Kickstarter

The Kickstarter Handbook: Real-Life Success Stories of Artists, Inventors, and Entrepreneurs

by Steinberg, Don  · 14 Aug 2012  · 163pp  · 46,523 words

raised $97,567 from 867 backers worldwide. As surprising or unconventional as it sounds, Thrift’s tale is typical of what has been happening on Kickstarter since the site formally launched in 2009. More than 20,000 inventors, designers, filmmakers, musicians, authors, painters, game developers, choreographers, poets, and other artists have

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normal. If you waited until you had money before you started lining up projects, you’d never do most of them.” Can something like Kickstarter really exist? Kickstarter is one of those rare so-crazy-it-just-might-work ideas that did in fact work. Who would’ve imagined it? A website

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you have crowdfunding, a means of moving money among people, circumventing traditional sources and decision makers and gatekeepers, a sort of grassroots redistribution of wealth. Kickstarter is part of a diverse ecosystem offering new ways for people to connect with one another online, to exchange ideas, stuff, and sometimes hard currency

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. Painters have long depended on patrons to put up money in advance. Classical composers, such as Mozart and Beethoven, sometimes relied on “subscriptions” similar to Kickstarter’s system, allowing them to advertise for pledges to finance concerts or printed editions of their work. For product development, too, crowdfunding creates markets for

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smallest details of their efforts. What worked and what didn’t. What challenges, surprises, and failures they confronted. How they decided they were ready for Kickstarter, settled on their fund-raising goals and their rewards and pledge amounts, made their videos, attracted attention through the media and social networks, and fulfilled

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his Web comics? Indeed. All those things really happened, and more. The numbers are alluring—and may be deceiving. They might lead you to imagine Kickstarter as a magical candyland of tangerine streams and marmalade skies (and, most of all, pennies from heaven) where benefactors are milling around with oozing checkbooks

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webcomics; the passionate fan base he’d spent years developing drove his funding total to dizzying new heights every day. Many filmmakers bringing projects to Kickstarter are not pitching dreamy notions that exist only on paper; rather, they are seeking funding either to wrap up filming or for postproduction. They may

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that you can deliver,” says Peter Seid, a cocreator of Romo - the Smartphone Robot, which drew $114,796 in pledges in late 2011. In fact, Kickstarter has been tightening its guidelines specifically for product design projects, asking would-be creators to provide detailed information about their background and experience, plus a

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it happen → decide what rewards you will give to backers, and attach specific pledge dollar amounts to specific rewards → decide on a duration for your Kickstarter campaign, setting a fund-raising deadline → make a video explaining and promoting your project → know in advance who are your likely backers and outlets for

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earlier, your total pledge haul isn’t exactly what you will receive to spend on your creative pursuit. First we subtract the 5 percent that Kickstarter receives from each pledge for providing its crowdfunding platform and making your campaign possible. We also subtract the Amazon Payments fee, which as noted earlier

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closer look at rewards and pledge amounts, examining them from every possible angle and providing lists, charts, and lots of real-life advice from successful Kickstarter campaigns. It might also make sense to skip ahead to chapter 10, “After the Loving—Tales of Fulfillment,” which covers the challenges of sending out

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, raffles, lotteries, sweepstakes Coupons, discounts, cash-value gift cards Financial incentives (ownership, share of profits, repayment) Other items on prohibited list (see chapter 1) source: Kickstarter Kickstarter has also issued statistics on pledge trends. This bar chart indicates that, overall, as of early 2012 the most popular pledge zone is the $11

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contribute content to magazine Technology project-related T-shirts, stickers, decals, product accessories midpriced product produced in the project high-end product produced by the Kickstarter campaign, assembled version of DIY kit, customized versions Theater CD or DVD, show program, poster tickets to rehearsal or performance invitation to party or reception

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illustration by artist, your character drawn into the comic Fashion print, T-shirt, tote bag, mug related to garment designs midpriced garment created by the Kickstarter project high-end garment, custom-fit garment, garment named after the backer Dance credit in performance literature or on website, tote bag, T-shirt, poster

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: Some personalized rewards Because you can never have too many ideas for cool rewards, here are some specific, highly personalized ones offered by real-life Kickstarter creators. campaign: Authors, Publishers and Readers of Independent Literature pledge amount: $35 or more reward: “Reverse Fan Mail—We’ll send your name or a

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webcomic sometime this year.” Plus, an original, signed crayon drawing of the character, and other goodies. Can you offer a tax deduction for pledges? Some Kickstarter campaigns promise backers that their pledge dollars will be tax deductible. That’s definitely an incentive to give. But it’s not something you can

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to go this route, you will probably want to involve an accountant, a lawyer, or both. An alternative is to try a program (separate from Kickstarter) through which arts fund-raisers can affiliate themselves with existing nonprofit organization to receive tax-deductible donations. Some of these are listed in chapter 12

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Skype conversation with me,’ and then twenty or thirty people choose that! The person then has like six hours of Skype conversations to do.” Sometimes Kickstarter campaigners have been happily surprised by the number of high-end rewards their most passionate backers go in for. Yehuda Berlinger, founder of the board

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be a much better deal than another. “Depending on which reward levels people choose, your ultimate costs can fluctuate dramatically,” Sarli notes. He advises all Kickstarter campaigners to “plan and budget for the worst-case [highest-cost] scenario.” For similar planning purposes, Sarli also warns against bundling several projects together into

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one Kickstarter campaign and then letting backers choose which ones they want as a reward. That can lead to disaster, he says. What if your rewards include

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twelve proposed rewards attached to pledges ranging from $15 to $10,000. They asked fans for feedback and made a few adjustments before launching their Kickstarter campaign. Similarly, Daniel Solis, a game developer in Durham, North Carolina, posted on his website a list of proposed rewards and pledge levels before

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RIOT, which would be based in Los Angeles. “Initially, most of the funds came from the comedy community in Los Angeles,” she confirms. Nevertheless, some Kickstarter projects with essentially local interest have succeeded in appealing to a wider audience beyond the one concerned in the campaign. The Detroit Needs A Statue

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campaign.” Meet Matt Haughey Matt Haughey, backer extraordinaire Matt Haughey is one of those mythical beings: the mysterious benefactor who will pledge money to a Kickstarter project just because he thinks it’s cool, even if he doesn’t know the creator personally. As of March 2012, Haughey had backed eighty

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a trough in the middle representing the slow midcampaign grind. Once again, we’ll supplement cold, hard statistical data with real-world advice from successful Kickstarter creators. What follows are a few words from people describing how they chose their campaign duration: RIOT—L.A.’s Alternative Comedy Festival raised $22

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this stage and tweak the content as necessary. The project is approved (or rejected) within a couple of days. If approved, launch. Building the Project Kickstarter’s Web interface makes building a project so simple, it almost doesn’t need to be explained. You’ll click through introductory screens reminding you

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“I had lined up a couple things beforehand to announce the project launch,” says Joshua Harker, whose Crania Anatomica Filigre campaign in October 2011 became Kickstarter’s most-funded sculpture project (it raised $77,271). “I sent out a newsletter and the obligatory Twitter and Facebook stuff. Social networking was huge

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getting media coverage. If they’re not listing their coverage prominently (they ought to be), you can Google their names. For example, type “Kickstarter Elevation Dock” or “Kickstarter Pebble” into Google, and you’ll get links to dozens of websites and blogs that covered those wildly successful gadgets. Make sure to note

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tabletop game, maybe you can share your idea with an audience of hardcore gamers at the annual Board Game Geek Con. You get the idea. Kickstarter-Friendly Online Media Ars Technica (technology, video games) Autoblog (automotive) Bicycling (bicycling) BoardGameGeek (games) Board Game Info (games) Boing Boing (tech, pop culture, odd news

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, design, gadgets) Film Courage (indie film) Film Independent (indie film) Film Threat (films; has also begun selling $50 “crowdfunding classifieds” ads) Filmmaker (films; curates a Kickstarter page) Flavorwire (music, film, culture) Futuregirl (crafts, DIY apparel) GearHungry (“stuff you’ll want”) GeekDad (parenting) Geekosystem (all things geeky) GigaOM (tech/business) Gizmodo (gadgets

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-business stories, ideas) Indiewire (indie film) Inhabitant (eco-friendly design) io9 (science/sci-fi) Jalopnik (automotive) Joystiq (video games) Kill Screen (video games; promotes a “Kickstarter of the Day”) Kotaku (video games) Laughing Squid (trends, gadgets, odd news) Laughspin (comedy) Lifehacker (gadgets, design, housewares) MAKE (DIY projects) Mashable (gadgets, tech business

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) Mediabistro/Galleycat (publishing projects) Neatorama (neat stuff) Nerdist (comedy, pop culture) PaidContent (publishing, media) Paste (music) Pitchfork (music; curates a Kickstarter page) PSFK (design, fashion) Purple Pawn (tabletop games) SlashGear (gadgets, tech) Swissmiss (cool designs and ideas) TechCrunch (tech gear/business) The Classical (sports) The Verge

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free party in Seattle. The band played all night and hung out with attendees; they also, conveniently, had a computer opened to their Kickstarter donation page. For a Kickstarter documentary film project called A Sustainable Reality: Redefining Roots, creators required a $20 fee to attend a party in Chicago that featured many

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few more days of effort and you can achieve something incredible—everything you’ve been working for. Need more inspiration? Here are four real-life Kickstarter stories of incredible final-days comebacks. They’ll surely provide motivation, and great ideas, for your final kick. Frantic Finish #1 In early December

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survey to all your backers requesting their shipping addresses and product preferences, that is, if they have choices to make (colors, sizes, and the like). Kickstarter provides you with a spreadsheet containing all of your backers’ information, and you can use that list to produce mailing labels, or hand-address packages

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Forms are free and also dump all responses into a handy spreadsheet. What happens next is different for each person. The real-life experiences of Kickstarter creators who have encountered the spoils of success speak loudly. You can learn plenty from their reward-fulfillment strategies as well as their miscalculations. Here

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well. Learning from failure is a reality of the creative process, a productive part of invention and entrepreneurship. All those things are the essence of Kickstarter. But learning from failure can be a jagged little pill, to borrow a phrase from another cultural commentator, Alanis Morissette. In this chapter we offer

