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
This Could Be Our Future: A Manifesto for a More Generous World
by Yancey Strickler · 29 Oct 2019 · 254pp · 61,387 words
-known music critic, but I carved out a niche doing it for almost a decade. My dream came true. And then Kickstarter happened. Perry Chen first had the idea for Kickstarter in late 2001 or early 2002. He and I met in New York in 2005 and quickly became friends. Soon Perry
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joined as cofounder and head of design not long after. The three of us and a lot of other people worked very hard to make Kickstarter and put it into the world. At the moment I write this, billions of dollars have been put into the hands of creative people through
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Kickstarter since it launched in 2009. More than 100,000 new ideas exist because of it. Public art by Ai Weiwei, Oscar-winning movies, Grammy-winning
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albums, new fields of technology, and thousands of books, artworks, and other creative projects are just some of the things created through Kickstarter. Kickstarter is a globally recognized tool, but little about it has ever been typical. From the beginning we exclusively focused on helping creative projects come to
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for the long haul. We said publicly that we’d never sell the company or take it public. We would do what was best for Kickstarter’s mission, not use it to do what was best for us. Unlike Silicon Valley companies burning through piles of cash, we stayed small and
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broader industry of crowdfunding. Though we weren’t the first to launch such a site, the look, feel, and functionality of crowdfunding is based on Kickstarter. A lot of online political fund-raising, too. (Sorry about that.) Crowdfunding is one of those ideas that seems obvious now. Groups of people putting
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. “Nobody’s going to give a stranger money,” they would say. “The world doesn’t work that way.” These people would tell us to make Kickstarter more like an investment: “Give me financial upside in projects. That’s how the real world works.” That’s exactly the world I wanted to
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. Ten years later, billions of dollars have changed hands and tens of millions of people have experienced crowdfunding just the way it was imagined. Through Kickstarter, GoFundMe, and others. A whole new economy based on the generosity of people supporting a fellow human being or idea. The status quo’s view
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some version of this that we all still believe. But it’s not true. The truth is that everything is made up. The same way Kickstarter was made up. Some people think of something and try to bring it into existence. If other people start believing in this new idea, it
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minds around. Or at least it was for me. I objectively knew this but didn’t truly understand it for most of my life. Then Kickstarter happened. Me, an ordinary person from a farm in rural Virginia, made a ripple in the world. It showed me that things were way more
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’s happening. We have to find a way out. I proposed we turn our backs on these forces and create a new path. I used Kickstarter as an example of a way it could be done. We had maintained our idealism and independence by not financially maximizing. If companies were willing
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to make different choices, they could, too. Normally I would be onstage selling people on using Kickstarter. What was I selling instead—not selling? Who wants to buy that? These aren’t the kinds of things you’re supposed to say. I
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, Orlando, Chicago, and Jackson, Mississippi. In every one of those rooms I discovered a similar yearning for a new way to think about the future. * * * ■ ■ ■ ■ Kickstarter gave me a unique window into how ideas work. Both through the experience of cofounding the platform, and by watching thousands of ideas come to
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life through it. When we first started telling people about Kickstarter, there was no website to point people to. The term “crowdfunding” was years away from being known. Using only words, we had to describe the
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you talk about something, the more you learn what works about it and what doesn’t. Through practice and iteration, we learned to talk about Kickstarter in a way that people connected with. Eventually I could even tell when someone had stopped listening to me. “Oh no, I’ve lost them
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potential investors who wanted financial upside in projects. But there were many early believers, too. Our creative friends especially got it. They lived the problem Kickstarter was created to solve. They knew firsthand how limited the paths to funding were. It’s no coincidence that some of
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Kickstarter’s earliest investors came from the creative world. The day after Kickstarter launched in 2009, I wrote a blog post titled “Why Kickstarter?” It reads: The Beatles were turned down by nearly every record label. George Lucas
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who doesn’t have a rich, benevolent uncle) sees only profit or predictability. Not art or passion or talent or an incredible story of inspiration. Kickstarter aims to give each one of us a chance to fund our ideas, starting directly with the people who are closest to it (friends, fans
