8 ms·

The Story of 2 $1 Million Projects in 24 Hours

345 points by zachh 15y ago

sawyer 15y ago
I love how enthusiastic the Kickstarter team looks in those photos - it's awesome for them to be able to share in the success of the projects on their platform. I'm looking forward to seeing how it grows and what other projects crop up now that people have seen this incredible milestone passed.
kilian 15y ago
This must be the epitome of feel-good startup stories. Congrats to everyone involved!
Jun8 15y ago
Congrats to Kickstarter!! This is the type of win-win startup I want to create/work at. Gives a simple example of pg's essay about wealth not being a fixed cake to share but that it can be created (http://paulgraham.com/wealth.html http://paulgraham.com/wealth.html). Two things that piqued my interest: 1) They kept saying that they were refreshing the project page to say when it'll hit 1M. Surely a company like Kickstarter has created visualization tools that create nice, real-time graphs of selected projects. No? 2) "After not having a single million dollar project in Kickstarter's first two-plus years, there are suddenly two within four hours of each other." Call it black swan, non-normality, heavy tail, whatever, this shows how common (and lumped) rare events are.
- Aqua_Geek 15y ago
  > 1) They kept saying that they were refreshing the project page to say when it'll hit 1M. Surely a company like Kickstarter has created visualization tools that create nice, real-time graphs of selected projects. No? I found that odd as well. Where's the websocket goodness?
  - acgourley 15y ago
    This just in: Web-socket powered dashboards not necessary for success.
    - Aqua_Geek 15y ago
      You're right - they're not. I'm not trying to argue that they are, though. I just assumed that a company that's dependent on projects succeeding to make their living would have something more than "keep hitting refresh" in place to track big projects like these.
    - VikingCoder 15y ago
      Well, a web-socket dashboard could potentially lower their bandwidth costs, when people start refreshing the whole page every 10 seconds, just to watch one number change.
  - untog 15y ago
    Well, given that this is the first time it's happened, I'd imagine the need for such a thing was small until now.
    - Aqua_Geek 15y ago
      The need to track up to a million dollars was small, sure. But if you're revenue is based on these projects, wouldn't you want some sort of real-time counter of $$ being pledged? Maybe I'm just being a statistics nut...
      - untog 15y ago
        Oh, don't get me wrong, I am too. But I don't know how stretched Kickstarter's team are- while I'd love to see a stats counter like that on my own project, I rarely have the time to put one together.
- SoftwareMaven 15y ago
  I would be more surprised if they did. For Kickstarter to succeed, they need the entire site doing well, not so mich individual projects, so tools to monitor individual projects are probably not the useful. On the other hand, stats about the whole site, eg donations per time period, new projects being created, total visitors, etc, would be much more relevant. Business like Kickstarter are about the long tail, not the mega-hits, and, if I were running it, I'd want my analytics to represent that.
- sp332 15y ago
  They do have nice visualization tools, but they don't self-update. https://farm7.static.flickr.com/6178/6162056538_ffbf3363bb_o.png https://farm7.static.flickr.com/6178/6162056538_ffbf3363bb_o...
- InclinedPlane 15y ago
  Consider the time frame of funding for every single other project. On average, it takes a month or two just to raise a few thousand dollars of funding. Even the biggest projects only raise about a million dollars in that time frame, and those are rare. A project raising thousands of dollars per minute is exceptionally rare on kickstarter, why would they build a tool who's use case is specifically targeted to such an unusual and unprecedented event?
deleted 15y ago
[deleted]
vannevar 15y ago
So if Blizzard does a Kickstarter and raises $10M in pre-sales for a new game, is that within the mission of the site? I was under the impression that it was a site for projects by people who otherwise wouldn't be able to fund them. This seems to be pushing that boundary.
- wmeredith 15y ago
  I see your point, but I feel like the true success of any platform is achieved when people start using (in a positive way) for things you hadn't even thought of.
- unreal37 15y ago
  Ultimately it's a place where anyone can post a project and try to raise some money to make it happen. I don't think it's limited to only people who couldn't raise it otherwise. Why can't Apple launch the iPad 3 on there? There's no reason they can't, except why would they give Kickstarter a cut of their profits when they've proven they can sell them directly with no middleman.
- jakelear 15y ago
  The Double Fine Kickstarter pitch video does a pretty good job of explaining why it can't fund an Adventure game, primarily because publishers generally won't fund anything that isn't a guaranteed success. The Double Fine kickstarter projects shows a shift in power from the publisher to the developers/players.
