I can’t believe Kickstarter is finally 10, and boy how fast time flies when you’re having fun!
Working together over the years on many exciting campaigns has been an exciting journey and has given me many friendships along the way. Kickstarter is, in fact, where I ran my first ever crowdfunding campaign for 3Doodler. It was an incredible campaign, full of excitement and anticipation.
Having high hopes for the project we set our target at a whopping $30,000, throwing ourselves into the campaign full pelt and believing this first of its kind product would spark creative ideas in the minds of backers.
We weren’t wrong! We ended that first Kickstarter with 26,457 backers, who pledged $2,344,134 collectively, to bring this project to life. That is 7713% more than our goal.
How naive I was! Since that first campaign I have gone on to see so many founders and startups raise millions from the Kickstarter community, and have continued to be impressed with how the people on the platform support creators and help companies evolve from a simple idea to a product sold on store shelves.
It might be cheesy, but crowdfunding makes dreams come true. Long may Kickstarter’s reign continue!
I’ve helped the brilliant team NEEO evolve and it’s heartwarming to see such a wonderful team build and grow to the extent that they did. Having launched their exciting crowdfunding campaign on Kickstarter, which had over 6,000 backers and obliterated their $50,000 target by 3016% to hit $1,558,280, they have now successfully been bought by the Control4 family and will now bring their creativity and design focus to a large audience.
Smartibot is one of the most recent fun campaigns I’ve worked on, and it’s an important campaign for me personally, because it shows how crowdfunding can revolutionise an industry. When it comes to children’s toys, this surprisingly traditional sector can quash the potential of toy inventors and it’s thanks to the power of crowdfunding which has completely changed and enabled so many clever toys to go to market directly. Smartibot raised almost $70,000, 595% more than it’s goal, and there are many children (and parents) thankful for such a campaign.
It is an honour to see the startups that got their shot through Kickstarter grow into fully fledged businesses. I have worked with many brands throughout the years, from product development and partnerships, PR and even exit strategy but it is doing activities like these with crowdfunding startups that will forever be the most rewarding.