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, grants—to discover that we can offer each other value through creation without a middleman dictating the product and terms. I had no idea whether Kickstarter would ever get close to these lofty goals when I wrote this. A decade later it has and then some
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backed by several hundred people. So did Oculus Rift, which was a prototype in a garage when its Kickstarter launched. Pebble invented smartwatches with its string of Kickstarter projects. Hundreds of restaurants, movie theaters, galleries, and other public spaces are open today thanks to their backers and the platform. All these projects
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began as ideas just like Kickstarter itself. During Kickstarter’s first year, I reviewed nearly every project when it launched. Over the years I personally helped musicians, artists, dancers, game makers, technologists, designers
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about financial maximization with people around the world, it’s felt like talking to creators about the challenge of funding ideas in the days before Kickstarter. Awareness of the problem is acute and widespread. I felt it when, early on, I pitched the book to classmates in a leadership program and
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. When society undergoes major change, people discover that the world isn’t as solid as they thought. I learned that in my humble way with Kickstarter. It changed me. I felt like I gained sight. I could better see the world for what it was. In the pages ahead, I hope
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a bad thing. Buybacks are simply a tool for companies to distribute their money. While I was CEO at Kickstarter, we used buybacks to distribute profits to shareholders and employees. Because Kickstarter won’t sell or go public, buybacks and dividends are the company’s best options for sharing the financial rewards
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. “Be paranoid.” “Disrupt yourself.” “Go to war.” Was this Guns & Ammo? The National Enquirer? Adbusters? It was Harvard Business Review. At the time I was Kickstarter’s CEO. I’d been one of the company’s cofounders and leaders for nearly a decade. But in the time since I’d taken
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the CEO seat almost two years before, Kickstarter had grown to more than one hundred employees. What had been an exciting adventure felt more serious by the day. To the outside world, we
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were a big success. In 2013, the leading tech site TechCrunch nominated Kickstarter for “Best Overall Startup” alongside Twitter, Uber, Snapchat, and Cloudflare. Despite being by far the smallest nominee by team size
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, Kickstarter won. But inside myself, I struggled with anxiety. The pressure I felt was immense. Creative people relied on our tool to fund their ideas. Employees
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somewhere. If I just worked hard enough, I’d find it. NOT FOR BREAD ALONE Even as I had my inner battles, Kickstarter was secure. From day one, Kickstarter has been a purpose-oriented company, not a profit-oriented company. We weren’t interested in playing the game others were playing. We
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had deliberately taken ourselves out of that race. Kickstarter was the opposite of Zenefits and Groupon. While they raised huge amounts of venture capital and set expectations for a big payday, we saw the
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of trap. * * * ■ ■ ■ ■ While writing this book I gave a talk to a couple hundred CEOs at an event in upstate New York. Along with the Kickstarter story, I presented the case that financial maximization was hurting us. I could see by their faces that some in the audience really connected with
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them, and their current needs. Are shifts like these just window dressing or do they actually matter? I speak from experience: yes, they do. When Kickstarter became a public benefit corporation in 2015, it was as if the company shifted Bentos. As a traditionally structured for-profit company
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and committing to what its Now Us, Future Me, and Future Us values said it should do, too. Becoming a PBC reflected the values that Kickstarter had always had. But those same values put us at some theoretical risk as a traditionally structured for-profit company. Theoretically our public statements about
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and identity, they had no standing compared to shareholders’ legally backed demands. As a PBC, on the other hand, Kickstarter’s mission and commitments are embedded in the company’s legal foundation. Kickstarter’s PBC charter lays out fifteen commitments. They include pledges to: “Not use loopholes or other esoteric but legal
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5% of its after-tax profit towards arts and music education, and to organizations fighting to end systemic inequality” These commitments established redlines for how Kickstarter must always behave. The values they represent aren’t vague platitudes. They have teeth. Within a year of becoming a PBC
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, Kickstarter began publishing a new, separate website called The Creative Independent. The Creative Independent is a growing resource of practical and emotional advice for creative people.