- kmfrk 15y ago
  I'd rather rephrase the question to ask generally what it would take to break the spirit of the site. A lot of projects already use it as a shop-like site. And as far as big companies are concerned, Kickstarter and Amazon take a combined 7.9% cut, which is quite significant. I'm also not entirely sure whether companies with DRM-encumbered games will manage to attract donours in a similar fashion to Double Fine who seem to be using the Steam platform, which is widely used and loved. Blizzard could probably pull it off with their games (MMOs not included) because of Battle.net, but it would turn into a major shitstorm, if they funded something like Call of Duty, which is a magnet to controversy and uproar. Then there would be the ensuing hell of charge-backs and refunds. With Kickstarter, you generally invest in an idea more so than a product. What but a product do you invest in by giving Blizzard money? With Double Fine, you revive the adventure genre, have a chance of disrupting the videogame industry and bring back some of the biggest videogame developer legends and give them free reins over their product without having to go hat in hand and pander to producers. With Blizzard, it would just be business as usual. I don't know whether Kickstarter will ever lose its indie feel, but if it does, or some project starters do, they will be subjected to a level of scrutiny orders of magnitude higher than what we are used to. I think Kickstarter projects depend more on goodwill than most of us imagine.
powertower 15y ago
KickStarter is one of the very few businesses that's truly innovating / disrupting anything right now. Then Stripe. Then CloudFlare (I really like their story and pivot).
- troygoode 15y ago
  Don't forget Khan Academy.
- AdamFernandez 15y ago
  ...or Twilio
- forgottenpaswrd 15y ago
  And Lynda.com
hop 15y ago
Hi HN, Casey from the Elevation Dock project. People use the term disruption pretty loosely, I think crowd-funding is really doing it. Goodbye middlemen, sayonara to the massive traditional barriers to entry. Hello bootstrapped projects like this that would otherwise never see the light of day.
- VikingCoder 15y ago
  Hi Casey, First off - Congratulations! I have a burning question. Have you figured out how you're going to do shipping and handling? Are you using a 3rd party to do all of the distribution, or do you have the workforce yourself to do it? Kickstarter and Amazon don't do it for you, do they?
  - jmonegro 15y ago
    Kickstarter doesn't, but Amazon does have a fulfillment service. IIRC, you send your stock to their warehouses and they ship it from there.
  - hop 15y ago
    Thx. Probably will use Shipwire or a local fullfillment company.
  - ChrisNorstrom 15y ago
    I did calculations for my (failed) kickstarter campaign between Amazon Fulfillment and me personally packing and mailing everything. Amazon Fulfillment would have cut my profit in half. Yes it saves you time but depending on where you live and where the fulfillment warehouse is, the size of the products you're making, and the cost of shipping them. For my specific case it wasn't worth it. Hiring a few neighbors and working out of the garage for a few days would be far more feasible.
    - rikf 15y ago
      There are cheaper alternatives then Amazon for fulfilment.
j45 15y ago
This is really inspiring to see. I give my respect, admiration, to the empowerment Kickstarter is enabling in the world. People say they do crap like empowerment all the time.. Kickstarter seems to say very little themselves, all I hear is the success stories. It's a delightfully simple concept: Put a great idea out there and let it be loved and supported. Ideas that wouldn't have seen the light of day are, fuelled by early adopters and pioneers. Being on the web for almost 2 decades makes everything look the same, or at least kind of blur together over time. For me, with information and innovation; since Gutenberg, the web really was the second big thing. Maybe enablers like Kickstarter are part of the third leap for our world where they are creating change in the real world from innovation. I've rarely seen something successful on Kickstarter I didn't want to buy. Normally I can't decide as quickly on items in the retail market that compete with it. The continued popping up of Kickstarter stories and dreams becoming a reality have made me think about all those things I wondered about. Could they become a reality? Where could I start learning about how to kickstart something successfully? (I Might be a search or two away but the feeling of possibility is great.)
akazackfriedman 15y ago
For Kickstarter, business model... Validated! Great job guys congrats! What a great story of someone not playing the startup lottery and winning.
ChuckMcM 15y ago
One has to wonder though, if you priced out your Kickstarter project because you wanted to make one for yourself and well if you could get 100 other people to kick in you would be able to get the better price on parts, and then 10,000 people kick in and now you're looking at something which was 'spend the weekend building up a hundred or so foo-widgets' becomes 'spend the next six months building 10 thousand foo-widgets' that has to suck.