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preamble explaining what they were calling their “relaunch”: “Turns out that our previous goal was a little bit too steep . . . but the great thing about Kickstarter is, through the whole process, we’ve actually made some great contacts. We’ve met some domestic manufacturers, we met some distribution guys . . . these guys

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imitation, homage, and general riffing on the concept. Several direct alternatives exist on the Web. Some approach project fund-raising differently. Others can supplement a Kickstarter campaign, such as facilities that offer assistance with rapid prototyping of a product concept or organizations that can help you work through the details of

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-for-Profit-y CrowdRise crowdrise.com Crowdrise is for charitable causes and volunteer efforts, two types of fund-raising activities that are explicitly excluded from Kickstarter. You can raise money by receiving pledges to run in a marathon, volunteer on weekends, or anything else that might inspire donations. Money goes

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Hifidelics. If a project is successful, the musicians get 60 percent of all sales after production costs are covered. PledgeMusic pledgemusic.com PledgeMusic is a Kickstarter-ish site just for music. It helps artists and bands “design a specifically tailored fund-raising campaign to raise money for their next release.” As

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community-minded projects” worldwide, from record albums to humanitarian missions. New Jelly newjelly.com This European crowdfunding site has many of the same rules as Kickstarter; denominated in euros. More Business-y In business, financial backers generally are looking for a piece of the action and a return on their investment

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implemented, circa mid-2012, remained in the hands of government regulators. Keep an eye on developments. Certainly, some people who are running cool projects on Kickstarter are in fact starting companies. And they may be working separately with more traditional angel and seed investors at the same time, or soon after

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their Kickstarter campaigns. Meanwhile, a variety of sites can help match business ideas with possible funding. Here are some worth knowing about. Angel List angel.co

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had over the successful development of a product. Every time one unit of a product sells, all the people involved get paid,” they explain. Like Kickstarter, it’s also a place to buy unique gifts. Accelerators, Boot Camps, and Incubators Start-up companies have options beyond crowdfunding, including the many organizations

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Partners, Salt Lake City, UT (juntopartners.com) Seed Hatchery, Memphis, TN (seedhatchery.com) TechStars, Boulder, CO (techstars.com) Y-Combinator, Mountain View, CA (ycombinator.com) KICKSTARTER CAMPAIGNS are a lot of work, so you’ll want to make a good plan well in advance of the launch date. This Prelaunch Worksheet

Makers at Work: Folks Reinventing the World One Object or Idea at a Time

by Steven Osborn  · 17 Sep 2013  · 310pp  · 34,482 words

only changing the way products are designed and developed, it is changing the way products are sold. With the rise in popularity of crowdfunding via Kickstarter, projects that may have been considered risky to bring to market are finding their way into people’s homes. Crowdfunding is a way for makers

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himself electronics and programming. His natural curiosity for hardware electronics has led him to build some impressive projects, even at a young age. His recent Kickstarter project, the Digispark, was a big hit for providing a cheap, easily embeddable Arduino-compatible board for hackers and hobbyists. What started out as a

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Arduinos in things. I always had like three Arduinos and twenty projects that needed Arduinos. So I was always ripping something apart. I came across Kickstarter around about a year and a half ago, and found that there were some Arduino clone projects on there, but they all were very hard

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time building that first prototype, to not make it perfect, because the laws of business still apply: most things will fail. I actually had a Kickstarter project before the Digispark that failed. It fell flat. Nobody was interested in it. And it was a software project. It was a software as

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us, but how fast can you produce thirty thousand?” This chip generally doesn’t sell that well. I think ATtinies—used for hobbies, and another Kickstarter project, the Blink1—was also trying for the same chip and had just been fairly successful. But, generally, the ATtinies were used in things like

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make enough of them. We knew—at that point, we already had this looming problem of shipping everything. We sold twenty-five thousand Digisparks through Kickstarter and the preorders that followed immediately. At that same time, we sold twelve thousand kits because we offered about twelve different shields,4 you know

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would pursue but don’t have the time now. But it’s certainly something that the community needs. I’ve even thought about making a Kickstarter project for sponsoring a package manager, and then hiring someone to do it, or something like that, because Digispark/Digistump would benefit from it greatly

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making one hundred boards at a time. So those projects have really excited me. On the embedded microcontroller side, there’s actually a project on Kickstarter right now that’s an FPGA.9 I think that’s really cool because I’ve always wanted to work with FPGAs. And really, there

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because somebody asked, “Can you do this?” And essentially we had to get those people to cancel their pledges, because when you’re running a Kickstarter campaign, you can’t cancel someone’s pledge on your own. “Get them to cancel their pledges, remove that category, or we’ll take your

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project down.” And the only way to communicate back with them was through Kickstarter messages, you know, through their ticket system. With such a huge project and so much at stake, it was a frustrating couple of days.

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with the problems it can encounter, there should be more support there. If nothing else, a number we could call and talk to someone at Kickstarter to get things resolved. I’ve heard that same sentiment echoed by other big projects. Eric, the guy behind the Pebble watch, is a Digispark

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I mean, there’s definitely a lot of balancing of priorities and risk, I think for everyone there. Kettenburg: I think a big threat to Kickstarter from within is the number of commercial products. And when they changed their rules10 within the hardware category—that you could only sell one unit

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very interesting case. Very mixed feelings there. Osborn: Well, all right. That’s some great insight. Especially into the sort of challenges that come with Kickstarting a physical product and getting it through manufacturing. I’m looking forward to seeing what Digistump has in store for the future. 1 Getting Started

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.com 9 An FPGA, field-programmable gate array, is a hardware device designed to be configured by the end-user after manufacturing. 10 www.kickstarter.com/blog/kickstarter-is-not-a-store 11 www.eevblog.com 12 http://dangerousprototypes.com CHAPTER 2 David Merrill Cofounder Sifteo David Merrill holds a Ph.D

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compete with Nintendo, it would be laughable. This is something people would snicker at—like, “Sure you will.” And then they raise $9 million on Kickstarter. Now they have this capital to go out and do it. Money that they’ve raised because they have the backgrounds and expertise, and people

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ll order it myself,” in a polymer or an acrylic or something. Osborn: Plus, you would get it on time since it’s not a Kickstarter project.10 Something in that realm that I find really interesting is Thingiverse.11 This repository for printable objects, which to me is an amazing

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com 6 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DeLorean_time_machine#Flux_capacitor 7 www.tindie.com 8 www.typeamachines.com 9 http://techshop.ws 10 Kickstarter projects are notorious for shipping late because many teams underestimate the time it will take to deliver a product. 11 www.thingiverse.com 12 http

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subscription business, some percent renew every year, and then you keep adding more people. Then a bunch of things happened all at the same time. Kickstarter launched, transaction volume on Etsy broke $100M l sellers using Fulfillment by Amazon stowed more than one million unique items in their fulfillment centers. Then

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we started getting inquiries from start-ups and actual people who were doing their Kickstarters and needed the materials. At the time, we didn’t sell the materials. We just connected you directly with the vendor if you were

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whatever they want, especially products they can sell. Osborn: The shift in product coming to market is pretty interesting. Ouya recently raised $9 million on Kickstarter. You know, it’s an open-source gaming console, and two or three years ago, if somebody told you they were going to do that

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now, where there is this idea that people are excited about things like 3D printing. People are excited about personal manufacturing. People are excited about Kickstarter. I used to feel like I worked on stuff that I was interested in. You sort of had to be an engineer to understand. Now

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to, “Are you passionate? Are you interested? Do you have ideas of what you want to make?” Then, when you start seeing people going on Kickstarter and raising all this money, like $9 million for an open-source gaming console, you know, people start to take notice. Like Scott Wilson, whose

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community, and the community is helping them contribute and play a part in the development of the project. And then they go out and do Kickstarter. Kickstarter serves as a way to unleash all this energy and excitement toward the prototype, or toward the idea, like, “Okay, I could make this, guys

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.” And then, you know, after the Kickstarter, it’s like, “What’s next?” With Shapeoko,5 we launched it on Inventables in more of a commercial way, and there was a second

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for makers to basically test their concepts and get preorders. We’re really focused on straight-up preorders. We weren’t trying to do a Kickstarter model where people are having various tiers and try to raise money for a venture. The businesses on Tindie are more focused on, “I’ve

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that I think most people don’t foresee. My advice is to start small. Osborn: When people see someone raise a half-million dollars on Kickstarter they say, “Wow, they made a half-million dollars.” But in reality, if they were working a job at a large company making salary,

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I open-sourced and released to the world. One of Safecast’s commercial affiliates, Medcom, picked it up and decided to build. They had a Kickstarter around it, and it’s currently shipping out like any day now. Osborn: That’s great. Huang: I’m pretty stoked about that. Osborn:

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just the insight I got from you about manufacturing in China is pretty interesting for a lot of people. A lot of folks are launching Kickstarter projects, and then realize—you already mentioned this—anybody can build one of a thing, but when you try to scale, things get hairy.

