Kick Mass: Crowdsourcing The Future With Kickstarter
Crowdsourcing has been used in a bunch of different categories.
The idea is that a lot of minds working on a problem are better than just an individual. Everything from Wikipedia to Amazon’s Mechanical Turk, the crowd has been utilized as fact checkers, content creators, and idea generators.
It’s been, by no means, a perfect endeavor. For every successful, there’s a flop. Crowdsourcing is a tricky endeavor and to work, it has to break free of the top-down approach that most current businesses mimic.
I like the chances of Kickstarter landing in the category of successful experiments.
Kickstarter calls itself a funding platform for artists, designers, filmmakers, musicians, journalists, inventors, and explorers. You can review projects and help fund a project. Project funders often receive rewards for backing a project. (That could be one of the keys: crowdsourcing projects where members “have skin in the game” tend to do better than pure good will models.)
It’s based on these two principles:
- A good idea, communicated well, can spread fast and wide.
- A large group of people can be a tremendous source of money and encouragement.
If you’re a creator or inventor, this is a great place to get a little seed money to fund your project.
Today’s projects include a documentary on a bicycle trip and a self-published book called “Live Wrong and Prosper.”
Some of the projects are getting wicked funding: Freeq, a radio drama and video game, has already topped $9,000!
While it would be difficult to predict its chance of long-term success, Kickstarter has already succeeded in showing that Crowdsource funding is alive and well… and kicking.
is one of my favorite financial books of all time. It's an allegory about a guy who has a terrible job, and how he overcomes challenges to achieve his dreams.
