Advancing science is costly and requires funding. Thus mechanisms to allocate money to scientific projects are needed. Many such mechanisms exist, most notably grant-based public funding and industry sourced funding, but they have been criticized for a variety of shortcomings. Crowdfunding, a novel way of financing projects by pooling funds from a large community, could be used for this purpose. Theoretical considerations show that it may offer distinct advantages particularly in the context of funding small projects, such as student-led or civic science ones. We developed a crowdfunding platform, called crowdTUM, to serve students and alumni of the TUM community, specifically to investigate what are the opportunities and how to overcome the challenges of establishing a crowdfunding platform for scientific projects. We found that the technical and legal implementation of the platform did provide a number of challenges to overcome, most notably organizing the transfer of funds. However, the main challenge was marketing our Crowdfunding initiative. While we managed to host several projects on the platform, we were unable to gather the crit- ical mass of backers necessary to allow projects to get funding. A more concerted social media push, combined with a way of reaching the TUM Alumni community, could potentially have alleviated this problem.