| Kickstarter is awesome. It helped bring light to this newly born industry in a way never been done before, and it's been responsible for scores of people being able to raise money to build really incredible things. But then you have the people on the other side - those that might have raised 10, 20, 50, or even 80% that didn't meet their mark, and did all of that work for nothing. At the end of the day, the only thing they have left is a dead dream, and a burned out list of supporters. I imagine it would be incredibly heartbreaking to walk away with nothing after a failed campaign. On the money side, yes it's expensive, but that's not what I didn't like about it. My beef with Kickstarter is that I don't want to fill out an application and wait weeks before getting approved. I also don't want to send all of the SEO benefit to them. Yes, I agree they should curate their marketplace, but it does filter out a lot of worthy projects. I wanted to be able to raise money for a variety of projects, each in my own way and in my own time. I worked with my co-founder to build IgnitionDeck (http://ignitiondeck.com) to be able to do that. It's actually doing pretty well, which I don't think would have happened without Kickstarter's popularity. In many ways, I view them as the MySpace of crowdfunding. It will certainly be interesting to see how they adapt and evolve as people get burned out from crowdfunding...or will they? |