adanyeva2 wrote:Thx edgybros for sharing such interesting info. Now, I have a question both for myself and for you. Wasn't it supposed for kickstarter to be a launching, cooperative platform and not a tool for earning money?
Since he hasn't posted again since posting this comment, I'm not sure that Adanyeva has seen the follow-up responses and questions. However, I think that some commentators may be misinterpreting his question...
My take on it is this: Adan is offering the opinion that KS was initially marketed as a tool for people with an idea for a new product, but no funds to start producing that product. The idea was that after raising production funds on KS, people would then continue to produce and sell their product in the "real world", away from KS, instead of returning to KS time and again as their primary sales venue.
i agree with Strag that this ship sailed long ago; and I even agree with the svede, that the way Adanyeva posed his question sounded fairly critical of Edgy Bros et al. However, maybe that was just poor wording from a non-native english speaker.
However, I do think the topic could be interesting to discuss further...
Clearly, the KS creators that we are most familiar with in the playing cards world use the latter model - returning to KS again and again with new products to sell.
I don't frequent the other areas of KS much, so I don't know if it is more common for creators of other products to continue manufacturing and selling their products through other venues "after KS".
For example, will the people behind the "million dollar coolers" take off with that idea, and continue to sell the same coolers for years through big box stores and/or their own web site? Or will they come back to KS with some new variation on their cooler, or an entirely new product? The former would be in line with Adanyeva's views, while the latter is essentially what we see from our playing cards KS "regulars".
(of course, who's to say the cooler people couldn't do both?)
There are some factors i see at play in our little corner of KS. For one, most playing card campaigns are heavily marketed on exclusiveness. The cards are usually "only available through KS", or to the lucky few who pick up the extras later. This precludes KS card creators from continuing to profit from existing work, and forces them to keep coming up with new designs or variations. Second, the margins on a playing card campaign are extremely small. Even with ever increasing prices for decks, creators are hardly getting rich off cards. And i think that the price increases themselves are partly a reflection of creators realizing they are making extremely small profits (if any) in relation to the hours (months!) of work they are putting in. The amount of capital needed to start a fully independent business is much more than the meager profits being realized by even the most high-profile playing cards campaigns. These people are barely making enough to support themselves, let alone the funds to scale up their "companies".
Third, KS has a huge following and incredible reach. There are probably just a few highly regarded card creators that have established themselves well enough, and built up enough of a following that they could probably leave KS behind. Uusi comes to mind as one that could, but I think the cards are only a small part of an already successful business. Jackson, obviously, has already experimented with doing so, and it will be interesting to see how often he continues to return to KS. It seems that there is just no replacing the amount of exposure and built-in following that creators get on KS. That 10% cut off the top, and whatever inconveniences creators face on KS, are obviously well worth it, or they wouldn't keep coming back. Even established pre-existing retailers have gotten in on the game, like Gamblers Warehouse and CPC, which is kind of an inversion of the original concept of KS, right?
I don't know why exactly KS has become such a huge player while other crowd funding sites seem like distant "also-rans". People with more web savvy probably have lots of theories. Regardless, i think it's actually
because KS has grown far beyond its original ambitions that it has become more than an incubator of new companies, and more of a tool for general commerce available to all. I wouldn't be surprised to see more established retailers sticking their toes in the KS pool. After all, you're getting a lot of valuable market research data from KS without even necessarily committing to making your product. That's something that big companies spend tons of money on. I'm curious, Is there a KS clause that prevents a huge company like Nike (as a random example) from starting a project?
not sure why this topic grabbed my interest... if you made it this far, thanks for reading!