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for creativity. The Creative Independent has no advertising, charges nothing for its content, and has a full-time staff. Kickstarter pays for all of it. And yet there’s no Kickstarter logo anywhere. Kickstarter is listed in the site’s footer as its publisher, but otherwise derives no direct benefit. So why do
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it? Because The Creative Independent is a value-creating project according to the commitments in Kickstarter’s PBC charter. The site supports the creative community, provides resources and educational material for creative people, and elevates the work of artists and creators
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committed to growing, and The Creative Independent supports with distinction. The Creative Independent—or other similarly focused projects Kickstarter may develop in the future—doesn’t need to make money to make value. PATAGONIA, TESLA, AND FUTURE US Few companies are more radical in
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like Taylor Swift or Adele. They’re already rich and famous. It doesn’t cost them anything. And it’s easy for Chick-fil-A, Kickstarter, Patagonia, and Tesla to act in generous ways. They’re already successful, too. There’s something to that. To go back to Maslow’s hierarchy
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Charles Adler, thank you for a lifetime-shaping partnership. This book wouldn’t exist without the experiences we created and shared together. To everyone at Kickstarter past and present, thank you for your friendship, your dedication, for the ways you helped me grow as a person and a leader, and for
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a socially positive or negative way. This idea stayed with me. How could our measurement systems be so broad and blunt? While cofounding and leading Kickstarter, these instincts became stronger. We were clear on money’s importance: we wanted to be independent, we wanted autonomy, and this meant we needed to
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. How a desire to constantly grow and enrich oneself leads to near-term thinking and abandonment of values. At the encouragement of a colleague at Kickstarter, Julie Wood, I spoke about financial maximization at Web Summit, as mentioned in the book. I continued to touch on the subject in every talk
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I gave as CEO thereafter. In 2017 I stepped down as Kickstarter’s CEO and began thinking more about the role of financial value versus other values. What was the history of our belief in financial value
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about young people and capitalism was reported in Time magazine (“American Capitalism’s Great Crisis,” May 11, 2014). CHAPTER ONE: A SIMPLE IDEA based on Kickstarter: Before Kickstarter launched, the musicians Marillion and Jill Sobule, as well as the platforms ArtistShare, DonorsChoose, Fundable, Indiegogo, and Sellaband, had done crowdfunding or something like
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focus on long-term value creation. By 2010, the first US state legalized this new structure. As of 2018, thirty-five states now permit PBCs. Kickstarter, Patagonia, Method, and others are among the organizations that have benefited from their work to bridge the value gap. end systemic inequality
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: Kickstarter’s full public benefit charter can be found online: https://www.kickstarter.com/charter. website called The Creative Independent: The Creative Independent can be found online at http://www.thecreativeindependent.com
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Jogging (Bowerman), 186 Johnson, Magic, 159 Kahneman, Daniel, 22–23, 113 Kalanick, Travis, 98 Kennedy, John F., 184–85, 187 Keynes, John Maynard, 193–95 Kickstarter, 15, 115, 175 charter of, 170–71 creative projects of, 5–7, 10–13 founding of, 4–8, 236, 247 as PBC, 6, 9–12
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, 95–96, 100 Zinkin, Harold, 185 Zuckerberg, Mark, 53, 98, 109–10 ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ ABOUT THE AUTHOR Yancey Strickler is the cofounder and former CEO of Kickstarter. He has appeared on NBC, CNN, MSNBC, NPR Marketplace, Planet Money, KCRW, PBS, and the BBC. He's been profiled in Wired, Financial Times, The
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
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
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
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
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
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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
Future Perfect: The Case for Progress in a Networked Age
by Steven Johnson · 14 Jul 2012 · 184pp · 53,625 words
most successful of a new generation of “crowdfunding” sites that organize financial support for creative or charitable causes through distributed networks of small donors. On Kickstarter, artists upload short descriptions of their projects: a book of poetry that’s only half completed, a song cycle that has yet to be recorded
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, a script for a short film that needs a crew to get produced. Kickstarter’s founders defined “creative” quite broadly: technological creativity is welcome, as are innovations in such fields as food or design. More than a few microbreweries
