Embracing the mothers of invention
I’LL admit it: I’m sometimes smugly entertained by the older generation’s reaction to the fads of the Web. “Facebook? Why on earth would I want other people to know about my private life?” “Twitter? Who’s got the time for that nonsense?”
Come on, people. Open your minds. You don’t have to participate, but at least let the youngsters have their fun.
And then I started hearing people rave about Kickstarter.com. I was mystified by its success — and alarmed that I didn’t get it. Was I suffering from Early-onset FuddyDuddyism?
Kickstarter is a “crowd-funding” site. It’s a place for creative people to get enough startup money to get their projects off the ground. The categories include music, film, art, technology, design, food, publishing and technology. The projects seeking support might be recording a CD, putting on a play, producing a short film or developing a cool new tech product.
Suppose you’re the one who needs money. You describe your project with a video, a description and a target dollar amount. Listing your project is free.
If the citizens of the Web pledge enough money to meet your target by the deadline you set, then you get your money and you proceed with your project. At that point, Kickstarter takes 5%, and you pay 3% to 5% to Amazon.com’s credit card service.
If you don’t raise the money by the deadline, the deal is off. Your contributors keep their money, and Kickstarter takes nothing.
But here’s the part I had trouble understanding: These are not investments. If you make a pledge, you’ll never see your money again, even if the play, movie or gadget becomes a huge hit. You do get some little memento of your financial involvement — a T-shirt or a CD, for example, or a chance to preorder the gadget being developed — but nothing else tangible. Not even a tax deduction.
Furthermore, you have no guarantee that the project will even see the light of day. All kinds of things happen between inspiration and production. People lose interest, get married, move away, have trouble lining up a factory. The whole thing dies, and it was all for nothing. So why, I kept wondering, does anybody participate? Who would give money for so little in return?
Bright ideas
Now, when you’re a tech columnist, you get e-mail pitches every day from PR people hoping you’ll write about their clients’ products. But in the last few months, I’ve started getting something really strange: pitch letters about products on Kickstarter. Products that aren’t even products, just concepts. Weirder yet, these pitches aren’t coming from the creators of those products. They’re coming from ordinary citizens.
I started reading about their projects. The one that seemed to be drumming up the most interest lately is called the Elevation Dock. It’s just a charging stand for the iphone, but wow, what a stand. It’s exquisitely milled from solid, Applesque aluminum. You don’t have to take your iphone (or ipod Touch) out of its case to insert it into this dock. And the dock is solid enough that you can yank the phone out of it with one hand. The dock stays on the desk.
The engineer behind this dock, Casey Hopkins, needed to raise US$75,000 (RM229,500) to make his dock a real product. But his pitch was so popular, it met that goal in only eight hours. “In 24 hours, it was at US$168,000 (RM514,080),” Hopkins told me by e-mail.
“It was shocking. I couldn’t eat and I didn’t sleep for about three days. The euphoria lasted about a week; then it was nose to the grindstone to start getting all the manufacturing and a million other things in place.”
Today, with about 16 days left to his deadline, he’s raised US$700,000 (Rm2.14bil). That’s a Kickstarter success story, all right.
So is the Tiktok Watchband, which turns an ipod nano into a touchscreen watch/computer on your wrist. Its goal: US$15,000 (RM45,900). Its final take: US$942,578 (Rm2.88bil). It’s now a real product and it’s for sale in the Apple Store.
The creators of the Pid-controlled Espresso Machine, a new design that brings the consistency of expensive espresso machines to a low-cost machine, sought US$20,000 (RM61,200) — and raised US$369,569 (Rm1.13bil) by its deadline last week.
The Cosmonaut wide-grip stylus for Tablets blew past its target back in April; the video points out that for a low-resolution surface where you can’t rest your hand, a fat stylus makes more sense than a pencil-like one.
Thrill of the experience
Still, these are risky ventures. Many of the projects are offered by firsttimers who have no idea how complicated it is to bring a product to market. In these tough economic times, why would average people give money to such iffy entrepreneurs, knowing that all they will get is a T-shirt?
Yancey Strickler, Kickstarter’s cofounder, told me that it’s all about the experience. “There’s a journey between when you back a project and it arrives on your doorstep. Ideas can take a while to come to fruition, and backers get a direct view into the process. Sometimes this is exciting (eureka moments, big achievements, etc.). Other times, it’s discouraging: roadblocks and other unforeseen events. That journey is part of the Kickstarter experience.”
He also points out that backing a project gives you bragging rights. “You’re not just buying the thing, you’re creating it. You’re in on the ground floor. Getting a bird’s-eye view of how it’s made is exciting.” Good point — one that explains why random, otherwise unaffiliated people are pitching tech journalists on their pet Kickstarter projects these days.
To gain insight into why people finance Kickstarter projects, I picked a person at random — he (Michael Critz) is listed on the site as a backer of five projects — and asked him why he gets involved.
“Kickstarter is to Amazon as Craigslist is to ebay,” he wrote me back. “I usually get to know the people behind the transaction a bit. It’s a community. The audience participates with the providers, not just people trying to game their seller ratings.”
He also noted that Kickstarter projects were great conversation starters. “It’s fun when people ask about my ipod watch or map-of-Boston T-shirt and I can say, ‘I got it on Kickstarter.’ I often see a spark in their eyes: ‘So it works! There’s a new market for my idea.”’
Even if you don’t invest, it’s fascinating to read about people’s projects. One person wants US$20,000 (RM61,200) to make a 30,000-mega-pixel photo of Machu Picchu.
“Using robotic camera mounts, huge lenses, advanced software and high-resolution digital cameras, we plan on taking thousands of photos, then stitching them together,” the site says. “The resulting image will be one of the largest panorama photos in the world: 30 billion pixels, more than 2,500 times the resolution of a standard digital camera.”
A pair of programmers wants to create Mail Pilot, an ingenious new e-mail service. It taps into your existing e-mail accounts, but presents each message as a “to do” item that you can check off when you’ve dealt with it.
Other projects seeking your support: Jaja, a drawing stylus for ipad and Android Tablets that’s pressuresensitive (makes fatter lines when you bear
down harder); LED Side Glow Hats (baseball caps with illuminated brims for working in dark places); Eye3 (an inexpensive flying drone for aerial photography); and so on.
Not all of them will reach their financing goals (only 44% do). Even fewer will wind up on store shelves.
But in dark economic times, Kickstarter offers aspirational voyeurism: You can read about the big dreams of the little people. And you can give the worthy artists a small financial vote of confidence — and enjoy the ride with them. — NYT