Kickstarter was and will always be beholden to their credit card processors and a painful lesson in picking one’s payment provider carefully. It’s your payment processors fraud risk department which dictates which products and services you offer not your own team. This decision is a 100% dictated by pigeonholing themselves here and losing out to gofundme.
After Philips caused a stink about LifX[1], it was the threat of losing their payment partners that caused Kickstarter to ban all sales of hardware [2]. They would later walk back that decision but not before we launched our own open source competitor that went on to do $100m, including Bitcoin support in 2012 [3].
Which is to say decentralized payment systems solve a lot of problems for crowdfunding platforms. Specifically Kickstarter missed out on the explosive growth that GoFundMe captured because Kickstarters payment processor said “no” and GoFundMe’s said “yes”.
But switching to Celo or some other platform in 2021+ feels too little too late for a platform whose culture has ossified.
It was an open source crowdfunding platform that raised $100m collectively for projects that used it.
Ie Lockitron raised $2.2m in presales with it. Tile raised $2.6m in presales with it. And so on.
Unlike Kickstarter it did not take a 8-10% fee of funds raised. It was not a primary business for us. Just something we casually maintained because we coincidentally had a bunch of payment processors in our YC batch that year so spinning it up was less than a weekend’s worth of work given our connections.
I am pretty indifferent now but at the time I was infuriated that Kickstarter drew an arbitrary line between a creative and a founder. It simultaneously marketed itself as the democratic fundraising platform for artists and was perfectly opaque (and self-contradictory) on which projects they would gatekeep from their platform once they started getting heat from places like NPR.
At the time I took a hardline approach that the way to do good was to give people access to tools not restrict them from a platform. Enough time has passed that I see that’s a bit reductive.
You’re making a lot of assumptions about what was happening behind the scenes with a payment processor agreement you weren’t privy to. Kickstarter was always and devoutly uninterested in medical fundraising, so missing out on GoFundMe’s growth was a feature, not a bug.
I’m referring to the period between 2010 and 2013. I suspect we were both privy to a lot of conversations we can’t share here. I am familiar with those processor conversations. GoFundMe didn’t pivot to primarily medical fundraising until later.
But as this is all ancient history why did Kickstarter walk back their anti-tech / anti-hardware position? At the time it felt like they really wanted to double down on artistic creators.
After Philips caused a stink about LifX[1], it was the threat of losing their payment partners that caused Kickstarter to ban all sales of hardware [2]. They would later walk back that decision but not before we launched our own open source competitor that went on to do $100m, including Bitcoin support in 2012 [3].
Which is to say decentralized payment systems solve a lot of problems for crowdfunding platforms. Specifically Kickstarter missed out on the explosive growth that GoFundMe captured because Kickstarters payment processor said “no” and GoFundMe’s said “yes”.
But switching to Celo or some other platform in 2021+ feels too little too late for a platform whose culture has ossified.
[1] https://www.npr.org/sections/alltechconsidered/2012/09/03/16...
[2] https://techcrunch.com/2012/10/07/the-story-of-lockitron-cro...
[3] https://github.com/apigy/selfstarter/pull/22