- marquis 15y ago
  I think that's a problem we'd all like to have.
  - ph0rque 15y ago
    As long as you're not losing money on each unit but making it up in volume...
  - ChuckMcM 15y ago
    Actually its not. Let me phrase it differently and you tell me if you'd volunteer :-) "Hi! I need you to work for slave labor wages for the next six months, if you don't you are going to be pilloried and your reputation destroyed, no one will ever work with you ever again, you may not be able to find future employment. How about it?" The situation arises when you haven't covered all of the possibilities. Generally the one over looked by Kickstarter participants is the 'wildly successful' one. The dilemma is as follows, to make one of something by hand might take an hour of your time. If you are going to make 10 you might create a couple of frames or something to hold parts to make it go more smoothly so it takes three or four hours, to make 100 might involve some slightly more elaborate frames and all weekend. Now if you've priced your kickstarter such that you 'make' a couple of dollars on each unit, then you've spent your weekend making a hundred widgets and you've got $200 to show for it. If you need to make 10,000 things get more complicated. You can invest in more sophisticated jigs and holders (that eats into your profit), or more sophisticated machinery (that eats into your profit), or more help (that hugely eats into your profit) So you still 'make money' after making 10,000 but its like $2,000 over 6 months, rather than $200 over a weekend. I suspect you could find better work for $350/month. However if you had priced your widget such that you could make money building 10,000 of them, well then you're golden because you've included the cost of paying for tooling at a small factory nearby and having them make the widgets. Now the second 10,000 are like 'free' since you've already got the overhead of setting up manufacturing paid for. The downside is that at the higher cost your Kickstarter might not fund that many. Its just a cautionary tale for would-be kick starters to think though the various scenarios and internalize what each scenario would mean to them and then price out accordingly.
1sttimefounder 15y ago
Why is Ron Gilbert nowhere to find in the celebration photo? Is he really that grumpy & shy?
- aidenn0 15y ago
  Maybe he was smiling and didn't want to be caught on camera (It would reduce the value of the $35k reward)
bvi 15y ago
Is the money raised through Kickstarter seen as income, and therefore, taxable (meaning that 20-30% of the final amount raised is lopped off)?
- patio11 15y ago
  Trade of money in return for promise of a future good/service is unquestionably income in the US, but that does not necessarily imply that sort of marginal rate. For example, if the money hits a corporate entity who hires programmers with it, the corp will use their salaries as an expense to offset that income. Similarly, if you raise $25k to make a foobar and spend $20k on materials, you'd only owe taxes on the profit. I am not an accountant, etc.
  - tesseract 15y ago
    > For example, if the money hits a corporate entity who hires programmers with it, the corp will use their salaries as an expense to offset that income. Or, to my understanding, even if it goes to a person. Being a sole proprietor does not preclude you from deducting your business expenses.
  - blacksmythe 15y ago
    One difficulty comes of the income comes in one tax year (no deduction yet), and the deduction comes in the next tax year (might not have enough income to deduct again). disclaimer: I am even less of an accountant, etc.
wildster 15y ago
Why din't Raspberry Pi use Kickstarter?
- Mvandenbergh 15y ago
  Kickstarter is US only, isn't it?
reidmain 15y ago
This is really starting to show the potential of Kickstarter. So many of the successful Kickstarter projects have been unknowns. Just really smart and driven people with a dream. If established companies can bypass publishers and investors by promising to sell a product directly to the consumer then we have a whole new ballgame here. Double Fine has successfully funded a game where the only promise is that they will release it. That's it. No percentage of revenue to the publisher. The publisher can't demand they add DRM, etc. Their only obligation is to do what they do best because they are only answering to someone who wants a great game, not a return on their investment. This is big.
- aw3c2 15y ago
  They already decided to use DRM. They use Steam. I'd be among the backers if I would get a simple standalone installer or even zip archive without any honest-customer-punishment.
  - reidmain 15y ago
    True. They've decided to go with the least invasive form of DRM that is typically excepted. I agree with you that a stand alone installer would be best but because of how easy Steam is I am gladly willing to give them $30 for said game.
- mkramlich 15y ago