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Yes. Osborn: So you knew where the surprises were and how to get things through the pipe. I think a lot of people in the Kickstarter projects run into some issues because they have no design-for-manufacturing experience. Do you have some advice for somebody who’s thinking about launching

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a Kickstarter project or has launched one, and has had some success on how to get a physical product out the door? Linder: Well, the first

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interesting because it’s a commercial product, but it’s a boutique commercial product. Seeing my professors as entrepreneurs was really inspiring. It was before Kickstarter and all that stuff, so launching your own product and sourcing manufacturing and being actually able to ship things was really interesting to me. I

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Season 4 episodes. Sylvia: Bye! 1 http://lilypadarduino.org 2http://lookwhatjoeysmaking.blogspot.com 3 http://watercolorbot.com 4www.evilmadscientist.com 5 Funded successfully on Kickstarter: www.kickstarter.com/projects/1894919479/super-awesome-sylvias-watercolorbot-0 6 www.shapeoko.com 7 Co-host of the Discovery Channel’s MythBusters television series. 8 See

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the point where hardware start-ups are a sexy thing to do now, but you started well before that. Migicovsky: We decided to go on Kickstarter mainly because we were unable to raise money from standard, more typical investment sources. We joined a program called Y Combinator, which is an incubator

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Pebble, we had the right combination of features, and more importantly, we were able to explain to people how useful the product was. On the Kickstarter page, we talked about the consumer use cases. We explained how you could see who’s calling on your watch, how you could control your

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and feel of the watch. Osborn: What advice would you have for somebody who has a hardware product that they want to bring to Kickstarter? It seems that Kickstarter is changing attitudes toward hardware products. I don’t know how it’s affecting people. Migicovsky: I think there’s a very good

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week or two, selling an early manufactured version of the Bus Pirate. In that time, we sold a thousand of them, presale. This was before Kickstarter and Indiegogo. There was no crowdsourced funding concept out there. We just took preorders from people with the promise to deliver it as quickly as

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that way, if you design with something out of the box and then you want to order a thousand for your small production run, your Kickstarter, whatever, then you have the Mouser part number, the Digi-Key part number, the manufacturers’ equivalent part numbers if you go directly to the

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out of our current products that are very popular. The open-source hardware market is flooded now. It’s just flooded. There are so many Kickstarters and great projects out there. When I started, there were just a handful of people doing this. Right now, there’s just so much stuff

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Huang, bunnie ARM CPUs, 64-bit artificial barriers billion-dollar company chumby electronic stickers FedEx charges foster hardware engineering hardware ecosystem hardware hacker innovation ecosystem Kickstarter projects legal defense fund media lab Microsoft Xbox Mims, Forrest (books) open-source laptop own projects reconfigurable hardware image-processing solution Safecast Sifteo cubes small

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Shapeoko textiles third industrial revolution transaction Kettenburg, Erik Arduino community ATtinies command-line program Digispark community forward-reaching approach full Spectrum 40-watt hobby laser Kickstarter projects lightbulb moment maker community maker culture open-source community parallel computing project prototype build up Radio Shack surface-mount assembly shop Tesla coil unexpected

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challenges Vacasa Rentals (company) web developer Wi-Fi modules WordPress Kickstarter Kraftwerk video L Legal defense fund Lesnet, Ian Bus Pirate camera system community cost down crimping tool dangerous prototypes DIY Life electronics life electronics market

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printer projects 3D printing landscape 3D QR code entrepreneurship filament-deposition method flexible-display technology Fluid Interfaces Group Form 1 Google glasses Jerusalem Venture Partners Kickstarter experience microfluidics MIT media lab one-click print OpenRC projector camera systems prosumers Samsung people Sinclair ZX81 PC SketchUp stopwatch application Sun Microsystems Logo programming

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and the demos TED talk videogames video segments Microsoft Microsoft Xbox Migicovsky, Eric advice apps for InPulse challenges childhood economy of hardware company key successes Kickstarter experience learned lessons profile SDK for InPulse smartwatch software development Moore, Geoffrey Mota, Catarina altLab business models conductive ink digital fabrication 3D printer education electrical

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CSS3 3D designs 3D printer ecosystem education background employees feedback loop Femtoduino fundraiser feature half-million dollars hardware revolution hiccups JavaScript juggling balls key players Kickstarter/IndieGoGo kits/projects Knowble Launchpad community maker business manufacturing process one-year anniversary open-source code outside VC/investment paraphrase patent/protection pick-and-place

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rentals CP/M 38 Creative Commons Dangerous Prototypes DARPA Grand Challenge employee of Winter Olympics Google beerware GPL or MIT GPS logger Internet of Things Kickstarter hardware projects LCD display LED Maker Faire microcontroller national tour open-source hardware Parallax BASIC Stamp program calculator games SPARC International TI calculator games venture

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CubeSat satellites aerodynamic de-orbiting mechanism Ames Research Center CubeSat Team SJSU design robotic submarine Robotic Systems Lab space exploration Hall City Cave ideological level Kickstarter project MATE NASA OpenROV accessible adventure (AA) business reason daily discoveries (DD) drawing and design Hall City Cave HomePlug adaptor intense innovation (II) internet

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-textiles fabric types FAT lab FLORA project FLORA sensors giant plush pillow Google+ Graffiti Research Lab gravitational pull hackerspaces list intellectual property Internet communication coding Kickstarter knitting needle collection Kraftwerk video LEDs and basic programming license little crafting knowledge and craft/sewing instruction local community Making Wireless Toys methane sensor nightlight

Makers

by Chris Anderson  · 1 Oct 2012  · 238pp  · 73,824 words

face of industry, as entrepreneurial instincts kick in and hobbies become small companies. Thousands of Maker projects have raised money on “crowdfunding” sites such as Kickstarter, where in 2011 alone nearly 12,000 successful projects (from design and technology to the arts) raised nearly $100 million9 (in 2012, that is on

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track to reach $300 million10). Venture capitalists joined in, investing $10 million each into Kickstarter, MakerBot, an open-hardware company making 3-D printers, and Shapeways, a 3-D printing service in 2011, as well as $23 million into Quirky

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Makers communities all have this, from the fantastic stream of daily blog posts of MakerBot, Sparkfun, and Adafruit to the video profiles of members on Kickstarter and Etsy. In a sense, such rich, engaging content is marketing—marketing for the community itself, but also for the products that the community has

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the product made. Crowdfunding may take many forms, from glorified tip jars to formal loans backed by people, not banks. The one Andon chose was Kickstarter, a website where people post descriptions of their projects and anyone can chip in to help. Rather than just making a donation, most contributors essentially

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gave $350 or more would be the first to get the tank when it was available, at a lower price than regular customers would pay. Kickstarter required Andon to set a minimum amount to be raised. If he hit that target within thirty days of posting the project, everyone who pledged

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up any of the company, getting into debt, or even doing much more than posting a video and project description on a website. Underground VC Kickstarter solves three huge problems for entrepreneurs. First, it simply moves revenues forward in time, to right when they’re needed. One of the reasons startups

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which they’ll presumably get back later when they sell the products. But if they can turn those sales into presales, which is essentially what Kickstarter does, they’ll have the money when they need it and won’t have to raise venture capital or take out a loan. Second

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, Kickstarter turns customers into a community. By backing a project, you’re doing more than pre-buying a product. You’re also betting on a team,

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’s genesis. This encourages a sense of participation in the project and turns backers into word-of-mouth evangelists, which helps projects go viral. Finally, Kickstarter provides perhaps the most important service a new company needs: market research. If your project doesn’t hit its funding target, it probably would have

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on their desks—but only once presented with that idea? How would you even find out? And how much would it cost to do so? Kickstarter and markets like it let such people find you. It’s the ultimate social capital. Word of mouth will send news of a project to

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they know and ideas that are compelling enough to pass along (what social scientists call memetic). How did you come to hear of your first Kickstarter project (assuming you have)? Was it a friend who thought you might be interested? The feed of someone whom you follow on social media? Coverage

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in the news in some area you follow? The point is that you probably didn’t go to Kickstarter looking for it. It found you. And if you responded, you were the right target audience even though nobody might have been able to guess

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that beforehand. So Kickstarter is not just money-raising, it’s market research. It surfaces demand that could often not be found any other way. Maker vs. multinational On

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hardware hackers working on the ground floor of their founder’s apartment building in Palo Alto had announced their own watch on Kickstarter … and it was simply better. The Kickstarter project, called Pebble, had a crisp sunlight-readable e-paper display rather than Sony’s OLED color display. Although color is usually

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outdesigned, out-marketed, and outpriced one of the biggest electronics companies in the world. And then, thanks to Kickstarter, they got ready to out-sell Sony, too. The Pebble team set a Kickstarter target of $100,000. It reached that in just two hours (I was one of those early backers). And

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going. By the end of the first day, it had passed $1 million. By the end of the first week, it had broken the previous Kickstarter record of $3.34 million. After a little more than three weeks, Pebble had already passed $10 million in backing and had pre-sold 85

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huge batch of electronics (although they had made smartwatches before, the most successful of them had sold only 1,500 units). Before Pebble’s monthlong Kickstarter fund-raising period was over, it had already achieved the most successful smartwatch launch of all time—and all before actually shipping a single watch

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. What was particularly interesting about the Pebble Kickstarter phenomenon was how the design team responded to the crowd of customers. First the backers asked for better water-resistance, so the Pebble team figured

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the right 4.0 modules and were able to source them, giving the watch better battery life and making it more future-proof. Finally, other Kickstarter projects joined the parade and announced that they would be writing apps to run on Pebble, including Twine, an “Internet of Things” device that could

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figuring it out as they went, and prototyping with 3-D printers and Arduino open-source processor boards, just like so many other Makers. What Kickstarter did was catapult them from just another small company trying to get a break to an overnight viral hit—with money attached. The future of

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a traditional stock market listing.43 Although some are concerned that such equity-based funding (as opposed to the simple preordering and charitable backing of Kickstarter) could lead to fraud, the hope is by having the SEC regulating the websites rather than the companies, they can help self-regulate the industry

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wisdom seems to be that economic growth in this country has stalled. Yet, that same conventional wisdom ignores the economic activity on DIY sites like Kickstarter.”44 Social capital Let’s return to the jellyfish example to see what makes this model so powerful. Consider the advantages Andon had by going

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the Kickstarter route with his project, rather than to a bank or traditional investor: 1. He raised the money without having to pay interest or give up

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emotional reward of knowing that they had something to do with bringing that product into existence. The act of “making in public,” which is what Kickstarter project leaders do, turns product development into marketing. The creator posts an idea, then updates frequently on the progress to completion. Backers comment and the

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paid instead. Beat that, Madison Avenue. What’s more, it’s fun. As Sarah Dopp explains at Culture Conductor, a Web community blog: Most of Kickstarter’s magic mojo is simply that they made a game out of raising money. Here are the rules to that game: 1. Set a deadline

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the funding goal. The campaign STOPS at the deadline, and if you didn’t meet the goal, the project doesn’t happen. (This is where Kickstarter is most valuable: they play bad cop about the rules of the game, while you get to play good cop and try to get people

