off a piece of plastic and lead (if you haven't seen the infomercial, don't wait another minute). Kickstarter is the new repository of bad ideas and even worse marketing.
The platform, which has raised over USD 680 million for ‘great ideas’ since its launch in 2009, allows anybody with a half-baked plan to chuck a video online alongside some text about how truly ‘great’ their idea is. Kickstarter trollers mindlessly click from one video to the next, on the lookout for that automated battery installer or foot-operated hedge trimmer they didn't realise they couldn't live without.
And while Kickstarter is lauded as a pioneer in ‘crowd-funding’, a new way for businesses to get off the ground without selling their company to suits who in turn, will just sell it off for a slightly higher profit, the concept is about as innovative as the Potty Patch. For those of us who might prefer cleaning dog faeces out of astroturf to actually letting said dog out of the house every now and again, the Potty Patch is a rectangle of fake grass that allows your dog to relieve itself all over your kitchen floor.
Kickstarter works like this. You (the innovator) can set a monetary goal and a number of days in which to reach it. If you do, you take all the money (minus the extortionate 7 per cent Kickstarter lobs off ‘processing’ fees). If you don't, nobody spends a buck. As they describe it on their website, ‘backers are supporting projects to help them come to life, not to profit financially’. While this is perhaps true in the absolute strictest sense of the word ‘profit’, Kickstarter probably isn't the wisest investment strategy for your environment. Just spend a bit of time on the site and it becomes painfully clear that its users are out to get a good deal on the newest gadget that'll fall apart the minute they pick it up. What hasn't yet sunk in is that Kickstarter doesn't enforce any sort of return policy, nor does it offer any guarantee that the finished product will look anything like the way it's advertised. Sound winning? It shouldn't. But apparently it does. For two simple reasons.
One. The folks at Kickstarter have done what throw-away cable shopping channels never did: convince you that when you step onto their website, you're entering a land of forward-thinking and innovation, not two-for-one deals and semi-poisonous hair reconstitution treatments. So you can rest assured that whatever you get from Kickstarter will be slicker than what you might find anywhere else.
Two. Kickstarter leans on basic crowd theory: where a few go, (however ludicrous their destination may be) more will follow. You're constantly being bombarded with how close this ultra-lightweight watch or that titanium potholder are to reaching their goals, which leads you to wonder what all the fuss is about. So you scroll over to their page and ten seconds later, you’re transported into the world of do-not-miss-this-chance.
That's what Kickstarter does for the backer. The so-called creators, though, are subject to a completely different set of smoke and mirrors. Say you really do have a tremendous idea and you want to build your company without investors breathing down your neck. You register your project on Kickstarter, post a video that honestly and simply explains your idea, offer copies of your idea at discounted prices to backers and find, to your disbelief, that you can't raise more than a few thousand dollars. Compare that to the guy next to you, who's selling self-massaging footie pyjamas, who’s just hit USD 75,000 in eight days. This, you see, is an average outcome for Kickstarter, because the platform does nothing to reward real ingenuity and everything to favour flashy marketing.
If massage-pyjamas come with a winning video, that's where the money goes. If Kickstarter really does ‘fund the future’, as Rolling Stone attests, I’d say the future looks a bit too glittery.
