Here’s my prediction: sometime in 2012, an A-list film director will successfully fund a feature film using Kickstarter.
Kickstarter’s time has come. If you haven’t heard of Kickstarter, you’re about to. If you have, you’ll still find this interesting.
Background
Kickstarter was launched in 2008 as a “crowdfunding” site and it works like this:
Someone who wants to create something (like a film, book, physical gadget, or website) creates a fundraising project. Every project has a deadline and a minimum funding amount, like $25,000. And then the project creator creates a number of pledge amount options ($5, $10, $50, $100, etc) and a prize that goes along with each one (like a t-shirt).
People who want to see that thing be created can pledge those different amounts and if the minimum fundraising goal is reached, their credit cards are charged and they get the prize that corresponds to that pledge level. If they don’t hit the minimum by the deadline, no one gets charged anything.
Pretty simple.
What’s odd is that this actually works. Really, really well. Since they launched, something like 50,000 projects have been launched on Kickstarter, and almost half have been successfully funded. And we’re not talking small numbers either; of the 27k projects launched in 2011, the average pledges collected per project was about $3600.
More on the stats here.
And then you have the monster projects, some of which have raised hundreds of thousands. You can see a list of those here.
So clearly Kickstarter is a really cool way for people to get money for their creative projects. But it’s about to become a lot more.
Two very significant milestones for Kickstarter came last week. The first is that one of their projects passed $1mm in pledges. A product designer put together an amazing iPhone dock and basically sold tens of thousands of pre-orders. Pretty unbelieveable.
But the bigger milestone came when veteran game designer Tim Schafer posted a fundraising project for his new game, Double Fine Adventure. He was trying to raise $400k in 35 days or something.
Instead he hit that $400k in about 8 hours. And the pledges just kept rolling in, hitting $1mm in less than 24 hours. As I write this, it’s at $1.77mm with 27 days left to go. More than 50,000 people have backed the project so far. I fully expect the media will pick this up in the next few days and the project will easily pass $2mm and possibly $3mm.
Something crazy is happening here. Kickstarter is obviously an amazing way for people with no following and no reputation to get their ideas funded. But Tim Schafer has just proven that it’s an amazing way for people with a following to get their stuff funded as well.
If I was a top director with an indie project I wanted to get funded, I’d be out right now shooting a trailer so I could post the mother of all Kickstarter projects. Not because I couldn’t get it funded any other way, but because the impact of having 100,000 or 200,000 donors backing your film would be huge.
While we’re waiting for that moment, what could you put on Kickstarter? Do you have an idea for a cool creative project or a gadget to make people’s lives better? Why not post it? What do you have to lose?