  DF/Tim is/was already famous in the gaming community beforehand though. This helps. It's a bit like if Paul & Ringo created a Kickstarter project saying they're thinking of making a new Beatles album, and wanting to know if anyone would front them the production costs upfront.
  - MattRix 15y ago
    That was his point. To reiterate: Up till now, it has basically only been the "unknowns" using Kickstarter, hoping that their product and pitch video are good enough. Some of them have done well, but the Double Fine project has made more than any other project in 24 hours. This project shows what can happen if an already well-known brand goes with crowd-funding. To me, the craziest part is that they didn't even pitch a specific game, just the genre.
newobj 15y ago
I think Kickstarter is the most interesting thing happening on the net today. Simply because it aggregates the most interesting things happening in the real world, by its very nature. Browsing Kickstarter has actually become a fun activity for me. It's such a simple and genius way of directly connecting producers and consumers, reducing risk for both parties, verifying ideas, creating relationships. So elegant. The number of opportunities this is going to enable is staggering. And Kickstarter themselves, do they have any overhead? These guys are going to be printing money. And being a patron is fun! One thing I'm curious about is Kickstarter's exposure to someone who fails to produce the promised rewards for funding. As a funder/patron, do I have any recourse for a producer failing to uphold their end of the bargain?
- jomohke 15y ago
  There's no guarantee that a project will be successful – your funds are treated as a donation. Here's a story from a few weeks ago of a failed kickstarter: http://a.wholelottanothing.org/2012/01/lessons-for-kickstarter-creators-from-the-worst-project-i-ever-funded-on-kickstarter.html http://a.wholelottanothing.org/2012/01/lessons-for-kickstart...
Blocks8 15y ago
Kickstarter continues to prove that good ideas spread quickly. Where websites show viral growth in user visits, kickstart shows it with real dollars for real products. Very inspiring. Thanks for sharing this post- it lets the community get an insider view of the excitement.
lwhi 15y ago
Congratulations to all concerned. I think the Kickstarter model is really powerful, and it's exciting to see that these projects have got off the ground, but - without wanting to be party pooper - what happens if a fundraiser can't deliver? It seems that Kickstarter have an incentive to raise as much money as possible. After all, they take their 5% - so as a company they've taken over $100,000 in the last 24 hours from two projects alone. Spending a vast amount of money without the necessary battle-scars and bruises gained from experience, is likely to involve a steep learning curve. Bringing a product to market isn't easy. The fundraisers in question are in a unique position, because they have their buyers' attention and money from the start. This has to be a great thing, and to large extent levels the playing field and creates a great environment for innovation .. BUT, the hard work has just begun. I can't help feeling that this model of funding is about to gain even more popularity - but could eventually open up a can of worms.
- Mvandenbergh 15y ago
  What I see as a problem is a failure by some projects to manage expectations. I think that a lot of people who are backing projects like this don't realise that they are not pre-ordering anything, they're making a contribution to the project startup costs and hopefully they'll receive one or more of that product when manufacturing begins. I've seen comments on some Kickstarter projects that have slipped on shipping deadlines that don't seem to indicate that the commenter understands the uncertainty of funding a project like this. I don't think there's much risk backing an experienced person with a ready to be manufactured product, and I've backed several such projects on Kickstarter, but I think that backers need to remember that part of the Kickstarter proposition is that you get discounts on products like this as a reward for putting in fixed upside risk capital.
  - lwhi 15y ago
    So is the contribution a donation?
    - Mvandenbergh 15y ago
      I think that might be an open legal question, if you use the word pre-order all over your Kickstarter page you might be creating a situation where you're on the hook, legally speaking for fulfilling those orders.
test23452 15y ago
Dock for a phone? Really? On the pictures it looks like they are at least sending a man to the moon. A charger for Nokia phone costs 1.5 USD. Why this costs 79 USD? What a ripoff.
nreece 15y ago
Every startup should be like a Kickstarter project. Show your concept, find customers who pre-purchase, build product, deliver and scale. Grow organically.
prawn 15y ago
This is going to put Kickstarter well and truly in the public eye and, as a result, bring many more potential wallets browsing the site. Great time to be an entrepreneurial industrial designer in the US. Just wish it was open to those outside the US as well.

