Kickstarter: The internet at its best

Kickstarter: the Internet at its best

`Friends of mine at Stevens have been working a board game they created for the past two years called Mr. Game. Just this past week the launched their Kickstarter campaign to raise money to get a company to print their game.  They have done a lot of work to get where they are now and have learned a lot about Kickstarter in the process. The more I talked to them, the more I realized how great Kickstarter is. Kickstarter seems to be the internet at its best.  I5t allows for the development of interesting products and art that would not have had a platform to get started otherwise.

For those of you how don’t know Kickstarter is one of a fem online crowdsourcing websites. The way it works is as follows. Someone puts up a project they want money to develop, it could be a new gadget, a film, or anything a venture capitalist might be interested in. The project has specific goal for the amount of money they want to raise. They also put up rewards for people backing certain amounts. For example if you give us x dollars we will send a copy of the finished game or we will put you in the credits of our short film. The project has a certain amount of time to raise the money typically 30 or 60 days. If the goal is not reached by the end of the campaign the person’s project gets no money and no money is taken from the backers. While this might seem harsh it makes sense, for example my friends how are making this game need a minimum amount of money to have a company print the game for them if they fall short of their goal no games will get printed. It should also be mentioned that Kickstarter does get a %5 cut of the money.

In my personal opinion Kickstarter and crowdsourcing is a great thing for the world. This is when the internet’s power of bringing people together can cause real things to be created. Kickstarter has already played a big role in many successful films such as Indie Game the movie, Wish I was here, and the documentary Finding Vivian Maier. The last of which was a nominee for best Documentary in this year’s Academy award. Kickstarter has proved itself to create good content and interesting products.  The website really feels like the democratization of capitalism. A big project can get funded by a lot of small backers and not by just a few large entities. Kickstarter makes it feel like it is really possible to get involved entrepreneurship. I personally feel like today it seems like it would not be possible to be able to make something that coasts a significant amount of money. It might just be me but I get the feeling that trying to create you won thing from scratch is bound to fail. Kickstarter makes me feel like if I think I have a really good idea I could start a project on the website and find out if it really could work. Typical if you start a company with a loan from a bank and nobody is interested in what you do you will be in debt. With Kickstarter you will only6 get the money if people believe in what you’re doing.