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to a cause. Although you have been promised that you will get a product in return, there is no binding legal agreement to ensure that. Kickstarter, like many of the sites like it (IndeGoGo, RocketHub, and Funded By Me, to name just a few), counts on transparency and the sophistication of

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to share information, backers should consider that when weighing a pledge. If something sounds too good to be true, it very well may be. If Kickstarter were helping companies raise funding or attract investors, it would be regulated by the Securities and Exchange Commission, and all sorts of rules and protections

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service is growing at an astounding rate. As of May 2012, three years after its founding, more than 47,000 projects had been launched on Kickstarter, of which more than 40 percent were successful, raising a total of $175 million.46 More than ten thousand of those projects were successful in

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totals, so $60 million went to the project creators. Most were just a few thousand dollars for music, film, and other arts projects (for which Kickstarter was originally intended), but there were also hundreds of successful physical products. Two dozen such projects, like the Jellyfish Tank, raised more than $100,000

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a wristwatch. But he chose that route anyway because he wanted the direct feedback and simplicity of the Kickstarter process. His TikTok+LunaTik proposal raised nearly a million dollars. Sixty days after his Kickstarter fund-raising period closed in December 2010, Wilson shipped more than twenty thousand of the watch cases. What

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to your clothes or backpack. He, too, could have pitched his idea to a camera accessory company. Instead, he decided to go it alone. His Kickstarter project raised $365,000 from more than five thousand backers. This, he wrote, “transformed my life. On May 2, 2011, I launched Capture as a

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,000. And so on, for hundreds more (I myself have backed everything from a three-string guitar kit for kids to a desktop CNC machine). Kickstarter has become the favored funding route for inventors everywhere, or at least for those who can put together a video and story that describes their

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vision in a way that compels people to buy into it. The accidental bank Kickstarter’s origins go back long before its founding in 2009. One of its cofounders, Perry Chen, was living in the French Quarter of New Orleans

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Adler it was “the best idea any waiter pitched him that year”), and the two decided to build a website to try it out. Today, Kickstarter is a multimillion-dollar Web company that’s trying as hard as it can to stick to its indie roots. Its building at 155 Rivington

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UNDERWEAR (a former tenant). Inside, it looks like the entry to a group house. Chen and Strickler are still slightly uncomfortable with the rise of Kickstarter as a financing engine for physical goods. They had originally intended it mostly for the kind of music and film projects that the record labels

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twenty-five approves projects before they are listed, mostly based on the quality of the presentations, not on their artistic merits. The biggest projects on Kickstarter, like it or not, are consumer goods. It simply fills a market need that was there all along, waiting for someone to tap it. Voting

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capital For all Kickstarter’s egalitarian charms, once projects are funded, creators are pretty much on their own to get them actually made. As they’ll quickly discover, the

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, to say nothing of just running a small business. What if a community could help decide which user-submitted product ideas get made, just like Kickstarter, but then a team of product-development professionals helps steer the project, handling all the tricky factory issues? That, in a nutshell, is the model

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of Quirky, which launched around the same time as Kickstarter in 2009 and is growing just as fast. Ben Kauffman, its founder (age twenty-four at the time of this writing), got his start in

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name, tagline, feature set, and other branding. • Quirky’s engineers make the winning design manufacturable and work with a factory to make it. As at Kickstarter, there are countdown clocks and competitions everywhere—the whole thing feels like a game. You don’t need to have any ideas of your own

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sales. That way Quirky can put its own engineers and designers to work only on the products that are most worthy of their time. Like Kickstarter, Quirky also uses a presale process, where products are made only if they reach a certain number of purchase commitments. (Your credit card is charged

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is always unique. If what you want is something created by a person and not just by a machine, Etsy is a gold mine. Unlike Kickstarter and Quirky, Etsy doesn’t try to help Makers fund or create their products. Instead, it’s simply a way to sell them, with a

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inspired us all with his visions of how far it could go. So did countless blogs and Web communities, from Hackaday and Makezine to Instructables, Kickstarter, Etsy, and Quirky. In the open-hardware movement, my chief guides have been Massimo Banzi of the Arduino project, Nathan Siedle of Sparkfun, Limor Fried

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. This is a future I believe in, and I’m one of many working to build it. 9. http://www.kickstarter.com/blog/2011-the-stats 10. http://www.businessinsider.com/kickstarter-on-track-to-generate-300-million-in-2012-funding-2012–4 11. http://www.crunchbase.com/ 12. http://www.wired

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_blog.html 45. http://cultureconductor.com/author/sarahdopp/ 46. http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-17531736 47. http://www.wired.com/magazine/2011/03/ff_kickstarter/all/1 48. http://www.etsy.com/blog/news/2012/notes-from-chad-funding-etsys-future/ 49. http://www.slideshare.net/stevekeifer/b2b-emarketplaces-rise

WTF?: What's the Future and Why It's Up to Us

by Tim O'Reilly  · 9 Oct 2017  · 561pp  · 157,589 words

how its application demonstrates an innovation not shown in that prior art. (BountyQuest was itself a great example of prior art for later innovations like Kickstarter, since it was one of the first examples of Internet-enabled “crowdsourcing”—even though the term itself wasn’t introduced till six years later.) With

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for an exit. In using dividends as a form of payout to investors, Bryce is following the same game plan as companies like Basecamp and Kickstarter. Jason Fried, the founder and CEO of Basecamp, notes that Basecamp makes tens of millions of dollars a year in profits and has paid out

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winner-takes-all world of online platforms. The value created for the ecosystem should be a paramount concern. In the summer of 2016, crowdfunding pioneer Kickstarter commissioned a report from a researcher at the University of Pennsylvania, which concluded that since its founding in 2009

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, Kickstarter had funded a total of $5.3 billion in projects, creating 8,800 new small businesses employing approximately 29,000 people full-time, and working

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gone on to great success. Some have even joined the supermoney economy. One project, Oculus, was later sold to Facebook for $2 billion, of which Kickstarter received nothing. (Unfortunately, neither did any of the project’s backers. It would have set a great precedent if, having won big, the Oculus founders

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, letting them in on some of the windfall.) While the absolute numbers are far smaller than those for Google, Kickstarter’s ratio of value captured to value created is far better. Since Kickstarter charges a fee of only 5%, that means the company’s total lifetime revenues were roughly $250 million, a

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tiny fraction of the value created. Because Kickstarter is a private company, and Yancey Strickler, its cofounder and CEO, made clear that he has no plans for the company to sell or go

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public, it’s impossible to estimate what Kickstarter would be worth if it were to do so. But Kickstarter is in the game for the long haul, committed to creating value for its participants rather than extracting it

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. Kickstarter has gone so far as to register as a public benefit corporation, a designation that places a legal requirement on the company to consider its

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impact on society and not just on shareholders. Kickstarter’s founders told their venture capital investors from the start that they have no plan to exit, and have instead put in place a mechanism

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’s lackluster financial results led to the ouster of Chad Dickerson, Etsy’s CEO. Airbnb doesn’t do an overall economic impact statement like Google, Kickstarter, or Etsy, but regularly publishes studies of individual cities. For example, in its 2015 study of Airbnb in New York City, the company calculated that

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tour; now soccer hooligans do it. Cell phones, designer fashion, and entertainment have all been democratized. Mozart had the Holy Roman Emperor as his patron; Kickstarter, GoFundMe, and Patreon extend that opportunity to millions of ordinary people. This rings of bubble talk from the privileged coasts. Yet it is true far

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Hank names it, is only one of many new forms of creative money that are available via online platforms. There’s Facebook money, Etsy money, Kickstarter money, App Store money, and more. Who would have thought ten years ago that people could make six-figure earnings playing video games while millions

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of artists now receive enough patronage via the platform that they can now concentrate on their work. As crowdfunding sites like Patreon (and, of course, Kickstarter, Indiegogo, and GoFundMe) show, there are increasingly new opportunities for ordinary people to compete for real currency, not just attention. These sites are still a

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instead is based on a reputation currency called “whuffie.” The economic competition is to get other people to approve of and support your creative projects. Kickstarter campaigns and Facebook likes may be early prototypes of that future currency. Creativity can be the focus of an intense competition for status, so that

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.conductor.com/blog/2014/07/organic-search-actually-responsible-64-web-traffic/. 291 commissioned a report: Yancey Strickler, “Kickstarter’s Impact on the Creative Economy,” The Kickstarter Blog, July 28, 2016, https://www.kickstarter.com/blog/kickstarters-impact-on-the-creative-economy. 291 have gone on to great success: Amy Feldman, “Ten of the

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Most Successful Companies Built on Kickstarter,” Forbes, April 14, 2016, https://www.forbes.com/sites/amyfeldman/2016/04/14/ten

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-of-the-most-successful-companies-built-on-kickstarter/#4dec455f69e8. 292 register as a public benefit corporation: Yancey Strickler, Perry Chen, and Charles

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Adler, “Kickstarter Is Now a Benefit Corporation,” The Kickstarter Blog, September 21, 2015, https://www.kick starter.com/blog/kickstarter-is-now-a-benefit-corporation. 292 regular cash distributions

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to their shareholders: Joshua Brustein, “Kickstarter Just Did Something Tech Startups Never Do: It Paid a

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Dividend,” Bloomberg, June 17, 2016, https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-06-17/kickstarter-just-did-something-tech-startups-never-do-it-paid-a-dividend. 292 shareholder value primacy has no legal basis: Lynn Stout, The Shareholder Value Myth (

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, 75 Kaplan, Esther, 193 Kasriel, Stephane, 333–34 Katsuyama, Brad, 237–38 Kernighan, Brian, 105–6 Kettl, Donald, 129 Keynes, John Maynard, 271–72, 298 Kickstarter, 291–92 Kilpi, Esko, 89–90 Kim, Gene, 122–23 Klein, Ezra, 143 knowledge, sharing vs. hoarding, 296–97, 323–25 Korea, 134 Korzybski, Alfred

The Revenge of Analog: Real Things and Why They Matter

by David Sax  · 8 Nov 2016  · 360pp  · 101,038 words

-tech ones, such as Mod Notebooks, which you send back to the company and have scanned into the cloud for you, and a world of Kickstarter-funded notebooks, launched by people who believe they can improve on Moleskine. The Spark Notebook was created by Kate Matsudaira, a tech executive at companies

