Most of the early projects on Kickstarter were like that: small, simple gestures of art with very low funding goals. Its creator offered pencil sketches to anyone on the internet for a small fee. But another project, Drawing for Dollars, did. Chen started a project, asking for $1,000 to make a limited run of spray-painted T-shirts that read "Grace Jones Does Not Give A Fuck." It did not meet its funding goals. The site went live at 4:30 pm on April 28, 2009. "We were constantly talking to people about Kickstarter and getting blank faces in return," Strickler wrote about the early days. They recruited their first employee, Cassie Marketos, who says she didn't quite know what she was signing up for but believed in Chen, Strickler, and Adler enough to come onboard. When Arrested Development was canceled, Chen used it as an example to drum up interest in Kickstarter: What if fans could band together to save the shows they loved-television networks be damned? He got an introduction to David Cross, who played Tobias Fünke on the show. They hired a few coders to build out the architecture of the Kickstarter platform and told as many people as they could about their idea. In 2007, Chen and Strickler introduced the idea to Charles Adler, an interaction designer, who would join on as their third cofounder. The two bought a whiteboard from Staples. Then he met Yancey Strickler, another creative type, who thought a threshold-based system for collective funding might actually work. All the while, the platform has given regular folks on the internet the tools to operate like venture capitalists, deciding what gets flushed and what gets funded: even something as silly as an art project that sends letters to strangers.Ī few years later, Chen moved back to New York City and the idea called to him. Others have profoundly impacted our world. Some Kickstarters have ended in disappointment.
The platform has collectively raised over $4 billion from disparate backers to fund creative projects and launch new businesses. Don't forget Awkward Black Girl, the Gravity Blanket, the Pebble smartwatch. You know the famous ones: Cards Against Humanity started as a Kickstarter. Kickstarter, which celebrates its 10 birthday this month, has enabled the creation of a number of projects that in any other world might have never existed. Who would use such a thing? The idea that you could tap the collective power of the web to fund all manner of harebrained schemes-for the sake of art, or entertainment, or simply to make something cool-seemed absurd.Ī decade later, all of that has changed. The term crowdfunding was not yet part of the common vernacular. Kickstarter had launched a few months earlier, and what it might become was still left largely to the imagination. To cover the travel and material expenses for such a project, they turned to the internet, where they found a few dozen strangers willing to fund their little scheme thanks to a brand-new platform called Kickstarter.
They had begun in a small Irish fishing town Pittsburgh, where Clayton is from, was next. The letters were in fact sent by the artists Lenka Clayton and Michael Crowe, who had taken on the ambitious project of mailing a physical letter to every person in the world. In fact, more than 600 residents of Pittsburgh's Polish Hill neighborhood received letters that year, each of them signed cryptically (but with love) by "Lenka and Michael." Similar letters reached the reverend of a local church and the architect William Hopkins. Inside was a message printed on cream-colored paper: "All of the items in your refrigerator are swapped with all of the items in Ben Affleck's refrigerator. In December 2009, a mysterious letter appeared at the home of one Mr.
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