Kickstarter-ing Your Future

Kickstarter is the world’s largest funding platform for creative projects, and it’s started literally thousands of new businesses for people all over the world.

Congratulations!  You’ve got an amazing idea, and all you need to get it off the ground is €10,000.  The bad news: your current account barely has enough to refill your Leap card, your parents aren’t interested in funding this idea, and getting a loan is unlikely.

There is another possibility, though it does have its own risks. You could try crowdsourcing, where anyone from your Gran to your friends to total strangers can pledge money to fund your idea.  The most well known source for this is Kickstarter. List your project, set your funding goal, offer a reward to the backers (a “thank you” tweet, a copy of the final product, a coffee mug, a guitar lesson, a tote bag–the more creative, the better) and you’re off!

That sounds amazing!  What possible risks could there be? The main risk to you is that Kickstarter’s model is an all-or-nothing deal.  If you don’t hit your total requested amount, you don’t get any of the money. This is a safety net for the people pledging money–if you don’t hit the total requested amount, they don’t get charged.

Even so, the backers are running risks of their own.  After all, just because you say you can produce your amazing idea for €10,000, doesn’t guarantee that it will happen and they get their promised reward.

Kickstarter does have some limitations; only creative projects are allowed, and the project eventually has to get to the point where you deliver your final product.  And if you’re trying to get funding for some kind of innovative technology, you need to produce a working prototype first.

When you’re coming up with your funding goal, remember that Kickstarter makes money off this as well. They take 5% of all funds collected, plus an extra 3 – 5% processing fee goes to Stripe, their online processor.  So that €10,000 you thought you needed? Better make it €11,000, just to be safe.

Just how successful is Kickstarter?  According to their own statistics, as of May 2019, over 162,500 projects had been successfully funded since they started in 2009. What’s their biggest success story? The project that has gotten the most notice would be Exploding Kittens, the insanely awesome card game project that started out by requesting $10,000 and ended up with over $8.78 million. Though that Kickstarter campaign ended in 2015, the company now has its own website, where it sells not only card decks and expansion packs (several of which are extremely Not Safe For Work), but also t-shirts, plushies, and even a Lego set.  

When you’ve got the right idea, the sky’s the limit.

Sources

• https://www.kickstarter.com/
• https://www.dailydot.com/debug/how-does-kickstarter-work/