Image through Order of the Stick
It was huge news when a Kickstarter project broke the $ 1 million dollar mark for the initial time onFebruary 9th. A lot more amazingly, two projects shattered that record in the same day. Now yet another project, The Order of the Stick Reprint Drive, has passed $ 1 million in pledges. This all begs the question: is this just a coincidence, or has Kickstarter hit an inflection point in its growth, with a lot more seven figure projects coming in the close to future.
Graph by way of Kickstarter
To realize the web site’s current good results, it helps to appear at their growth more than the final two years. Kickstarter’s Fred Benson made this graph, which shows the acceleration in new backers who are funding Kickstarter projects. It’s the kind of chart the venture capitalist drool more than, since while it may not be the hockey stick growth of a web site like Pinterest, each 1 of these new backers represents somebody who was willing to give cold tough cash via Kickstarter, which collects five percent on each effective funding.
Although only about 44 percent of projects on Kickstarter succeed, 89 percent of backers have funded a productive project. That’s the type of positive reinforcement that turns several men and women into serial backers. As I wrote after my fiancee completed a productive Kickstarter, a full third of the men and women who donated had been full strangers, but looking closer, a lot of of those contributors seemed to have backed a dozen or more various projects.
There is yet another element at operate here, which is that much more established artists are turning to Kickstarter. Each Order of The Stick and Double Fine Adventures, which has now passed the $ 2 million mark on Kickstarter, are projects from creators who spent years creating up their fanbases. It has led to internal debate at the business. “There is some level of conflict here—we employed to have a no-organizations method,” mentioned co-founder Yancey Strickler. “But, really, this was just a guy with an notion, and design is art. We limit Kickstarter to projects. Startups come to us when they don’t want to go to venture capitalists, and we say no, it has to be a project. It’s difficult.”
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