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have been launched on Kickstarter, and one of the most successful early projects (in terms of funds raised) involved turning the iPod Nano into a wristwatch. When Jacob Krupnick first
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announced his project—which he had come to call Girl Walk // All Day—on Kickstarter, he uploaded his footage of Anne Marsen dancing on the Staten Island Ferry, along with a more detailed description of his ultimate goal: The idea
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beyond, inspiring an interactive viewing experience that will evolve into a series of dance parties around the globe. Once creators have defined their project on Kickstarter, they then have to establish two crucial items: how much money they need to complete their project, and what reward they are offering their patrons
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in return for their financial support. The financial goals are crucial to Kickstarter’s success: when would-be patrons pledge money to support a project, their credit card isn’t charged until the creators receive enough pledges to
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a project that doesn’t end up happening because the creators ultimately failed to raise enough money. In fact, almost half of the projects on Kickstarter fail to reach their goals. If you happen to back one of those projects, your pledge is erased, as if you’d never contributed in
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the first place. The reward system is also crucial to Kickstarter’s success, and is itself a space of great creativity on the site; the only real limitation on the rewards is that they not be
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launch party or a private performance in their living room or a signed copy of a CD. Borrowing a page from most nonprofit pledge drives, Kickstarter makes it simple to create tiered rewards for patrons according to how much money they contribute. In Krupnick’s case, his rewards ranged from a
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lesson from Anne Marsen (along with an invitation to the wrap party and other perks) for contributions over $500. Krupnick’s project went live on Kickstarter on January 31, 2011. He asked for $4,800 to support six days of shooting, the subsequent editing and production of DVDs, and the projectors
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Walk // All Day was at the very top of the list, beating out videos by Beyoncé, Adele, and the Beastie Boys. — How novel is the Kickstarter crowdfunding approach? If you look at it exclusively in terms of the donations themselves, it doesn’t seem to be a genuine paradigm shift. Any
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. The money comes from the edges of the network, but the center still decides what programs should air, or what the campaign strategies should be. Kickstarter, on the other hand, does away with the center altogether. Both the ideas and the funding come from the edges of the network; the service
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a matter of months. To a traditional economist, there’s something baffling about the lack of an “upside” in the Kickstarter donation. By strict utilitarian standards, the vast majority of Kickstarter donors are wildly overpaying for the product. No music video—however long, however large the typeface they use to thank donors
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a music video by an unknown director that hasn’t, technically, been made yet. So why does the contribution get made? The return on the Kickstarter investment can’t be measured by the conventional yardstick of utilitarian economic theory. People contribute for more subtle, but just as powerful, reasons: the psychological
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example, is powered entirely by the gift economy, mostly in the form of the free labor contributed by its authors and editors. Unlike Wikipedia, though, Kickstarter is a hybrid system. Designed to support creative work that the market does not value, the service is itself a for-profit company, funded by
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this, almost as if some nineteenth-century industrial giant had created a factory that produced socialist collectives. I suspect that if you were to describe Kickstarter to most people a few years ago, the idea would have seemed like a pipe dream at best: Imagine a company that asks ordinary people
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million for artists in a single fiscal year. The entire annual budget for the National Endowment for the Arts is $154 million. The question with Kickstarter, given its growth rate, is not whether it could ever rival the NEA in its support of the creative arts. The new question is whether
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it will grow to be ten times the size of the NEA. The peer-network approach to funding worthy causes is hardly limited to Kickstarter alone. Over the past few years, dozens of services have emerged, targeting different problems with similar crowdfunding techniques. Some, such as the Australian service Pozible
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, share Kickstarter’s focus on creative ideas; others tap into large networks of patrons to support nonprofit charities, such as the site Causes.com, cofounded by Sean