345 points by zachh 15y ago

I love how enthusiastic the Kickstarter team looks in those photos - it's awesome for them to be able to share in the success of the projects on their platform. I'm looking forward to seeing how it grows and what other projects crop up now that people have seen this incredible milestone passed.

kilian 15y ago

This must be the epitome of feel-good startup stories. Congrats to everyone involved!

Jun8 15y ago

Congrats to Kickstarter!! This is the type of win-win startup I want to create/work at. Gives a simple example of pg's essay about wealth not being a fixed cake to share but that it can be created (http://paulgraham.com/wealth.html http://paulgraham.com/wealth.html). Two things that piqued my interest: 1) They kept saying that they were refreshing the project page to say when it'll hit 1M. Surely a company like Kickstarter has created visualization tools that create nice, real-time graphs of selected projects. No? 2) "After not having a single million dollar project in Kickstarter's first two-plus years, there are suddenly two within four hours of each other." Call it black swan, non-normality, heavy tail, whatever, this shows how common (and lumped) rare events are.

Aqua_Geek 15y ago
> 1) They kept saying that they were refreshing the project page to say when it'll hit 1M. Surely a company like Kickstarter has created visualization tools that create nice, real-time graphs of selected projects. No? I found that odd as well. Where's the websocket goodness?
- acgourley 15y ago
  This just in: Web-socket powered dashboards not necessary for success.
  - Aqua_Geek 15y ago
    You're right - they're not. I'm not trying to argue that they are, though. I just assumed that a company that's dependent on projects succeeding to make their living would have something more than "keep hitting refresh" in place to track big projects like these.
  - VikingCoder 15y ago
    Well, a web-socket dashboard could potentially lower their bandwidth costs, when people start refreshing the whole page every 10 seconds, just to watch one number change.
- untog 15y ago
  Well, given that this is the first time it's happened, I'd imagine the need for such a thing was small until now.
  - Aqua_Geek 15y ago
    The need to track up to a million dollars was small, sure. But if you're revenue is based on these projects, wouldn't you want some sort of real-time counter of $$ being pledged? Maybe I'm just being a statistics nut...
    - untog 15y ago
      Oh, don't get me wrong, I am too. But I don't know how stretched Kickstarter's team are- while I'd love to see a stats counter like that on my own project, I rarely have the time to put one together.
SoftwareMaven 15y ago
I would be more surprised if they did. For Kickstarter to succeed, they need the entire site doing well, not so mich individual projects, so tools to monitor individual projects are probably not the useful. On the other hand, stats about the whole site, eg donations per time period, new projects being created, total visitors, etc, would be much more relevant. Business like Kickstarter are about the long tail, not the mega-hits, and, if I were running it, I'd want my analytics to represent that.
sp332 15y ago
They do have nice visualization tools, but they don't self-update. https://farm7.static.flickr.com/6178/6162056538_ffbf3363bb_o.png https://farm7.static.flickr.com/6178/6162056538_ffbf3363bb_o...
InclinedPlane 15y ago
Consider the time frame of funding for every single other project. On average, it takes a month or two just to raise a few thousand dollars of funding. Even the biggest projects only raise about a million dollars in that time frame, and those are rare. A project raising thousands of dollars per minute is exceptionally rare on kickstarter, why would they build a tool who's use case is specifically targeted to such an unusual and unprecedented event?

deleted 15y ago

[deleted]

vannevar 15y ago

So if Blizzard does a Kickstarter and raises $10M in pre-sales for a new game, is that within the mission of the site? I was under the impression that it was a site for projects by people who otherwise wouldn't be able to fund them. This seems to be pushing that boundary.