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. . . rather than someone trying to make believe there’s something there.” Abrams’s name came up when Baldini spoke about FILM Ferrania’s campaign on Kickstarter in late 2014, which had collectively raised $315,000 to make the company’s goal of securing “100 More Years of Analog Film” a reality

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before the power and water were cut off and their chemical emulsions from the first test batch expired. Already they had sent updates to their Kickstarter backers about the delays, and the responses were universally encouraging and supportive. “Don’t give up!” wrote one. “Let me know if you need help

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, printing off each order as it comes in. By far the most disruptive and powerful technological tool behind the revenge of tabletop games has been Kickstarter. Since the crowdfunding service began in 2009, it has quickly become the de facto launchpad for tens of thousands of board and card games, large

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and small. At any given time there are roughly two hundred new tabletop game projects raising money on Kickstarter, and roughly half reach their fund-raising goal. Tabletop games are one of the most popular projects on

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Kickstarter, in terms of both dollars raised and the success of fund-raising campaigns. Kickstarter does not regularly break down its statistics for the games category (which includes both video and tabletop games), but in

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the company told the New York Times that tabletop game projects raised $52.1 million that year, compared to $45.3 million for video games. Kickstarter has done more to fuel the creation of games than anyone since Milton Bradley. Almost every single designer I spoke with for this book had

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launched games on Kickstarter. There are certainly runaway successes, such as the silly card game Exploding Kittens, which raised over $8 million in a matter of days, but most

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projects raise a few thousand dollars to pay for a game’s production. Some games start out small on Kickstarter, and eventually grow huge. One of the first to do this was Cards Against Humanity. Cards Against Humanity is a game that asks players to

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it available for free online. Over the next two years it gained a cult following, and its creators turned to Kickstarter in 2011 to see whether they could get it printed. “Kickstarter gave us an incredible opportunity,” said Max Temkin, one of the game’s creators, who manages the business part-time

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. My hope is that it led people to real moments and connections together.” Many of the same critics of Cards Against Humanity also believe that Kickstarter is bad for the tabletop game industry. They see easy crowdfunding money flooding the market with poorly designed games, projects that never get made, or

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are eager to return to. One night, I walked over to Snakes & Lattes to meet Alejandro Vernaza, who was in the final week of a Kickstarter campaign for the game Deal: American Dream. Vernaza is originally from Bogotá, Colombia, but now works as a teacher in Toronto. The game is a

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develop the game, and took early prototypes to board game industry trade shows, including Germany’s massive Essen Spiel, where they learned about Kickstarter. When they launched their Kickstarter campaign in late May 2015, the goal was to raise €29,000 to fund Deal: American Dream. I met Vernaza with just six

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days left, and only €20,000 raised. “No one tells you how much Kickstarter is a ride,” he said, as he unrolled a prototype board for the game and set up the cards. “It’s really a ride.” Deal

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enough dope back to America to win. Deal: American Dream was a fun, fast-paced, original game. I pledged $10 to the campaign, and followed Kickstarter over the next week. With five days to go, it looked increasingly unlikely that Vernaza and Frobert would reach their goal, but a sudden surge

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of backers in the last three days pushed them past their goal. The game should now be commercially available. Deal: American Dream had filmed its Kickstarter video at Snakes & Lattes, and I first encountered Vernaza there just before it launched, during one of the monthly game designer nights the café holds

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in its back room. If Kickstarter and Board Game Geek are the digital communities driving the revenge of board games, then these evenings are their analog equivalent. Each month, twenty to

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-movie card game Grave Robbers from Outer Space, which first came out in 2001, but was no longer in print. He was considering going to Kickstarter with an updated version. “I think there’s a market,” Tassie said, laying out different monster, prop, and character cards (including “Guy Who Will Die

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First” and “Girl Who Shows Her Breasts”), which players formed to make a movie. “It’s my first Kickstarter campaign, and it’s pretty fucking scary. I already know how much fun the original game is to play, but what I’m looking to

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do is show it to people who have never played it before, to ensure that the fun is still there.” Kickstarter and Board Game Geek were great tools for fund-raising and publicity, Tassie said, but the only way you can truly get a sense of

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more the culture of gaming grows.” Lim acknowledged the power of digital tools to bring that analog culture to life. He had raised money on Kickstarter, was a regular on Board Game Geek, and even hosted his own podcast. But he also firmly believed that the revenge of board games was

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Men: The Story of Dungeons & Dragons and the People Who Play It. Scribner, 2013. Furino, Giaco. “Board Game Creators Are Making Assloads of Money on Kickstarter.” VICE, September 17, 2014. Gilsdorf, Ethan. “Board Games Are Back, and Boston’s a Player.” Boston Globe, November 26, 2014. Kuchera, Ben. “No One Is

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Getting Rich from Exploding Kittens’ $8.7 Million Kickstarter.” Polygon, February 25, 2015. Lagorio-Chafkin, Christine. “The Humans Behind Cards Against Humanity.” Inc., January 6, 2014. Moulder, Stuart. “Boardgames: The Latest Analog Craze.” GeekWire

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, 2014. O’Neil, Lauren. “Cards Against Humanity Sells 30,000 Boxes of Actual Poop to Mock Holiday Consumerism.” CBC News, December 15, 2014. Ochs, Rhiannon. “Kickstarter Killed the Board Game Star.” Whose Turn Is It Anyway? December 10, 2014. Raphel, Adrienne. “The Man Who Built Catan.” New Yorker, February 12, 2014

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, 215–216 Kaufman, Donna Paz, 127, 128 Kelly, Kevin, 226–230 keyboards, xvii, 186, 237 Keynes, John Maynard, 164 Khan Academy, 200 Kickbox, 208–209 Kickstarter, 43, 73, 91–92, 94, 95–96, 98 Kim, Eurie, 137, 138 Kind of Blue (album), 25 Kindle, 124, 130, 142, 143, 228 Kinfolk (magazine

Ctrl Alt Delete: Reboot Your Business. Reboot Your Life. Your Future Depends on It.

by Mitch Joel  · 20 May 2013  · 260pp  · 76,223 words

a serious business model, they turned to one of the hottest online destinations, Kickstarter, to get a feel for the potential market. If you don’t know about Kickstarter, well, now’s the time for you to find out: Kickstarter is a simple crowdfunding platform that allows individuals to post their creative projects

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question, the most interesting thing happening online right now. In short: If you can’t get a movie deal, you can post your project to Kickstarter, define the budget, and invite anybody and everybody who thinks it’s a good idea to become a backer. This doesn’t mean that a

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great ideas that can be explained in simple three-minute online videos, but very few people have the skills to then execute the ideas successfully. Kickstarter has reduced the mountain between ideation and execution into the proverbial molehill. Now, by posting their ideas with a clear financial structure on

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Kickstarter, businesses can find out—in short order—if there really is a market for their wares. Kickstarter is a New York startup that was founded in April 2009. According to Wikipedia, the company has

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raised more than $275 million for more than sixty-five thousand projects since it got started. Even more impressive, Kickstarter has a project success rate of close to 45 percent. (Success is defined by whether the project met or surpassed the threshold set by the

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a true vision for a product or service that doesn’t exist can be a solitary place to be… until now. DIRECT RELATIONSHIPS MINIMIZE RISK. Kickstarter does more than initiate interesting and obscure projects; it helps kick-start businesses by matching them with consumers who are interested in a direct relationship

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. The platform doesn’t begin and end with a project being funded. The entire journey is often shared (both on Kickstarter and other online social networking channels), so that the relationship between the consumers (the backers) and the creators can strengthen through the process. With

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Kickstarter, business owners can figure out if they’re producing something that people actually want, instead of producing something and then having to create the market

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for it. At first blush, Kickstarter seems foreign given how we have seen business to date, but doing some digging into it reveals that it may be the smartest way for

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this truly have an effect on business? Consider this last piece of data from the Kickstarter world: In February 2012, Yancey Strickler (one of Kickstarter’s co-founders) said in an interview with Talking Points Memo that Kickstarter was on course to disburse over $150 million to its various projects in 2012. To

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put this into perspective, the National Endowment for the Arts had a fiscal 2012 budget of $146 million. On top of that, several Kickstarter projects have topped $1 million in

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funding from backers. As Kickstarter’s popularity continues to grow and inspires new and exciting entrepreneurs, we’re starting to see that businesses that create

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suppliers to turn this watch from a video into a real-world product, they kept their direct relationships alive with constant updates on both the Kickstarter page and in their own social spaces. Their future consumers became active participants (evangelists and cheerleaders) for Pebble Technology—right down to choosing colors for

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), only two of which (Poke the Box and We Are All Weird) were authored by Godin. Once he finished his “experiment,” Godin then took to Kickstarter for the launch of another book titled The Icarus Deception. Within a handful of hours, this project hit its goal of $40,000 and then

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longer need a virtual mural to do this kind of shopping. E-commerce on mobile is a powerful reality (just ask Amazon or Fab or Kickstarter). In fact, it’s safe to say that these types of virtual mobile shopping experiences don’t just disrupt the retail industry—they disrupt everything

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anything and everything that touches Silicon Valley—the hotbed for startups. The challenge is that the biggest and brightest in this industry (Google, Facebook, Twitter, Kickstarter, LinkedIn…) simply do not employ a lot of people in relation to their valuations. Yes, the majority of these companies have many job openings, but

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of the modern consumer. The complexity comes in breaking down what all of this means. We now live in a world where online platforms like Kickstarter are enabling everyone to create a brand with global attention. We’re quickly moving into a DIY (do it yourself) culture (look back to The

The End of Big: How the Internet Makes David the New Goliath

by Nicco Mele  · 14 Apr 2013  · 270pp  · 79,992 words

first album didn’t sell enough to attract any labels, but we wanted to make another album.” So the band went to a site called Kickstarter, which enables artists to crowd source funding for their ventures. The band raised $8,612 from 149 backers, a sum that would let the group

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End of Big: a small band with a small audience that creates music without any of the normal channels for production, distribution, marketing or monetization. “Kickstarter helped us have it both ways, in a sense: we could do a serious album, somewhat harboring the hope that it would arouse a lot