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both the density and diversity of the participants. It gave thousands of creative people direct access to the wallets of millions of potential patrons. Before Kickstarter, if you were the sort of person who was interested in supporting fledgling artists, it was actually quite hard to meet fledgling artists, and almost
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impossible to meet them in bulk. Kickstarter changed all that. It increased the density of links connecting artists and their would-be supporters, and it increased the diversity of those groups. Selection
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, too, is crucial to the genius of Kickstarter, thanks in large part to the patron’s simple act of supporting one project over many potential rivals. Interesting, provocative, polished, ambitious ideas get funding
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; boring or trivial or spammy ones don’t. At last count, 48 percent of Kickstarter projects do not reach their funding goal, and thus raise zero dollars. This is, as they say, a feature, not a bug. All of which
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form, but solely as the dispersed bits of incomplete and frequently contradictory knowledge which all the separate individuals possess.” But for the precise problem that Kickstarter is trying to solve, the fact that it relies on the gift economy makes it more efficient than a traditional market. Patrons are not basing
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economy turns all that on its head. It promotes risk, experimentation, cultural slow hunches that may not turn into commercial ideas for twenty years. Because Kickstarter the company belongs to the private sector, because it has shareholders who are motivated by traditional market incentives, it may be tempting at this point
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to assume that Kickstarter itself is just a roundabout argument for libertarian values. Sure, you may need gift economies to support fringe or early-stage creative ventures, but eventually
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so relentlessly innovative that it will eventually come up with a non-market solution if that’s what’s required. Yet there is nothing in Kickstarter’s DNA that says it has to be a for-profit company. We could easily decide as a society that the $200 million
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, “Great, now we can do away with the NEA.” The peer progressive says, “Now we can make the NEA look more like Kickstarter.” What is ultimately important about Kickstarter is not whether it is a for-profit company or a creature of the gift economy or some interesting hybrid—what is important
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Internet seems to have a bias toward peer networks, if only because it makes it so much easier to assemble them. We didn’t have Kickstarter or Wikipedia before the Web came along because the organizational costs of connecting all those people were prohibitive. The fact that the Net is biased
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or Arab Spring have turned out to be something of a distraction, averting our eyes from the more concrete and practical successes of peer networks. Kickstarter, for instance, is not a platform for expressing outrage at the woeful state of arts funding. It is a platform for getting things done. Could
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first impulse should be to build a peer network to solve that problem. Some of those networks will rely heavily on digital network technology, as Kickstarter does; others will be built using older tools of community and communication, including that timeless platform of humans gathering in the same room and talking
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individuals to fund those projects directly through small donations. In other words, imagine a system that discovers the problems with 311 and solves them with Kickstarter. This is what a group of social designers in Helsinki are beginning to do, under the all-too-perfect code name of Brickstarter. Here’s
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replaced by purely elective charitable giving. The government would be just as big in terms of the tax dollars flowing through it. In fact, if Kickstarter’s success is any indication, people might well be willing to pay higher local taxes if they felt they had a direct say in how
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years is the story of a peer network coming into being, a system far more decentralized and diverse than anything that came before it. Unlike Kickstarter or 311, the peer network of tech news was not a single platform created by a few visionaries and entrepreneurs. The network evolved through thousands
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, get background information from Wikipedia, or download government statistics or transcripts from data.gov or the Sunlight Foundation. They can even get funding directly from Kickstarter. Once again, the power of the system comes not just from the individual peer networks, but from the way the different networks layer on top
