Hot Seat

Chapter 18. Winning at Crowdfunding

A few years ago, a friend told me about an amazing new website called Kickstarter. As he explained it, companies pitched themselves and their products. You could invest in the companies with real dollars, and in exchange for your investment, you would get... something... maybe.

I told him it sounded ridiculous.

The joke was on me. A few years later, I sit here decked out in my Pistol Lake shirt, Gustin jeans, and Pebble watch. I’m not dressed for the cause—it’s just that about a third of my clothes come from Kickstarter.

It turns out Kickstarter, Indiegogo, and the self-hosted variations (collectively known as “self-starters”) are absolute magic. Here’s why: they make it OK to sell your product before it exists.

Now, people have been doing this for years. It used to be called “vaporware”—invent an idea, persuade people to buy it, then stall them long enough to build it. But it was always frowned upon and, depending on the level of optimism/deception involved, was often considered unethical.

Well, now you can do the same thing, but minus the unethical part. With crowdfunding, you are up front about the fact that you’re selling the dream, and people pay you for it in cash. You get the money at the start and can use it to deliver the results later.

If you have a product that’s a good fit for crowdfunding, you’d be crazy not to do it.

That’s why when I dreamed up the idea for Robot Turtles, a board game that teaches programming fundamentals to kids, ...