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is probably what bands have always done when they want to record something but don’t have a record deal; what has changed is that Kickstarter (like other Web resources) reduces the search and transaction costs for hitting up friends (and in some cases others who find out about it), including

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distributing the rewards that incentivize the donors or investors. And it’s hardly a unique story. Among the over 26,000 projects successfully funded on Kickstarter since its inception in 2008, a third have been music albums, another third film or video, and about a tenth writing and publishing projects.20

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films premiering at Sundance Film Festival in 2012 were at least partially funded on Kickstarter, leading David Carr to remark in the New York Times that “at Sundance Kickstarter resembled a movie studio, but without the egos.”22 And Kickstarter is just one of several crowd-sourced funding sites. Others include Indiegogo.com

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, focused on funding indie films, and PledgeMusic.com, for musicians. After the Great Unknowns’ second album, Andy went back to academia. Kickstarter had given them enough funding to make another album but not enough to cover the marketing and touring expenses the band would accrue when promoting

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it up, moving on to other endeavors. In early 2011, Ze decided to return with A Show with Ze Frank, launching his effort with a Kickstarter project that had a $50,000 threshold. It quickly topped $150,000, and Ze was soon releasing videos again regularly—although this time on YouTube

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, with the benefit of YouTube’s Partner program for revenue sharing on top of his Kickstarter fund. It’s hard to imagine Ze’s show working on television; it is a quirky combination of video commentary, online community, and scavenger hunt

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our cultural space will change as a result. Rich Burlew has a Web-based comic called The Order of the Stick. He wanted to use Kickstarter to print hardcover books of his comic strips, something he’d never done before. He ended up with more than 110,000 orders at a

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total of $1,254,120—far in excess of his original goal of $57,750. Wired chronicled Kickstarter projects that have been mixed blessings for the creators and noted, “[Burlew] says he’s spending his days wrangling dodgy suppliers and devoting ‘more time

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platforms that support a certain kind of work: that which possesses artistic merit and which the new cultural marketplace does not necessarily reward. Companies like Kickstarter are the beginning of these new institutions, but we need more, and we need them soon. We must figure out how to encourage and compensate

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/entertainment/tv/blogs/the-stream/2012/03/aziz-ansari-dangerously-delicious-standup-online.html 19. http://bigthink.com/ideas/42326 20. Kickstarter statistics are constantly updated at http://www.kickstarter.com/help/stats. 21. http://www.kickstarter.com/blog/10000-successful-projects 22. http://mediadecoder.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/01/30/at-sundance

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-kickstarter-resembled-a-movie-studio-but-without-the-egos/ 23. http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/22/magazine/22madmen-t.html 24. Levine, Free Ride, 141.

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/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20111228/COMMENTARY/111229973 29. http://www.shortoftheweek.com/2012/01/05/has-hollywood-lost-its-way/ 30. David Downs, “Five Kickstarter Projects Get Slammed with Success,” Wired 20, no. 8 (2012): 25. 31. http://www1.umn.edu/news/news-releases/2012/UR_CONTENT_395531.html 32

Blood, Sweat, and Pixels: The Triumphant, Turbulent Stories Behind How Video Games Are Made

by Jason Schreier  · 4 Sep 2017  · 297pp  · 90,806 words

this book, each telling the story behind how a different video game was made. One chapter visits Irvine, California, for a look at how the Kickstarter-funded Pillars of Eternity helped Obsidian Entertainment recover from its darkest days. Another chapter heads to Seattle, Washington, where the twentysomething Eric Barone shut himself

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least partly on money from outside partners, even if that meant dealing with cancellations, layoffs, and bad deals. Double Fine had found a fourth option: Kickstarter, a “crowdfunding” website that had launched in 2009. Using this website, creators could pitch directly to their fans: You give us money; we’ll

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give you something cool. During Kickstarter’s first couple of years, users of the site were hobbyists, hoping to earn a few thousand dollars to shoot short films or build neat

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break six figures; Double Fine raised $1 million in twenty-four hours. In March 2012, just as Microsoft was canceling Stormlands, Double Fine’s Kickstarter concluded, having raised over $3.3 million from 87,142 backers. No other crowdfunded video game had earned even a tenth of that. By then

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, Obsidian’s staff were all paying attention. With Kickstarter, a developer wouldn’t have to rely on any other companies. Independent studios wouldn’t have to sign away the rights to their intellectual properties

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the Stormlands team, the studio still had two dozen developers who needed work. Thanks to the Double Fine Adventure and other high-profile projects, the Kickstarter bug had spread throughout Obsidian. Several employees were high on the idea of crowdfunding, including two top veterans: Adam Brennecke and Josh Sawyer. Both had

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worked on Stormlands—Brennecke as a programmer, Sawyer as the director—and both thought that Kickstarter would be the perfect fit for a work-for-hire studio like theirs. During meetings, as management tried to figure out the company’s next

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by the time they’d finished South Park. Then Josh Sawyer and Adam Brennecke came to Urquhart with an ultimatum: they wanted to launch a Kickstarter. They preferred to do it with Obsidian, but if Urquhart continued to stonewall, they’d quit, start their own company, and do it themselves.

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.* Urquhart relented, and within the next few days, Adam Brennecke was locking himself alone in an office, trying to come up with the perfect Kickstarter. One thing became immediately clear to everyone who was left at Obsidian: they needed to make an old-school RPG. Much of the company’s

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trying to develop a brand-new 3-D game. If they kept their team small and somehow managed to raise a couple million dollars on Kickstarter, even selling just a few hundred thousand copies could turn Obsidian’s fortunes around. Adam Brennecke spent the next two months working on a

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Avellone, and other veterans at Obsidian including Tim Cain, a designer best known for his work on the original Fallout. Before they could launch the Kickstarter, they needed to nail down every detail, so they spent weeks mapping out a schedule, a budget, and even reward tiers. “There was a

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’d ditch the features that felt obsolete after the last ten years of innovation in game development. Brennecke told them he’d budgeted for a Kickstarter goal of $1.1 million, but he secretly thought they could hit $2 million. “Obsidian employees want to make this game,” he wrote. The

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owners agreed. They said Brennecke could put a small team together and launch the Kickstarter in September. From there, Brennecke pulled Josh Sawyer away from the dreary world of pitching and asked him to start designing the game. They knew

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Torment and put them all together in one delicious stew. For the next few weeks, Adam Brennecke and Josh Sawyer met daily with their small Kickstarter crew. They pored over every word, every screenshot, and every second of their video pitch. They battled against last-minute second-guessing from some of

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, Armored Warfare would turn into an important financial security blanket for Urquhart and crew. What it meant was that they weren’t gambling everything on Kickstarter. Just a few things. On Friday, September 14, 2012, a group of Obsidian employees gathered at Adam Brennecke’s desk and hovered behind him,

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hour earlier, when a big red text alert had informed Brennecke that there was an ambiguous “problem with the campaign,” but a quick call to Kickstarter HQ had resolved the issue just in time. At exactly ten o’clock, Brennecke hit the launch button. When the page loaded, the ticker

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very little game development happening there. What you’d have found instead was dozens of people mashing F5 on their keyboards, watching the Project Eternity Kickstarter raise hundreds of dollars per minute. In the afternoon, realizing that they weren’t going to get much work done, Feargus Urquhart took a group

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and went to Dave & Buster’s across the street, where they ordered a round of beers and proceeded to stare silently at their phones, refreshing Kickstarter. By the end of the day they’d hit $700,000. The next few weeks were a whirlwind of fundraising, updates, and interviews. Project

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Eternity raised its original goal of $1.1 million a day after the Kickstarter went live, but Urquhart and his crew weren’t content settling for the minimum—they wanted to raise as much as possible. More money wouldn

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people and take more time on the project (which would probably lead to a better game). As Brennecke scrambled to produce a regular stream of Kickstarter updates, the team began to add stretch goals—features they’d add to the game if they hit certain funding thresholds. It became a

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They drank, sang, and watched the final dollars pour in. When the countdown hit zero, they had raised $3,986,794—nearly four times their Kickstarter goal and double what Adam Brennecke, the most optimistic of the bunch, had hoped they could get. With additional backing they received on PayPal and

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of ensuring that Eternity’s pieces would all fit together. He was also responsible for the budget. During the first few weeks after the Kickstarter ended, his job was to plan a schedule and figure out exactly how much money the team could spend on each part of the game

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this check.’ Production holds the checkbook.” Thanks to crowdfunding, Brennecke had over $4 million in that checkbook, which was a lot of money for a Kickstarter project. But compared with modern major video game budgets, which can cap out at hundreds of millions of dollars, it was minuscule. Using the standard

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a team of twenty working for twenty months. Four million dollars could even fund a team of two people working for two hundred months—although Kickstarter backers might not enjoy waiting seventeen years for their game. That was all on paper, though. In real life the math was never that

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going upwards to the south, it would feel disorienting, like you’d just walked into an M. C. Escher painting. In the months following the Kickstarter, the ever-expanding Project Eternity team battled over dozens of these creative decisions, reducing the scope and cutting features as they tried to figure out

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save time and money. There was no big publisher demanding progress reports, but Obsidian did feel obligated to offer regular updates to the 74,000 Kickstarter backers who had funded Eternity. The upside of talking to fans was that they could be open and honest without worrying about a publisher’s

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to developing in isolation, getting feedback from the outside world only when they released a new trailer or wandered around a trade show. With the Kickstarter approach, they’d get criticism in real time, which could help make the game better in a way that just hadn’t happened on

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previous projects. Josh Sawyer, who read the Kickstarter backer forums nearly every day, would constantly read and absorb fan feedback, to the point where he scrapped an entire system they’d planned after

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finally came up with a logo that pleased the whole team. On December 10, 2013, Brandon Adler, the production lead, posted an update on Kickstarter. “Through the hard work of the Project Eternity team we are proud to present our first in-game teaser trailer,” he wrote. The trailer zipped

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seem critical. But with Pillars of Eternity, Adam Brennecke had a unique problem: Obsidian had already promised many of those features to fans. During the Kickstarter, the developers had made a big show out of having a huge, fifteen-level optional dungeon that they now had to construct, no matter how

