I talked about Kickstarter and crowd sourcing a couple of years ago on this site, the idea of a group of people contributing to an effort just for the satisfaction. Kickstarter is a web site that has taken it a step farther. Kickstarted got started to fund artistic projects like plays and art exhibitions but after they put it out there the Internet made it their own and know it’s high profile campaigns are products (hardware) and companies trying to launch. A little less altruistic but quite a bit more useful than the original vision. It continues to evolve.
A friend of mine uses it to launch games. He has a business developing and selling board/card games. He now uses Kickstarter to fund new games. If he doesn’t raise the desired amount of money it raises a red flag that perhaps the game needs to be modified to make it more appealing. So much better to find this out BEFORE you invest your capital and launch a new product. It is also another way he has 2-way communication with his customers.
Kickstarter campaigns (the term they use for projects) have been getting more and more sophisticated and have been gathering more and more money. Below is a campaign to launch a new 3D printer. They hoped to raise $50k and so far they have almost $3M pledged and they still have several weeks to go. Their product seems cool
, their campaign is very professional and the people have said “I want one and here is my money”.
It makes you wonder, what would have happened to these ideas 10 years ago? What ideas will be see come to light that wouldn’t have stood a chance without these options we have now?