wmeredith 15y ago
I see your point, but I feel like the true success of any platform is achieved when people start using (in a positive way) for things you hadn't even thought of.
unreal37 15y ago
Ultimately it's a place where anyone can post a project and try to raise some money to make it happen. I don't think it's limited to only people who couldn't raise it otherwise. Why can't Apple launch the iPad 3 on there? There's no reason they can't, except why would they give Kickstarter a cut of their profits when they've proven they can sell them directly with no middleman.
jakelear 15y ago
The Double Fine Kickstarter pitch video does a pretty good job of explaining why it can't fund an Adventure game, primarily because publishers generally won't fund anything that isn't a guaranteed success. The Double Fine kickstarter projects shows a shift in power from the publisher to the developers/players.
kmfrk 15y ago
I'd rather rephrase the question to ask generally what it would take to break the spirit of the site. A lot of projects already use it as a shop-like site. And as far as big companies are concerned, Kickstarter and Amazon take a combined 7.9% cut, which is quite significant. I'm also not entirely sure whether companies with DRM-encumbered games will manage to attract donours in a similar fashion to Double Fine who seem to be using the Steam platform, which is widely used and loved. Blizzard could probably pull it off with their games (MMOs not included) because of Battle.net, but it would turn into a major shitstorm, if they funded something like Call of Duty, which is a magnet to controversy and uproar. Then there would be the ensuing hell of charge-backs and refunds. With Kickstarter, you generally invest in an idea more so than a product. What but a product do you invest in by giving Blizzard money? With Double Fine, you revive the adventure genre, have a chance of disrupting the videogame industry and bring back some of the biggest videogame developer legends and give them free reins over their product without having to go hat in hand and pander to producers. With Blizzard, it would just be business as usual. I don't know whether Kickstarter will ever lose its indie feel, but if it does, or some project starters do, they will be subjected to a level of scrutiny orders of magnitude higher than what we are used to. I think Kickstarter projects depend more on goodwill than most of us imagine.

powertower 15y ago

KickStarter is one of the very few businesses that's truly innovating / disrupting anything right now. Then Stripe. Then CloudFlare (I really like their story and pivot).

troygoode 15y ago
Don't forget Khan Academy.
AdamFernandez 15y ago
...or Twilio
forgottenpaswrd 15y ago
And Lynda.com

hop 15y ago

Hi HN, Casey from the Elevation Dock project. People use the term disruption pretty loosely, I think crowd-funding is really doing it. Goodbye middlemen, sayonara to the massive traditional barriers to entry. Hello bootstrapped projects like this that would otherwise never see the light of day.

VikingCoder 15y ago
Hi Casey, First off - Congratulations! I have a burning question. Have you figured out how you're going to do shipping and handling? Are you using a 3rd party to do all of the distribution, or do you have the workforce yourself to do it? Kickstarter and Amazon don't do it for you, do they?
- jmonegro 15y ago
  Kickstarter doesn't, but Amazon does have a fulfillment service. IIRC, you send your stock to their warehouses and they ship it from there.
- hop 15y ago
  Thx. Probably will use Shipwire or a local fullfillment company.
- ChrisNorstrom 15y ago
  I did calculations for my (failed) kickstarter campaign between Amazon Fulfillment and me personally packing and mailing everything. Amazon Fulfillment would have cut my profit in half. Yes it saves you time but depending on where you live and where the fulfillment warehouse is, the size of the products you're making, and the cost of shipping them. For my specific case it wasn't worth it. Hiring a few neighbors and working out of the garage for a few days would be far more feasible.
  - rikf 15y ago
    There are cheaper alternatives then Amazon for fulfilment.

j45 15y ago

This is really inspiring to see. I give my respect, admiration, to the empowerment Kickstarter is enabling in the world. People say they do crap like empowerment all the time.. Kickstarter seems to say very little themselves, all I hear is the success stories. It's a delightfully simple concept: Put a great idea out there and let it be loved and supported. Ideas that wouldn't have seen the light of day are, fuelled by early adopters and pioneers. Being on the web for almost 2 decades makes everything look the same, or at least kind of blur together over time. For me, with information and innovation; since Gutenberg, the web really was the second big thing. Maybe enablers like Kickstarter are part of the third leap for our world where they are creating change in the real world from innovation. I've rarely seen something successful on Kickstarter I didn't want to buy. Normally I can't decide as quickly on items in the retail market that compete with it. The continued popping up of Kickstarter stories and dreams becoming a reality have made me think about all those things I wondered about. Could they become a reality? Where could I start learning about how to kickstart something successfully? (I Might be a search or two away but the feeling of possibility is great.)

akazackfriedman 15y ago

For Kickstarter, business model... Validated! Great job guys congrats! What a great story of someone not playing the startup lottery and winning.