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circulating through the digital world before Wikipedia came along. There are probably more than a hundred start-ups tinkering with the best incentive systems for Kickstarter-style crowdfunding. Some online communities function as virtual anarchies; others build elaborate tools for building reputation and leadership positions. Forty years ago, at the dawn
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roots into Turkey red. A premium that made it profitable to plant acres of Rubia tinctorum offered a way out of that catch-22. Like Kickstarter, prize-backed challenges are often responses not so much to outright market failures as they are to market blind spots, or market shortsightedness. Jacob Krupnick
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may opt to continue funding his video career via the micro-patrons of Kickstarter, but there’s little doubt that the success of his seventy-one-minute music video will enable him to follow a more traditional career path
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phase, both through tracking down earlier inventions that might be relevant and explaining those inventions to the overwhelmed examiner in the patent office. Just as Kickstarter widens the network of potential funders for creative work, peer to patent widens the network of discovery and interpretation, bringing in people who do not
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number of persons each giving a relatively small amount.” We have seen this formula before, in the micro-patronage of Kickstarter and other crowdfunding services. To a certain extent, the Kickstarter model is already alive and well in the world of campaign finance: 90 percent of the donations to President Obama’s
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on the work of Yale’s Bruce Ackerman and Ian Ayres, Lessig himself has proposed an ingenious solution to this crisis, which entails creating a Kickstarter-style approach for the public funding of campaigns. Lessig’s scheme would create what he calls “democracy vouchers.” Taxpayers would be allowed to contribute fifty
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work, and given us the confidence to have faith in systems that would have seemed like utopian fantasies before the practical success of Wikipedia or Kickstarter. The technology makes it easier for us to dream up radical new approaches—crowdfunded art, liquid democracies—and it makes it easier for us to
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for the Arts funding, 43 private-sector funding organizations, 34 projects lacking commercial market, 31–32 traditional options for fringe artists, 34–35 See also Kickstarter aviation incremental progress, xvii–xxii, xxii–xxiv jet crash into Hudson, xv–xvi, xvii, 62 media reports, xxii–xxvi safety record, xiii–xiv Baran Web
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–74 Brooks, David, 103 Brooks, Robert, 159 capitalism conscious capitalism, 181–184 employee ownership, 188–190 Facebook model, 192–195 high-frequency stock trading, 120 Kickstarter model, 42–43, 45–46 market failures, 29–31, 33–34, 128 marketplace attempts at global Internet networks, 18 patenting of intellectual property, 129–131
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employee ownership, 188–190 stakeholder model, 178–181 in technology sector, 184–187 traditional hierarchy, 28–29, 195, 210 Creative Commons, 94 crowdfunding. See also Kickstarter elimination of centralized control, 39–40 for neighborhood improvement projects, 72–74 peer-progressive values in, 44–45 for political campaigns, 39, 159–162 range
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Papers, The (Madison), 157, 163–164 fly-by-wire aviation safety system, xix–xxii Fly by Wire (Langewiesche), xx–xi funding for arts. See arts; Kickstarter funding for political campaigns crowdfunding, 39, 159–162 democracy vouchers, 160–162 influence of donors on legislative agenda, 156–159, 162 gateways, 15 Gentzkow, Matthew
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, 78–79, 84, 89–90, 91, 103–104 vanishing-point theory, 68–69, 75–76 Joy, Bill, 142 Kahn, Bob, 15 Kelly, Kevin, 41–42 Kickstarter creator-defined projects, goals, and rewards, 35–37 deviation from traditional economic theory, 40–43 gift economy, 41–42 as hybrid system, 42–43 versus
The Mesh: Why the Future of Business Is Sharing
by Lisa Gansky · 14 Oct 2010 · 215pp · 55,212 words
of companies make their community’s passion, intelligence, and resources a core part of the business itself. Kickstarter is honored to be included as part of this new movement.” —PERRY CHEN, cofounder and CEO, Kickstarter “At ThredUP, we fully embrace what Gansky calls the Mesh and are rapidly growing our service, community
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to market. Hundreds of millions of dollars in venture funding have already flowed into the Mesh. Thriving Mesh companies like Zopa, Prosper, Lending Club, Zipcar, Kickstarter, thredUP, SmartyPig, Etsy, Instructables, and smava were all funded by well-respected, big-name venture funds. Early in my research, I talked with Chris Larsen
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fashion exchange concept; Robin Chase, cofounder of Zipcar; Shelby Clark, founder of RelayRides; Sunil Paul, creator of Spride Share services; Perry Chen, the founder of Kickstarter, a community of artists and funders; James Reinhart of thredUP; Derek Sivers, inventor of MuckWork, hosted services for musicians; and Jia En, cofounder of Roomorama
