Kickstarter

Self-portrait

Kickstarter helps artists, musicians, filmmakers, designers, and other creators find the resources and support they need to make their ideas a reality. To date, tens of thousands of creative projects — big and small — have come to life with the support of the Kickstarter community.

Kickstarter is an enormous global community built around creativity and creative projects. Over 10 million people, from every continent on earth, have backed a Kickstarter project.

Some of those projects come from influential artists like De La Soul or Marina Abramović. Most come from amazing creative people you probably haven’t heard of — from Grandma Pearl to indie filmmakers to the band down the street.

Every artist, filmmaker, designer, developer, and creator on Kickstarter has complete creative control over their work — and the opportunity to share it with a vibrant community of backers.

(https://www.kickstarter.com/about?ref=nav)

Description

Kickstarter is an independent crowdfunding platform for creative projects, including movies, games, art, design, comics, crafts, fashion, journalism and music, among others. The company has helped fund 89,000 projects since its beginning in 2009 and is currently based in Brooklyn, NY, with 121 employees.

A project is a finite work with a clear goal to materialize an idea. Funding is “all-or-nothing”, meaning each project needs to establish a funding goal that needs to be meet at a 100% by the established end date; this way, people are motivated to support a project and spread the word. Usually, the first people backing a project are its creator’s friends and admirers, making social media campaigns an essential part of the process. To motivate backers, creators offer rewards (a copy of what the project is producing, either digital or physical, or a limited edition).

Kickstarter does not guarantee a project’s completion nor efficiency, since it depends on backers to analyze proposals, verify the creator’s history and references to decide a project’s validity and potential success. Project completion depends entirely on its creator, although they must keep backers up to date on the project’s progress and difficulties, reassessing goals accordingly in case of problems.

Links

URL: https://www.kickstarter.com/

Wayback Machine: https://web.archive.org/web/*/https://www.kickstarter.com/

Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kickstarter