Kickstarter at Sundance
Psst … looking for good projects?
The other day, I had a few meetings about start up projects. The project sponsors faced the usual problem — how to generate momentum for what they wanted to achieve. It is partially a problem of financing. But equally important, it is a problem of story telling — how to get people excited about the idea. The problem is that fund raising via project applications usually has nothing to do with getting people excited. Instead, it is about meeting funder criteria. Ho hum. So you get the money and then what?
Kickstarter breaks down that barrier by democratizing the fund raising process. If you tell a good story on the Kickstarter platform, people will pledge. And Kickstarter has raised over $130 million for projects so far. In fact, as NYT reports, Kickstarter helped finance quite a few of the new films on display at the Sundance Festival this year.
This is a great trend and I hope it goes a lot further. Not just because it is a new fund raising opportunity. It is an opportunity for the rest of us to connect with great stories.
May 18th, 2012 at 9:29 am
[…] a project on the one hand and to fund it on the other. The system is growing rapidly in the US and going mainstream. Most interesting, it is changing the way people think about financing and project […]