Kickstarter

I’ve written about this before but crowd funding it now perched to redefine where we get cool gadgets and how they are funded.

In the old days, we relied on The Shaper Image, Hammacher Schlemmer, and other mail order catalogs to find cool new stuff.  Not any more.  Kickstarter has the latest and coolest of the coolest new projects.

That alone is pretty cool but here’s the twist that interests me.

Businesses now are using Kickstarter to fund projects like this Wahoo Smartphone bike computer.  This is a game changer.  Imagine you are a company and you have a product manager who wants to develop his or her pet project.  There are always more ideas than money so management has to weed out what they believe are the best investments.  Not any longer.

Make it a Kickstarter project.  The product manager has to put his idea up on Kickstarter.  Consumers will decide whether or not it’s a good enough idea to fund. For small businesses it replaces the need to go to banks for funding and most importantly, lets consumers dictate whether they want to buy a new product before it’s made.

Crowd funding is giving resources to people and companies with ideas and that is one of the best things the Internet has done.

Thanks for reading – John Neugent