Thank you. I have some ideas for you guys. KickStarter doesn't want to go the route of "being a store" and selling pre-sales. This is EXACTLY what a lot of us want and the direction I think you should go in.<p>In fact set it up in a way that makes Pre-Sales the main attraction. It would make things so much easier.<p>When I was running my ToDoCal kickstarter the biggest pain in the ass was trying to set up prizes and calculating the cost to fulfill them. Because kickstarter isn't set up like a store that accepts pre-sales I would have to double the cost of all my "prizes" so as to buffer the cost of fullfilling expensive orders. Shipping to Chicago would be $6, shipping to San Francisco was $10, international shipping was $16. But I can't charge different people different prices, so I had to forcing everyone to pay a higher price to keep it safe.<p>By designing Crowdhoster as a pre-sales store you can eliminate that completely. USPS shipping api's can calculate the exact cost each backer should pay down to the penny. You could offer your backers discounts based on bulk orders and have an idea of where your products are going so you can design packaging to be more efficient.<p>Basically make a pre-sales store with minimum order requirements where anyone can place orders and their card is charged only when the minimum order is reached after X amount of time.
One day self-crowdfunding will be as easy as hosting a blog. Not yet, but this is a good step towards that direction. I certainly wouldn't mind it if in 10 years crowdfunding is what powers the internet.
We built the exact same service last month <a href="http://www.jumpcrowd.com/" rel="nofollow">http://www.jumpcrowd.com/</a> The hosted SelfStarter movement will open up crowdfunding in the same way services like Blogger and WordPress opened up blogging platforms. KickStarter probably won't survive in its current form.
Hey, this is Yancey from Kickstarter here. We think projects like this are great, which is part of the reason we open-sourced the Amazon FPS code that we use at Kickstarter, which was then used in Selfstarter and Crowdhoster. It's on Github here: <a href="https://github.com/kickstarter/amazon_flex_pay" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/kickstarter/amazon_flex_pay</a><p>For us, Kickstarter is a big experiment and we're constantly learning what works, what doesn't, and making changes as we go. We want to provide the best possible space for creators to share their projects and for people to connect with them. We think we're doing a pretty good at that, but of course there's always more to learn.<p>If you're curious, we have many of our stats available (live) here: <a href="http://www.kickstarter.com/help/stats" rel="nofollow">http://www.kickstarter.com/help/stats</a>
This is fantastic!<p>16 hours ago, I asked this:
<a href="http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5138705" rel="nofollow">http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5138705</a>
and now you just conveniently come along with the perfect answer!<p>Awesome.
I read somewhere that the challenge with posting your projects with Kickstarter is getting the attention of people and hence most of them do not reach their funding goal.
This is great to see. I'm working on something similar which has a few more features is focused on integrating into other brands websites or social networks.<p>I think this is going to be an exciting arena with a lot of market potential. The current marketplaces support a small percentage of the audience and free form platforms can let anyone crowdfund.
This is just a great project. Thank you!
I submitted my own proposal.<p>I was going to use kickstarter, but it simply did not match very well with what I plan to launch. This however, fits just right.<p>Also, great landing page. I don't know what is your conversion rate, but from experience I can tell that it just works.
As a user I would feel more comfortable buying from a trusted source such as kickstarter because I feel like there is more of a guarantee of getting my money back if the project never gets off the ground
I don't know a ton about crowdfunding... but what could be the downside of using Kickstarter? Seems to me that it comes with free audience and offers some security for the backers.