Kickstarter is brilliant, innovative and inspirational! It is also a very useful product financing tool. Since it started in 2009 it has raised over USD 2.23 billion for nearly 111,000 projects. There are currently some 4,300 project in 15 different categories looking for finance. These include categories for Art, Technology, and Journalism, the full list is at the bottom of this post. It really does live up to its mission to bring creative projects to life, so much so that it reincorporated as a Benefits Corporation in 2015.
This is all a preamble to me getting my Ace Marks shoes this week. Paul and his team, long-term in the shoe industry, raised $574,000 from Kickstarter with over 2,000 backers in March and it was with great excitement that I tried on my new, very good, shoes. In fact I got so carried away I did this little video – hey, it is holiday time!
Many of the projects have charitable connections, Ace Marks shoes encourage you to send back your old pair so that they then donate to Career Gear an American charity helping people back to work. Here is a link to the Ace Marks Kiskstarter site showing what a good campaign looks like. Here is the one for Ockham Razors from my 10th August post. Many projects do not reach their minimum pledge needed so your money will not taken. Once the target sum is raised and the project closes then you are at risk, some projects do not deliver in which case you lose your cash and many, if not most, will deliver late.
So here is the full list of Kiskstarter Categories, there are many subgroups:
Art, Comics, Crafts, Dance, Design, Fashion, Film & Video, Food, Games, Journalism, Music, Photography, Publishing, Technology, Theatre
