Kickstarter - Back to Basics with Quickstarter

by Startacus Admin

With Quickstarter, crowdfunding platform Kickstarter wants to remind people of its smaller roots.

Pretty much everyone has heard of Kickstarter, even if they haven’t used it or donated to any campaigns. Founded in 2009, it has become so popular and mainstream that you might be forgiven for thinking it has always existed.

From jackets, to videogames, to tabletop and card games, to fidget cubes, Kickstarter is where some of the simplest ideas found their success and backers launching their funding into the tens of millions. The 2015 Pebble Time is, even now, the most funded Kickstarter campaign, raising just under $20.5m before being acquired by Fitbit in 2016. But what people forget is that Kickstarter was never aiming to be the place where millionaires were made. Its original aim was to find funding for small, personal projects.

London-based French designer Oscar Lhermitte recently inspired Kickstarter to go back to basics, with such small and simple campaigns. Oscar created 3 little projects: an accurate, moving lunar globe, packing tape that can be cut into stickers, and a tangram game made from offcuts from his workshop projects.

These campaigns brought him to create some simple rules for Quickstarter campaigns, which were soon embraced by the platform itself. These rules are what define Quickstarter, not new functionality or features on the Kickstarter platform. These include keeping the goal under $1,000, no stretch goals, no fancy rewards worth over $50, no PR and paid ads, and planning the campaign in under 3 months.

At the time of writing, there are 50 or so projects listed on the page Kickstarter specifically set up for Quickstarters, including dry-erase, static-cling stickers, colouring books, art, and games. With these small campaigns that are more about experiments and fun than about launching full-scale businesses, Kickstarter might bring back interest from those who perhaps view the platform as only for people with far-reaching plans and multimillion-dollar ideas.

We look forward to seeing more of what inventive Quickstarters people come up with.

If crowdfunding is your thing, you might also want to read up on:

Seedrs expands into investor automation with AutoInvest

Why are some equity-crowdfunding campaigns more successful than others?

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• #crowdfunding
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• #quickstarter

Published on: 25th July 2018