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, and expose the disingenuous. A curator with the ability to transmit on a mass scale. And a curator with credibility corporations have all but squandered.” Kickstarter, a new platform for micro-funding new arts projects, is self-consciously taking advantage of social networks and the curator effect to expand its business
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to invite artists who are influential and have a following to participate on its site. very meshy. very cool. People who support new artists on Kickstarter or make wine with Crushpad feel that they are smarter and lighter, at the forefront of a new wave. They feel cool. That’s a
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consider valuable, and how to deliver that value. If you do, they’ll love you for it. And think you’re cool, too. CASE STUDY: Kickstarter In April 2009, a new way to fund creative ideas and projects made a splash on the Internet. Designers, filmmakers, journalists, inventors, artists, and other
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creatives flocked to Kickstarter, a platform for soliciting small yet consequential monetary contributions from donors. Kickstarter is powered by a unique funding method that is not about personal investing: project creators maintain 100 percent ownership of
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their intellectual property. Starting a project on Kickstarter is free, but currently projects are posted by invitation only, and must be
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based in the United States. Founder Perry Chen says Kickstarter plans to assist international project creators in the future. To initiate a project, creators set a funding goal and a deadline of up to ninety
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days after the project’s posting date. Kickstarter offers advice to help creators meet their funding goal on time and to attract possible investors with compelling project descriptions and clever rewards to funders
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200 percent funded within the first forty-eight hours. Even if the funding goal is surpassed, projects can accept pledges until the funding deadline arrives. Kickstarter applies a fee of 5 percent to the amount raised. The caveat: if a funding goal isn’t achieved, all pledges are canceled, and no
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networks to the site, the potential for donors to find new interesting projects, and for artists to reach more donors, naturally builds. Perry reports that Kickstarter is increasing the number of projects and the volume of its transactions at a rate of about 20 percent a month
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. Kickstarter has momentum, a growing following, angel investors, and a big idea—perfect ingredients for success in the Mesh. A similar service is off and running
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for the company. Amazon offers not only a hosting service to run your Web site, but also a back end for collecting payments. (As noted, Kickstarter, Etsy, and many other brands, both large and start-up, use the Amazon back end.) You can also use the pick-and-pack facilities of
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Internet companies, development, stages of Inventory, pick-and-pack facilities, use of iPod iTunes Jewelry rental, Mesh companies JGoods Johnson & Johnson Kashless Kennedy, Robert, Jr. Kickstarter case study Kimball, Curtis Kisskissbankbank Kodak Landshare Larsen, Chris Lending Club Lessig, Larry Life transitions, Mesh companies, need for LinkedIn Loans/social lending Mesh companies
To Save Everything, Click Here: The Folly of Technological Solutionism
by Evgeny Morozov · 15 Nov 2013 · 606pp · 157,120 words
history of political philosophy.” To Hobbes and Rawls, now we must add ARPANET and TCP/IP. Why? Well, Johnson believes that sites like Wikipedia and Kickstarter, a popular fund-raising platform for aspiring artists and geeks, work because they embed the decentralizing spirit of “the Internet”—the same spirit that runs
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confront neighborhoods, artists, drug companies, parents, schools,” writes Johnson. What does this mean in practice? Take just one example: Johnson thinks that a site like Kickstarter offers a much better model of funding arts than, say, the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA); in fact, he thinks it’s just a
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matter of time before Kickstarter overtakes the NEA. “The question with Kickstarter, given its growth rate, is not whether it could rival the NEA in its support of the creative arts. The new question
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of the NEA.” Elsewhere in the book, Johnson writes that he doesn’t want to scrap the NEA, only to make it work more like Kickstarter; what’s most interesting about his argument, however, is that he doesn’t spell out why the NEA should become like
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what makes the latter’s model superior. Perhaps, Johnson simply doesn’t have to, as his audience can anticipate the argument that is implied: the Kickstarter approach is simply better because it comes from “the Internet.” This odd and shortsighted claim focuses on the mechanics of the platform rather than on