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had to be there, and so they built Twin Elms, knowing that if they didn’t deliver on every feature they’d promised in the Kickstarter, fans would feel betrayed. In May 2014, Obsidian had to switch its focus again. It had struck a deal with the game publisher Paradox

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August 18 drew closer, Adam Brennecke realized that the game wasn’t in great shape, and sure enough, when Obsidian released the Pillars beta to Kickstarter backers, there was immediate criticism. “We got a lot of negative first impressions because it was so buggy, unfortunately,” Brennecke said. “I think [the

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Sawyer explained that trying to release the game in November would be a disaster. The team needed more time. Yes, they were out of Kickstarter money and would now have to dip into Obsidian’s own funds, but for a game like Pillars of Eternity—Obsidian’s most important game

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. Critics loved it. “It’s the most captivating, rewarding RPG I’ve played on a PC in years,” wrote one reviewer.* Outside of their Kickstarter backers, Obsidian sold over 700,000 copies of Pillars in the game’s first year, exceeding most of their expectations and ensuring that a sequel

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balance patches for a year after launch, tweaking attributes and class abilities in response to fans’ feedback. And the team kept interacting with backers on Kickstarter, keeping them up to date on patches and other projects Obsidian was working on. “Because eighty thousand people or so said they wanted this, and

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’s developers argue and try to find common ground over the direction of the sequel and how they would approach a second campaign. Rather than Kickstarter, they’d decided to put this one on Fig, a crowdfunding site that Feargus Urquhart had helped create. Obsidian wanted to return to crowdfunding

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combination of anxiety and sleep deprivation was making them all jittery. “Look, everybody,” Velasco said to the camera. “We’re going to fucking launch the Kickstarter right now. . . . Oh my god. OK. Here it goes. Ready to launch.” Nick Wozniak pressed the button. “Oh my god, you have to confirm,”

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god,” Velasco said. “OK. All right. OK, you guys. All right. All right. Are you ready? We gotta get to work.” The Shovel Knight Kickstarter was now live, asking fans for $75,000 to make their dream game, although unlike Obsidian’s Pillars of Eternity, this campaign didn’t start

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if Velasco’s team took over that second office and became its own semi-autonomous entity? WayForward’s management had been thinking about launching a Kickstarter—what if Velasco’s team handled that? What if they came up with something totally original, a Nintendo-style game that they could all be

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The only real option was crowdfunding, not just to earn money for their game, but to start building a base of loyal fans. “We thought, Kickstarter is probably the best way we can grow a community that is behind the game the whole way through,” said David D’Angelo. And so

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going to put together this project and it’s going to be really great and we’re going to put it up on something called Kickstarter, where we take donations.’ His response was, ‘Well, let me know when your begging site is up.’” They called their company Yacht Club Games,

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eyed developers, sitting in a one-bedroom apartment and working on Ikea furniture, it felt morbidly ironic. And on March 14, 2013, they launched the Kickstarter. A brief trailer, scored by the well-regarded composer Jake Kaufman (who went on to write all of Shovel Knight’s music), showcased the art

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that Shovel Knight wasn’t going to make enough money. Or, perhaps worse, that it’d reach the absolute minimum goal. “You’d just have Kickstarter open on a second monitor or background, whatever you’re doing,” said Nick Wozniak. “You’re constantly looking, trying to do the math, doing

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a sudden flood of money, it did help Yacht Club get the word out, and on March 29, 2013, with two weeks left on the Kickstarter campaign, they reached their goal of $75,000. They could still raise money until the campaign ended in mid-April, but now they were

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actively participate and spread the word about Shovel Knight rather than simply waiting around for the game. Right after PAX, Yacht Club started running daily Kickstarter updates with art contests, character reveals, and stretch goals. At $115,000 they’d make one of the boss knights playable. At $145,000

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like the Game Grumps later played through the demo, they reached hundreds of thousands of people. During the last few days of the Shovel Knight Kickstarter, the funding skyrocketed, going from a few thousand dollars to upward of $30,000 to $40,000 every day. It was enough to make

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and comments to Yacht Club, asking them to stop updating Shovel Knight and just make something new already. But the team had committed to those Kickstarter stretch goals: three boss campaigns and a multiplayer mode. “That’s been our biggest mistake, for good and for bad: we promised a lot

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million, they estimated—into a bunch of campaigns that they were selling for a whopping zero dollars. After all, Yacht Club had promised in the Kickstarter that Plague Knight, Specter Knight, and King Knight would all be free. Going back on that promise would be a bad look. The optimistic

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One were both quite successful. * Avellone had even partnered with Brian Fargo, the founder of Interplay and a longtime friend of the company, on the Kickstarter for a game called Wasteland 2. * This figure is according to Todd Howard, the director of Skyrim, who mentioned it in a November 2016 interview

…

with the website Glixel. * Fulfilling and shipping Kickstarter rewards like T-shirts and portraits would drain hundreds of thousands from that sum, so the actual budget was closer to $4.5 million. * An

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Club could’ve existed or that I would exist as a designer without all the things I’ve learned at that place.” * Before launching the Kickstarter, they contacted a writer at IGN, Colin Moriarty, who they figured would be a fan of Shovel Knight because he had started his career

Open for Business Harnessing the Power of Platform Ecosystems

by Lauren Turner Claire, Laure Claire Reillier and Benoit Reillier  · 14 Oct 2017  · 240pp  · 78,436 words

, Facebook Buyers of goods Guests Passengers Car renters Passengers Viewers Amex, Visa, Mastercard Upwork, Hired Tinder, Match.com, Happn UberEATS, Deliveroo AngelList, Seedrs TaskRabbit, Stootie Kickstarter, Indiegogo Card owners Businesses Single guys dating Buyers of meals at home Investors in start-ups Buyers of services Buyers of new products Sellers of

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network) responsible for the development and management of the platform itself and its ecosystem. For example, eBay Inc. (commercial organization), Kiva (not-for-profit organization), Kickstarter (public-benefit corporation), Reddit (community). Sides: the distinct and diverse groups of customers or entities being connected by the platform. For two-sided platforms, they

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jointly called ‘platform participants’. • Producers: individuals, communities, businesses or entities delivering value created on and/or through the platform. For example, eBay sellers, Kiva borrowers, Kickstarter creators, Reddit content contributors. The producers side can be further segmented if it is made of different customer groups. For example, eBay sellers can be

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• 79 Users (or consumers): individuals, communities, businesses or entities that access, consume and utilize the value provided by producers. For example, eBay buyers, Kiva lenders, Kickstarter backers, Reddit readers. Partners: individuals, communities, businesses or entities that collaborate with platform owners and add value for the platform participants. For example, the Airbnb

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their customers and people in their network. This can be through word of mouth, social media or platform tools aimed at helping producers advertise. Indiegogo, Kickstarter and other crowdfunding platforms have viral invite loops enabling project owners to invite people in their network to join in and 110 3 4 5

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connecting students all over the world with universities (edX, FUN, Coursera). Money sharing, where projects can be financed through crowdfunding or crowd-lending platforms (Kiva, Kickstarter, Lending Club). Time/service sharing, where people can share their time and expertise, on an ad hoc or regular basis with others in need (Stootie

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few sharing economy platforms have recently taken a stance to address the profit conundrum. Benefit Corporations include Etsy, Juno, and Kickstarter, which reincorporated as a benefit corporation in 2015.12 Kickstarter’s mission is driven first by how well they bring creative projects to life before The future of platforms 211 the

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size of their profits. Kickstarter measures project success rates (typically only 9% of projects fail to deliver results)13 as a key driver of added value. It is also very

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www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/2moyiz/serious_ how_should_reddit_inc_distribute_a/. 12 21 September 2015, Kickstarter blog, www.kickstarter.com/blog/kickstarter-is-now-abenefit-corporation?ref=charter. 13 Kickstarter fulfilment report, www.kickstarter.com/fulfillment. 14 At the time of writing, the Singapore Autonomous Vehicle Initiative (SAVI) is running live trials

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127, 128; regulation 174, 186, 199 Instagram 70, 99, 107, 110, 133 insurance 164 intervention 175 intimacy 156 IT infrastructure 52 key enablers 51, 52 Kickstarter 78, 109, 210 La Belle Asiette 93–4, 99 labour laws 177 Launchworks 21, 157, 206, 208 leakage 49, 126, 147–8 leverage 61, 62

Digital Bank: Strategies for Launching or Becoming a Digital Bank

by Chris Skinner  · 27 Aug 2013  · 329pp  · 95,309 words

focus upon in depth. There are many new financial service operations emerging using social media covering Capital Markets (Etoro, Stocktwits, etc), Corporate Banking (Funding Circle, Kickstarter, Market Invoice, Platform Black, The Receivables Exchange, etc), Retail Banking (Zopa, Moven, Simple, Bitcoin, etc), Payments (Currency Cloud, Square, mPowa, etc) and Insurance (Friendsurance). These

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money of the masses into a nice venture fund to get things started. Much of the focus of crowdfunding has been around Kickstarter, the American leader in this space. Kickstarter provides a platform for funding by pre-selling your idea, rather than providing equity in the business. For example, you have a

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conceptual music idea, and you pre-sell the idea through Kickstarter with the hope of getting enough monies to fund the implementation of the idea (unlike other sites where you get an equity stake in the

…

business). Kickstarter kicked off in business in April 2009 and, three years later, had seeded $200 million in funds across 50,000 projects. Most of these projects

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to entertainment and the arts (about sixty percent of all projects), although some are technology and related fields. For example, in their most recent success, Kickstarter generated $10 million in funding for a new venture called Pebble. Pebble is a smartwatch that will connect to a smartphone. According to the Wall

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Street Journal, it raised more than $1 million in its first day on Kickstarter (April 17 2012) based upon an offer to pledge $115 to pre-order the watch. By mid-May 2012, Pebble had achieved its goal of

…

raising the funding required. In fact, about 41% of the projects listed fail with only half getting the funding needed. However, crowdfunding is big business – Kickstarter had $100 million of pledges by May 2011 increasing to $250 million by May 2012 – and now the service has expanded into other regions of

