Get Kickstarting!

Kickstarter – If you haven’t heard of it by now, then you are bound to within the next couple of weeks.

Kickstarter is a website that enables people to pitch their ideas to users, if you like their idea, you can back the idea by funding their project, if the idea hits its financial goal within 30 days Kickstarter take the money from users to fund the idea, if the idea didn’t reach it’s goal, you don’t pay a thing.

What’s great though about Kickstarter though is, it isn’t all one-way traffic, you don’t just pump money into someones scheme and then hear nothing, in return for funding there are always a list of benefits for the funders (its mandatory) and these benefits are directly linked to how much (or how little) you funded to that particular idea.

I recently heard about Kickstarter.com after Frank Chimero (who gave a brilliant talk at Build Conf 2010) decided he wanted to write a book titled “The Shape of Design”, he was asking for $27,000 to help him reach his goal – that goal needed to be hit within 30 days, otherwise it wouldn’t have happened.

Frank got the funding within 2 days, 2 days! Not only that but within the 30 day period he raised almost $100,000, with nearly 2,000 people backing his project – pretty cool right?

I actually backed Franks book, and in return for my $40 pledge, not only am I backing his project, but I will also receive every edition of his book on completion, including plenty of eBook versions and the Hardcover Book.

Kickstarter is not only a great website to view peoples good ideas, but it’s great for people to back these ideas and in turn benefit from the success of that idea.

Since backing Frank’s book, I also backed The Manual, a new book by Andy McMillan, the organiser of Build, his book idea also made its goal, so congratulations to him!

I’d recommend anyone to sign up to kickstarter, it literally takes 5 seconds to do, and uses Amazon for it’s payments, so everything is both quick and easy – and secure, it’s becoming rather addictive!