ChuckMcM 15y ago

One has to wonder though, if you priced out your Kickstarter project because you wanted to make one for yourself and well if you could get 100 other people to kick in you would be able to get the better price on parts, and then 10,000 people kick in and now you're looking at something which was 'spend the weekend building up a hundred or so foo-widgets' becomes 'spend the next six months building 10 thousand foo-widgets' that has to suck.

marquis 15y ago
I think that's a problem we'd all like to have.
- ph0rque 15y ago
  As long as you're not losing money on each unit but making it up in volume...
- ChuckMcM 15y ago
  Actually its not. Let me phrase it differently and you tell me if you'd volunteer :-) "Hi! I need you to work for slave labor wages for the next six months, if you don't you are going to be pilloried and your reputation destroyed, no one will ever work with you ever again, you may not be able to find future employment. How about it?" The situation arises when you haven't covered all of the possibilities. Generally the one over looked by Kickstarter participants is the 'wildly successful' one. The dilemma is as follows, to make one of something by hand might take an hour of your time. If you are going to make 10 you might create a couple of frames or something to hold parts to make it go more smoothly so it takes three or four hours, to make 100 might involve some slightly more elaborate frames and all weekend. Now if you've priced your kickstarter such that you 'make' a couple of dollars on each unit, then you've spent your weekend making a hundred widgets and you've got $200 to show for it. If you need to make 10,000 things get more complicated. You can invest in more sophisticated jigs and holders (that eats into your profit), or more sophisticated machinery (that eats into your profit), or more help (that hugely eats into your profit) So you still 'make money' after making 10,000 but its like $2,000 over 6 months, rather than $200 over a weekend. I suspect you could find better work for $350/month. However if you had priced your widget such that you could make money building 10,000 of them, well then you're golden because you've included the cost of paying for tooling at a small factory nearby and having them make the widgets. Now the second 10,000 are like 'free' since you've already got the overhead of setting up manufacturing paid for. The downside is that at the higher cost your Kickstarter might not fund that many. Its just a cautionary tale for would-be kick starters to think though the various scenarios and internalize what each scenario would mean to them and then price out accordingly.

1sttimefounder 15y ago

Why is Ron Gilbert nowhere to find in the celebration photo? Is he really that grumpy & shy?

aidenn0 15y ago
Maybe he was smiling and didn't want to be caught on camera (It would reduce the value of the $35k reward)

bvi 15y ago

Is the money raised through Kickstarter seen as income, and therefore, taxable (meaning that 20-30% of the final amount raised is lopped off)?

patio11 15y ago
Trade of money in return for promise of a future good/service is unquestionably income in the US, but that does not necessarily imply that sort of marginal rate. For example, if the money hits a corporate entity who hires programmers with it, the corp will use their salaries as an expense to offset that income. Similarly, if you raise $25k to make a foobar and spend $20k on materials, you'd only owe taxes on the profit. I am not an accountant, etc.
- tesseract 15y ago
  > For example, if the money hits a corporate entity who hires programmers with it, the corp will use their salaries as an expense to offset that income. Or, to my understanding, even if it goes to a person. Being a sole proprietor does not preclude you from deducting your business expenses.
- blacksmythe 15y ago
  One difficulty comes of the income comes in one tax year (no deduction yet), and the deduction comes in the next tax year (might not have enough income to deduct again). disclaimer: I am even less of an accountant, etc.

wildster 15y ago

Why din't Raspberry Pi use Kickstarter?

Mvandenbergh 15y ago
Kickstarter is US only, isn't it?

reidmain 15y ago

This is really starting to show the potential of Kickstarter. So many of the successful Kickstarter projects have been unknowns. Just really smart and driven people with a dream. If established companies can bypass publishers and investors by promising to sell a product directly to the consumer then we have a whole new ballgame here. Double Fine has successfully funded a game where the only promise is that they will release it. That's it. No percentage of revenue to the publisher. The publisher can't demand they add DRM, etc. Their only obligation is to do what they do best because they are only answering to someone who wants a great game, not a return on their investment. This is big.

