My brother and I are currently working on a browser-based MMORPG and today he turned my attention to Kickstarter (http://www.kickstarter.com/). I was wondering how the VC/startup folks feel about that approach, assuming the initial capital needs are relatively small and growth is expected to be as organic as possible. Anyone on HN have experience with Kickstarter? Can you share your thoughts?
Kickstarter can work, but think of it as a tool for hosting campaigns, not a community you can tap. Unless they decide to feature your campaign it won't even be visible on their site... Not even on the pages for more specialized tags.<p>It's a good way to gather donations, but go into it assuming you'll bring every single referral to your campaign.<p>And ask for the minimum amount you could get started with. We had to leave thousands of dollars on the table because we didn't reach our goal.
Friends of mine raised $26 thou for expanding and porting a really cool Flash game:<p><a href="http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1296948465/no-time-to-explain-indie-game" rel="nofollow">http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1296948465/no-time-to-ex...</a><p>But, I think it's more of a lottery than anything else ... if you browse down the newest projects a while there's a small chance of reaching your goal, and a pretty good chance of not getting enough or not getting anything.
Give it a try. Raising money via Kickstarter will require you to generate some awareness and excitement around your project - being able to do so in a meaningful way could be proof to future investors (and more importantly yourself, too!) that you're actually able to not only build, but also market your product in an organic way.<p>As an aside, Kickstarter itself received quite some VC funding:
<a href="http://allthingsd.com/20110317/kickstarter-fesses-up-the-crowd-sourced-funding-startup-has-funding-too/" rel="nofollow">http://allthingsd.com/20110317/kickstarter-fesses-up-the-cro...</a><p>EDIT: grammar
Since they added the Games section, Kickstarter has been flooded with game projects. A small portion of them are successfully funded.<p>It seems that Kickstarter alone isn't enough to get funding - putting your project on Kickstarter and then leveraging some other form of publicity has a much higher change of success.<p>As a side note:<p>My company builds html5 multiplayer game technology. I'd love to talk about your project - you can reach me at tom@gameclosure.com
I personally think it's an amazing platform. Having said that, it seems more common for hardware hacks to be successful on kickstarter more than software, especially those that acts as preorders for the hardware. While some software companies have been successful, it's generally more rare from my own observations. Nonetheless, you could try.
My problem with Kickstarter is the approval process, which doesn't cater very well to idea people. I'm also not a fan of giving all of my SEO away to another website, especially if I'm in charge of driving traffic to my campaign.<p>That being said, it's hard to argue with the success of their model. My problem was that I wanted a way to self-host my own campaigns, as often as I wanted. We're building <a href="http://ignitiondeck.com" rel="nofollow">http://ignitiondeck.com</a> to fulfill our own needs. Who knows, maybe it'll help someone else too. Still a long way to go though.<p>Profounder looked nice at first glance, but then I realized I had to hit up my friends and family. Last thing I want to do is MLM the people I hang out with on a daily basis.
I was frustrated to find that Kickstarter is US only if you want to use it to raise funds, though they happily accept money from people outside the US.<p>No personal experience myself, but the Diaspora team would have some experience with it.
It depends on the project. They declined our website and my friends paper-picture-flower making project. It seems the majority of their projects are in the arts (music, movies, art, etc)
Thank you everyone for the responses and information! We'll be looking at Kickstarter for sure and I'll try to report back here with our experience, if any.<p>Thanks again.