If you’ve never been to Kickstarter.com, then you’re denying yourself endless hours of fun. This site brings together under-funded inventors with budding venture capitalists. The results are sometimes brilliant, sometimes banal. But they’re always fascinating. To give you a taste for what’s in store, here’s a look at some Kickstarter success stories, along with a few others that will leave you scratching your head and asking, “why?”
Three of the greatest Kickstarter ideas…
- The Pebble Watch – the team that created this product has done something apparently no one else has ever thought to do: bring the wristwatch into the 21st century. Along with telling time, the Pebble also serves as a Blueberry device that controls your music, alerts you to incoming calls and tells you how far you’ve traveled on your bicycle. There are hundreds of other apps for it in development as well. The Pebble’s inventors sought to raise $100,000 on Kickstarter. The final total was more than $10,000,000— more than 10 times that amount.
- The Elevation Dock – as any iPhone user can tell you, finding a dock that also fits standard-size cases is nearly impossible. Lots of people have complained about the problem, but designer Casey Hopkins has actually done something about it. His invention, the Elevation Dock, easily accommodates a case-enclosed iPhone with no modifications needed. Plus, it looks really cool. Casey sought to raise $75,000 on Kickstarter. He met that goal with a little cash to spare: $1,464,707 in funding has come in to date.
- The Aluminum Wallet – Plenty of alternatives to the traditional wallet have been pitched via infomercials over the last decade, from money clips to hinged metal boxes. But this is perhaps the best thought-out and most durable of them all. It’s a simple combination of metal plates and o-rings, which should be easy to replace from applerubber.com if they wear out. It even includes a built-in bottle opener. The developers initially sought to raise $6,000. Instead, more than $45,000 has been pledged by investors anxious to see a wallet for the third millennium hit the market.
And three not-so-great ideas…
- The Cabin Sisters – once upon a time, a pair of wealthy young ladies decided to pour all of their energies for an entire afternoon into writing a song. The duo, daughters of a famous, uber-rich playwright, thought their tune was so good it deserved to have its own music video. But, rather than tap into their own considerable funds, they decided to ask the Kickstarter community for the $32,000 they needed for the project. The public didn’t share their opinion of the song’s commercial success and, after two weeks, the sister’s Kickstarter campaign folded after raising less than 10 percent of its goal. Oh, and the girls got laughed at by virtually everyone on the planet— not the most promising start to a singing career.
- The Food Exchange board game – Americans love games, right? Americans also love to pretend they’re losing weight, right? So what could be a better seller than a board game about healthy foods? In the minds of Kickstarter fans, just about anything. That explains why this idea didn’t raise enough cash to buy a single head of broccoli. In fact, it didn’t raise anything at all. But it did get a few chuckles.
- Potter’s book of poems – Erik Potter thought his poetry was brilliant. Erik Potter thought that the public would give him $5,000 so he could publish his work. Erik Potter got nada for his efforts, and that’s about all there is to say on the subject.
