
Kickstarter's Economic Impact Measured at $5B - hownottowrite
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/jul/28/from-virtual-communities-to-real-life-enterprises-how-kickstarter-generated-more-than-5bn
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startupdiscuss
An interesting follow-up study would be to see the amount of money Kickstarter
has saved by not wasting money on products that no one wants.

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paulsutter
Maybe the downvotes misunderstood the question? I think he means, people who
ran a campaign, discovered no demand, and saved the costs of building a
company / product that would have failed.

That's a real value that Kickstarter provides.

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codingdave
Or a real deterrent to people doing creative work for its own sake. I no
longer hear of people just building something new because they want to build
things. Everyone needs funding, or else they just... don't.

Kickstarter as a validation tool for a business is one thing. But one of its
original intents was to fund creative works. I think that intent has slipped
away, sadly.

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sokoloff
Another front page article now is a teenager that built a software-defined
radio from scratch. For fun. With an FPGA, a home-designed 6-layer board, BGA
parts, hand placed, and reflowed in an oven he made in only 3 spins.
Ridiculous respect.

Now that he's built it and people are asking to buy it, he's not even sure if
wants to (bother to) sell any.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12181350](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12181350)

I think there's probably about as much creative/hobby work getting done as
before. Now, you're just hearing about the wantrepreneurs who can't get a
Kickstarter funded. Those people probably weren't going to build something in
the absence of Kickstarter/Indiegogo either.

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lowglow
I was speaking with one of the founders of one of the first successful (multi-
million dollar) kickstart campaigns and Kickstarter is missing its "maker"
edge. It used to be a place where people could go to test ideas and now it's
mostly just a marketing platform for fleshed out ideas and products.

We took a step back and started building Baqqer[0] to help makers find
community and resources while they from from idea to prototype to product. You
should check it out, we have a lot of cool stuff like splash pages for
projects, newsletters, etc. We also dog food our own product. Any feedback
would be cool. :)

[0] [https://baqqer.com/](https://baqqer.com/)

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egypturnash
Depends on what kind of making you do. It's a boon to people who make
independent comics like myself; I've got my third one going right now.
[https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/egypturnash/decrypting-...](https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/egypturnash/decrypting-
rita-volume-3-and-omnibus)

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Vaskerville
Hmmm, what about all the failed Kickstarters?

Here's another one worth a half a million bucks, with a rock-star co-founder
(Yugo Nakamura), and two years later almost zero delivery. Just more empty
promises and lack of delivery (except they have been selling at MOMA since
last September):

[https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1353046055/framed-a-
rev...](https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1353046055/framed-a-
revolutionary-platform-for-digital-art?ref=discovery)

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armenarmen
Very, very cool. I hear some voices out there saying that crowdfunding is a
played out space, and even speaking down about it as a method of getting
started. But with numbers like these its impossible to argue against it, a
real democratization of entrepreneurship. I'm working on getting my own
platform built now, the twist being its competitive. Our first campaign is
ongoing. The teams are trump supporters and Hillary supporters, the side that
raises the most through pledges gets planes to flyover Denver carrying a
message in favor of their candidate. On BART right now headed to SFO and the.
Denver to get some canvassing in!