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the substance of what institutions like the NEA actually do. Kickstarter works as follows: creators—they can be start-ups that want to build a cool app or new gadget or artists who want to make
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their project. Many projects don’t meet the fund-raising target and get no money; those that do sometimes fail to deliver what was expected (Kickstarter’s most famous failed alumnus is Diaspora, an ill-fated start-up that wanted to take on Facebook and offer users better privacy; started in
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model of the NEA, in which a bunch of artsy bureaucrats make all the decisions as to what art to fund. But the fact that Kickstarter offers a more efficient platform for some projects to raise more money more effectively—bypassing the bureaucrats and increasing participation—does not mean it will
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yield better, more innovative art or support art that, in our age of cat videos, might seem old-fashioned and unnecessary. Sites like Kickstarter tend to favor populist projects, which may or may not be good for the arts overall. The same logic applies to other governmental and quasi
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-governmental institutions as well: if the National Endowment for Democracy worked like Kickstarter, it would have to spend all its money on funding projects like the highly viral Kony 2012 campaign, which, all things considered, may only be
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since so many in the professional media now read sites like Gawker and The Huffington Post, extending their reach far beyond social media. Thus, while Kickstarter might give us the illusion of more efficient distribution of arts funding than the NEA, it would be naïve and very shortsighted not to take
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4, and Channel 5), which dictate the terms to the filmmaker. In this context, crowdfunding and Kickstarter seem liberating, even revolutionary. But, as Sørensen points out, this revolution has a few mitigating circumstances. First, Kickstarter might produce many new documentaries, but the odds are that they will be of a very particular
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you have the BBC’s lawyers backing you up, you’ll probably take many more risks than if you are relying on crowdfunding. But if Kickstarter is your platform of choice, you’ll probably forgo venturing into the thorny legal issues altogether. Both of these arguments show the danger of viewing
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the nimble and crowd-powered Kickstarter as an alternative (rather than a supplement!) to the behemoth that is the BBC, or in the American context, the NEA. This might fit quite
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content is simply unlikely to get crowdfunded. Johnson, however, does not want to make his case for reforming the NEA on aesthetic grounds; for him, Kickstarter is better because it’s more Internet-like and more participatory. That these may be irrelevant considerations when it comes to funding art does not
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plays in art; much good art is meant to shock and provoke. It’s not meant to collect “likes” on Facebook or raise money on Kickstarter. To make the process of discovering new musicians a prisoner of the algorithms is to slow artistic innovation. A lot of this music will sell
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directly”: ibid., xxxv, 26 “the creation of ARPANET and TCP/IP”: ibid., 16. 26 “Slowly but steadily”: ibid., 18. 26 “The question with Kickstarter”: ibid., 43. 27 Kickstarter’s most famous failed alumnus is Diaspora: see Jenna Wortham, “Success of Crowdfunding Puts Pressure on Entrepreneurs,” New York Times, September 17, 2012, http
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2012): 726–743; I’ve written about Sørensen’s research in my Slate column, from which the following few paragraphs are drawn: see Evgeny Morozov, “Kickstarter Will Not Save Artists from the Entertainment Industry’s Shackles,” Slate, September 25, 2012http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/future_tense/2012/09
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/kickstarter_s_crowdfunding_won_t_save_indie_filmmaking_.single.html . 29 What Would Google Do?: Jeff Jarvis, What Would Google Do?, 1st ed. (New York: HarperCollins,
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-crime statistics underreported Crime detection devices Crime prevention. See also Predictive policing; Situational crime prevention Critics, professional and cultural expertise Critser, Greg Crowdfunding. See also Kickstarter Crowdsourcing Cultural expertise Culture, public participation in the Cycle The Daily Me Daschle, Nathan Data, online, longevity of Data-gathering devices Data mining Data repositories
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Justice, and innovation Kaika, Maria Kandil, Hazem Karpf, David Keen, Andrew Kelly, Kevin and privacy Kelty, Christopher Kelvin, Lord Kerr, Ian Kettmann, Steve Khanna, Parag Kickstarter vs. NEA Kindle e-reader Kitcher, Philip Knowledge and information reductionism production of Kodakers Kony 2012 campaign Krugman, Paul Kuhn, Thomas Kurzweil, Ray Land records
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