operation, Implementation strategy
If Boeing has an airline startup service, you can safely assume that Airbus has one too, and would be asking the same questions about the project plan.
Concerning BRAND & NICHE, I think a lot of people would agree that the Western European Muslim population is sufficiently large to form a credible core home audience for a new airline. If the airline is staunchly halal, I think that you should be able to count on this audience, on the condition that everything else is comparable to other airlines: security, price, service, reach, and so on.
Concerning CAPITAL, I somehow suspect that between half a million and one million dollar in initial crowdfunding pledges would attract larger investors and fill up the remaining capital requirements.
The main problem will be to find PEOPLE with credibility at the executive level of the airline industry, preferably people of Islamic extraction. It would be a bit weird to use non-Muslims as champions for a project that has strong religious undertones. It would almost be like non-Muslims starting a mosque. In my impression, it will require to poach executives somehow from existing airlines such as Qatar or Emirates. In fact, it does not need to be done in a hostile way. These other airlines may even agree to this, if people talk them into doing that. They may even see it as an opportunity to partner up in other ways.
Therefore, the first step would be to onboard people with credibility -- in any field actually -- in something like a
Western European Islamic Airline Construction Organization,
WEIACO, which would be some kind of
Decentralized Autonomous Organization similar to the original
DAO. We would need Muslim people from all walks of life to join this organization and help giving critical mass and credibility to the plan. In the DAO, it is much more about head count than about money/capital. It is obviously the head count itself that will attract the money/capital.
In the DAO, we do not need people to bring money, but bring enthusiasm and their belief that this would be a good thing. They would really have to come online to the project in large numbers. If we fail to mobilize interest and gather head count, we would not stand a chance at the other parts either.
A heavily-populated DAO would automatically attract PEOPLE and CAPITAL, and validate the BRAND & NICHE.
In other words, we need some kind of organized discussion forum like this one, where people would regularly log on to tell other people that they have made dua for this airline to materialize out of the fricking blue. As you can imagine, it is obviously our Beloved Master, Allah himself, who would start directing interesting resources to the WEIACO, on grounds of hearing so much
dua for it, and on the condition that our most Beloved Master also believes that it is a good idea, of course. But then again, we will never know, if we do not try it out. It is clear that it will only work, if it is the One God himself who endorses the idea.
So, my point of view is that it is a requirement to gain the ability to brag about how many people are member of the WEIACO in order to get the next steps going, that is, to attract CAPITAL and PEOPLE, to a project of which everybody would be able to see that it is obviously serious, if only, in terms of head count and number of members. So, we need to start the WEIACO discussion forum first.