Kyle
If you’re not familiar with Kickstarter, it’s a crowd sourced platform for seed investments of projects. It originally started as a launching pad for musicians who were trying to fund album and video projects.
An artist or band would make a kickstarter page for their next endeavor. Say the project would cost them $5000 for a limited cd run, art, photography and studio time. The artist or band would provide telethon type incentives for people and fans to pledge to donate money to the project.
For example my little brothers band with a decent sized local fan base used kick starter for an album project. They needed $4000. For a $10 pledge the donators (fans) would get a free copy of the cd delivered to their home once complete. For a $20 pledge they would autograph the CD. For a $100 pledge they would meet the fans backstage and so on and so forth. 50 fans pledged enough money to reach the $4000 goal. Once they reached the goal the funds were secured via credit card (that had been given when the donator pledged) and all the money was gathered and delivered to the band.
More after the break
Kickstarter quickly caught on in the start up community as a way to fund various start up projects. We’ve seen some really cool projects, like an interactive digital picture frame and table. We’ve seen numerous apps and games get developed via kickstarter and many like minded projects.
Yesterday Kickstarter reported that two separate projects each hit over one million dollars in pledges. Until now Kickstarter hadn’t had one project hit one million dollars, much less two.
The first project called Elevation Dock is a new kind of all aluminum dock for iPhones and iPods. Yesterday the project had raised $1,084, 006 from 9,942 backers. The other project, a video game called Double Fine Adventure had raised $1,134,714 from 30,152 backers. The entrepreneur behind the video game project said that the extra funds would be used to take the game to more platforms.
Tim Schafer, the creator of the Double Fine Adventure project’s largest incentive was a pledge of $10,000 and that donator got lunch with the creators of the game at their office and all the other incentives on their page. Casey Hopkins, the entrepreneur behind the elevation dock offered a distributor pack of new elevation docks consisting of over 70 new elevation docks all in premium retail packaging.
While the prizes are nice many of the people who are investing in the start up based kickstarter projects are doing it because they want to help fellow entrepreneurs and aren’t big enough or have the resources to fit into typical seed rounds.
If you want to get started on your own Kickstarter project go here
Source: CNet