aw3c2 15y ago
They already decided to use DRM. They use Steam. I'd be among the backers if I would get a simple standalone installer or even zip archive without any honest-customer-punishment.
- reidmain 15y ago
  True. They've decided to go with the least invasive form of DRM that is typically excepted. I agree with you that a stand alone installer would be best but because of how easy Steam is I am gladly willing to give them $30 for said game.
mkramlich 15y ago
DF/Tim is/was already famous in the gaming community beforehand though. This helps. It's a bit like if Paul & Ringo created a Kickstarter project saying they're thinking of making a new Beatles album, and wanting to know if anyone would front them the production costs upfront.
- MattRix 15y ago
  That was his point. To reiterate: Up till now, it has basically only been the "unknowns" using Kickstarter, hoping that their product and pitch video are good enough. Some of them have done well, but the Double Fine project has made more than any other project in 24 hours. This project shows what can happen if an already well-known brand goes with crowd-funding. To me, the craziest part is that they didn't even pitch a specific game, just the genre.

newobj 15y ago

I think Kickstarter is the most interesting thing happening on the net today. Simply because it aggregates the most interesting things happening in the real world, by its very nature. Browsing Kickstarter has actually become a fun activity for me. It's such a simple and genius way of directly connecting producers and consumers, reducing risk for both parties, verifying ideas, creating relationships. So elegant. The number of opportunities this is going to enable is staggering. And Kickstarter themselves, do they have any overhead? These guys are going to be printing money. And being a patron is fun! One thing I'm curious about is Kickstarter's exposure to someone who fails to produce the promised rewards for funding. As a funder/patron, do I have any recourse for a producer failing to uphold their end of the bargain?

jomohke 15y ago
There's no guarantee that a project will be successful – your funds are treated as a donation. Here's a story from a few weeks ago of a failed kickstarter: http://a.wholelottanothing.org/2012/01/lessons-for-kickstarter-creators-from-the-worst-project-i-ever-funded-on-kickstarter.html http://a.wholelottanothing.org/2012/01/lessons-for-kickstart...

Blocks8 15y ago

Kickstarter continues to prove that good ideas spread quickly. Where websites show viral growth in user visits, kickstart shows it with real dollars for real products. Very inspiring. Thanks for sharing this post- it lets the community get an insider view of the excitement.

lwhi 15y ago

Congratulations to all concerned. I think the Kickstarter model is really powerful, and it's exciting to see that these projects have got off the ground, but - without wanting to be party pooper - what happens if a fundraiser can't deliver? It seems that Kickstarter have an incentive to raise as much money as possible. After all, they take their 5% - so as a company they've taken over $100,000 in the last 24 hours from two projects alone. Spending a vast amount of money without the necessary battle-scars and bruises gained from experience, is likely to involve a steep learning curve. Bringing a product to market isn't easy. The fundraisers in question are in a unique position, because they have their buyers' attention and money from the start. This has to be a great thing, and to large extent levels the playing field and creates a great environment for innovation .. BUT, the hard work has just begun. I can't help feeling that this model of funding is about to gain even more popularity - but could eventually open up a can of worms.

Mvandenbergh 15y ago
What I see as a problem is a failure by some projects to manage expectations. I think that a lot of people who are backing projects like this don't realise that they are not pre-ordering anything, they're making a contribution to the project startup costs and hopefully they'll receive one or more of that product when manufacturing begins. I've seen comments on some Kickstarter projects that have slipped on shipping deadlines that don't seem to indicate that the commenter understands the uncertainty of funding a project like this. I don't think there's much risk backing an experienced person with a ready to be manufactured product, and I've backed several such projects on Kickstarter, but I think that backers need to remember that part of the Kickstarter proposition is that you get discounts on products like this as a reward for putting in fixed upside risk capital.
- lwhi 15y ago
  So is the contribution a donation?
  - Mvandenbergh 15y ago
    I think that might be an open legal question, if you use the word pre-order all over your Kickstarter page you might be creating a situation where you're on the hook, legally speaking for fulfilling those orders.

test23452 15y ago

Dock for a phone? Really? On the pictures it looks like they are at least sending a man to the moon. A charger for Nokia phone costs 1.5 USD. Why this costs 79 USD? What a ripoff.

nreece 15y ago

Every startup should be like a Kickstarter project. Show your concept, find customers who pre-purchase, build product, deliver and scale. Grow organically.

prawn 15y ago

This is going to put Kickstarter well and truly in the public eye and, as a result, bring many more potential wallets browsing the site. Great time to be an entrepreneurial industrial designer in the US. Just wish it was open to those outside the US as well.