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Smava, Prosper, Lending Circle et al; Currency Cloud is nibbling away at the cross-border activities of banks, as is Bitcoin, Azimo, Klickex et al; Kickstarter is nibbling away at the commercial banking operations of banks, as are Receivables Exchange, Funding Circle et al; and eToro is nibbling away at the

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getting into banking and finance. The upstarts are trying to eat the margins from products, processing and relationships. Upstarts are focused upon products (Zopa, Wonga, Kickstarter etc); processing (Currency Cloud, Fidor, Stocktwits etc); and relationships (Moven, Simple, Alior etc). Incumbents are hell bent at preserving the status quo, ceterus parabus, caveat

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Receivables Exchange, Urica and more), Payday Lending (Wonga, Cash America, Advance America, et al), Goalsetting and gamification (SmartyPig, Moven, Simple and more), Crowdfunding (Funding Circle, Kickstarter, Indiegogo, crowdrise, razoo and more), and the list goes on in each and every area of banking. There are 100s of these startups and established

…

through this credit crisis that were previously offered, such as credit, other services gain traction. This is clear from the rise of crowdfunding platforms like kickstarter and social lending services like Zopa, Smava and Prosper. For example, the first social lending platform launched in 2005 in the UK, Zopa. Its mission

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Startup Communities: Building an Entrepreneurial Ecosystem in Your City

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The Man Behind the Microchip: Robert Noyce and the Invention of Silicon Valley

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Chaos Monkeys: Obscene Fortune and Random Failure in Silicon Valley

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Hogg

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The Bad-Ass Librarians of Timbuktu: And Their Race to Save the World's Most Precious Manuscripts

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Big Debt Crises

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The Misadventures of Awkward Black Girl

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Wanderers: A Novel

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Trick Mirror: Reflections on Self-Delusion

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Transaction Man: The Rise of the Deal and the Decline of the American Dream

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We Are the Nerds: The Birth and Tumultuous Life of Reddit, the Internet's Culture Laboratory

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We Are Electric: Inside the 200-Year Hunt for Our Body's Bioelectric Code, and What the Future Holds

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Still Broke: Walmart's Remarkable Transformation and the Limits of Socially Conscious Capitalism

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The Future Is Analog: How to Create a More Human World

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Beautiful Solutions: A Toolbox for Liberation

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News and How to Use It: What to Believe in a Fake News World

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The Controlled Demolition of the American Empire

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Stakeholder Capitalism: A Global Economy That Works for Progress, People and Planet

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The Food Lab: Better Home Cooking Through Science

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Blockchain Chicken Farm: And Other Stories of Tech in China's Countryside

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Insight Guides South America (Travel Guide eBook)

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Digital Gold: Bitcoin and the Inside Story of the Misfits and Millionaires Trying to Reinvent Money

by Nathaniel Popper  · 18 May 2015  · 387pp  · 112,868 words

Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future

by Ashlee Vance  · 18 May 2015  · 370pp  · 129,096 words

Age of Discovery: Navigating the Risks and Rewards of Our New Renaissance

by Ian Goldin and Chris Kutarna  · 23 May 2016  · 437pp  · 113,173 words

Blueprint for Revolution: How to Use Rice Pudding, Lego Men, and Other Nonviolent Techniques to Galvanize Communities, Overthrow Dictators, or Simply Change the World

by Srdja Popovic and Matthew Miller  · 3 Feb 2015  · 202pp  · 8,448 words

The Grid: The Fraying Wires Between Americans and Our Energy Future

by Gretchen Bakke  · 25 Jul 2016  · 433pp  · 127,171 words

Utopia for Realists: The Case for a Universal Basic Income, Open Borders, and a 15-Hour Workweek

by Rutger Bregman  · 13 Sep 2014  · 235pp  · 62,862 words

Ten Billion Tomorrows: How Science Fiction Technology Became Reality and Shapes the Future

by Brian Clegg  · 8 Dec 2015  · 315pp  · 92,151 words

The Best Interface Is No Interface: The Simple Path to Brilliant Technology (Voices That Matter)

by Golden Krishna  · 10 Feb 2015  · 271pp  · 62,538 words

NeoAddix

by Jon Courtenay Grimwood  · 16 Jan 1997  · 338pp  · 92,385 words

Ours to Hack and to Own: The Rise of Platform Cooperativism, a New Vision for the Future of Work and a Fairer Internet

by Trebor Scholz and Nathan Schneider  · 14 Aug 2017  · 237pp  · 67,154 words

4th Rock From the Sun: The Story of Mars

by Nicky Jenner  · 5 Apr 2017  · 294pp  · 87,986 words

Kill All Normies: Online Culture Wars From 4Chan and Tumblr to Trump and the Alt-Right

by Angela Nagle  · 6 Jun 2017  · 122pp  · 38,022 words

New Year, Same Trash: Resolutions I Absolutely Did Not Keep

by Samantha Irby  · 24 Jan 2017  · 22pp  · 5,377 words

The Simulation Hypothesis

by Rizwan Virk  · 31 Mar 2019  · 315pp  · 89,861 words

Exoplanets: Hidden Worlds and the Quest for Extraterrestrial Life

by Donald Goldsmith  · 9 Sep 2018  · 265pp  · 76,875 words

The Rough Guide to Jamaica

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Volt Rush: The Winners and Losers in the Race to Go Green

by Henry Sanderson  · 12 Sep 2022  · 292pp  · 87,720 words

IRL: Finding Realness, Meaning, and Belonging in Our Digital Lives

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Moon Oregon Trail Road Trip: Historic Sites, Small Towns, and Scenic Landscapes Along the Legendary Westward Route

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The Rough Guide to Sweden (Travel Guide eBook)

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Age of the City: Why Our Future Will Be Won or Lost Together

by Ian Goldin and Tom Lee-Devlin  · 21 Jun 2023  · 248pp  · 73,689 words

An Elegant Puzzle: Systems of Engineering Management

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The Age of Extraction: How Tech Platforms Conquered the Economy and Threaten Our Future Prosperity

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Lonely Planet Hong Kong

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Money in the Metaverse: Digital Assets, Online Identities, Spatial Computing and Why Virtual Worlds Mean Real Business

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Inner Entrepreneur: A Proven Path to Profit and Peace

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Experience Great Britain 2

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My Friend Anna: The True Story of a Fake Heiress

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Indelible City: Dispossession and Defiance in Hong Kong

by Louisa Lim  · 19 Apr 2022

The History of Money

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Second World: Empires and Influence in the New Global Order

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How to Run the World: Charting a Course to the Next Renaissance

by Parag Khanna  · 11 Jan 2011  · 251pp  · 76,868 words

Thank You for Being Late: An Optimist's Guide to Thriving in the Age of Accelerations

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Animal: The Autobiography of a Female Body

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The Men's Health Big Book of Exercises: Four Weeks to a Leaner, Stronger, More Muscular You!

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Snakes and Ladders: The Great British Social Mobility Myth

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Stakeholder Capitalism: A Global Economy That Works for Progress, People and Planet

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Drugs Without the Hot Air

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HBase: The Definitive Guide

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The River Cottage Fish Book: The Definitive Guide to Sourcing and Cooking Sustainable Fish and Shellfish

by Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall  · 19 Nov 2007

Lonely Planet Andalucia: Chapter From Spain Travel Guide

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Rough Guide Directions Bruges & Ghent

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Bootstrap

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Fluent Forever: How to Learn Any Language Fast and Never Forget It

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Show Your Work!: 10 Ways to Share Your Creativity and Get Discovered

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The Second Curve: Thoughts on Reinventing Society

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Pulling Strings With Puppet: Configuration Management Made Easy

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Randomistas: How Radical Researchers Changed Our World

by Andrew Leigh  · 14 Sep 2018  · 340pp  · 94,464 words

HWFG: Here We F**king Go

by Chris McQueer  · 8 Nov 2018  · 252pp  · 65,990 words

Getting Things Done for Hackers

by Lars Wirzenius  · 15 Jun 2012  · 32pp  · 10,468 words

The Longing for Less: Living With Minimalism

by Kyle Chayka  · 21 Jan 2020  · 237pp  · 69,985 words

The Hype Machine: How Social Media Disrupts Our Elections, Our Economy, and Our Health--And How We Must Adapt

by Sinan Aral  · 14 Sep 2020  · 475pp  · 134,707 words

Making It Happen: Fred Goodwin, RBS and the Men Who Blew Up the British Economy

by Iain Martin  · 11 Sep 2013  · 387pp  · 119,244 words

Greece Travel Guide

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Beginners: The Joy and Transformative Power of Lifelong Learning

by Tom Vanderbilt  · 5 Jan 2021  · 312pp  · 92,131 words

The Rare Metals War

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Die With Zero: Getting All You Can From Your Money and Your Life

by Bill Perkins  · 27 Jul 2020  · 200pp  · 63,266 words

Uncharted: How to Map the Future

by Margaret Heffernan  · 20 Feb 2020  · 335pp  · 97,468 words

The Jobs to Be Done Playbook: Align Your Markets, Organization, and Strategy Around Customer Needs

by Jim Kalbach  · 6 Apr 2020

We Are Bellingcat: Global Crime, Online Sleuths, and the Bold Future of News

by Eliot Higgins  · 2 Mar 2021  · 277pp  · 70,506 words

Happy Inside: How to Harness the Power of Home for Health and Happiness

by Michelle Ogundehin  · 29 Apr 2020  · 245pp  · 78,125 words

The Miracle Pill

by Peter Walker  · 21 Jan 2021  · 372pp  · 98,659 words

Grow Green: Tips and Advice for Gardening With Intention

by Jen Chillingsworth  · 31 Mar 2021  · 122pp  · 36,274 words

First Time Ever: A Memoir

by Peggy Seeger  · 2 Oct 2017

Green Swans: The Coming Boom in Regenerative Capitalism

by John Elkington  · 6 Apr 2020  · 384pp  · 93,754 words

Think Like a Rocket Scientist: Simple Strategies You Can Use to Make Giant Leaps in Work and Life

by Ozan Varol  · 13 Apr 2020  · 389pp  · 112,319 words

Filterworld: How Algorithms Flattened Culture

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