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Twenty dollars. That's how much the first successful Kickstarter campaign wanted to raise.
L.J. Ruell, a Kickstarter user from Long Island City, launched a campaign in April 2009 to raise a small amount of money to make some drawings. "I like drawing pictures. and then i color them too," Ruell wrote in the proposal for his Kickstarter project, which was simply titled Drawing for Dollars. "So i thought i would suggest something for me to draw and then if someone wants me to draw it then they can put in some pennies and then ill draw it. and color it."
On May 3, five days after Kickstarter launched publicly, Ruell became the first user to hit his funding goal and went on to raise a whopping $35. In the four years since then, Kickstarter has raised nearly half a billion dollars for more than 40,000 successfully funded campaigns, including some particularly big successes like the $8.5 million amassed for the Ouya gaming console and the $10 million raised for the Pebble smartwatch. But Kickstarter still holds up that first successful project as the embodiment of the perfect Kickstarter campaign.
"As more time passes, I increasingly think about that project as a perfect microcosm of Kickstarter," Yancey Strickler, Kickstarter's co-founder, told CNN in an interview in December. "Here's a simple idea. Here's an invitation. Let's work on this together."
In recent months, however, some of the most buzzed-about Kickstarter projects have had a slightly different equation for success: Here's a celebrity. Here's an idea. Here's an invitation. Fund.
Rob Thomas launched a campaign to bring "Veronica Mars" to the big screen. Bjork launched an (unsuccessful) campaign for an app. Melissa Joan Hart launched a campaign to finance a film called "Darci's Walk of Shame." And most recently, Zach Braff launched a campaign to fund a follow-up to his popular indie movie Garden State."
Sunday marked Kickstarter's fourth anniversary. It also just happened to be the same weekend that Braff hit his funding goal. The actor raised more than $2 million in three days -- less time than it took Ruell to raise $20 four years earlier.
On one level, that kind of high-profile success is clearly a positive for Kickstarter's business. Not only does Kickstarter get tons of press thanks to Braff's star power, the crowfunding service also takes a 5% cut of the total funds that Braff raises. If Braff were to end his campaign right now, the startup would receive more than $100,000 as a fee.
But the downside is that Kickstarter is receiving some criticism for allowing celebrities to use its platform. Amos Barshad wrote a piece in Grantland called "Thanks to Kickstarter, Zach Braff Finally Has Millions of Dollars," in which he lays out one of the big philosophical complaints about celebrity Kickstarter campaigns: "The more that famous people take over Kickstarter, the less room or attention or money there'll be for small, plucky filmmakers with no name recognition who try to get their projects going the only way they can, through crowdsourcing."
Kickstarter tried to disprove this theory in a post last year, noting that there is a ripple effect from blockbuster Kickstarter projects. When one project attracts thousands of new users to back it, many of those users go on to back other projects later. The suggestion is that rather than suck up a limited pool of funds for other projects, blockbuster Kickstarter campaigns end up increasing the pool of money available for everyone.
Even so, there is a more fundamental question: Can Kickstarter serve as a platform for celebrities looking to raise six- or seven figures without somehow intimidating or deflecting attention from aspiring artists and inventors with more modest ambitions who might otherwise use the service? As it turns out, it's Strickler, the Kickstarter co-founder, who best expressed this concern in an interview with Fast Company earlier this year.
"The thing is, if Michael Bay came along and wanted to do a Kickstarter we'd probably tell him, please don't," Strickler said at the time. "I would never want to scare the girl who wants to do a $500 lithography project, 'cause that's why we started this thing. We think we have a moral obligation to her."
Braff and Veronica Mars may be considered more indie than Michael Bay, but is their presence on the crowfunding site really that much less intimidating?
If Kickstarter's goal is to boost its revenue and notoriety by attracting ever bigger personalities and projects to the site, that is certainly a good business model and it has every right to do so. If Kickstarter's goal really is to provide a platform for the lithography girl and projects like Drawing For Dollars to get a little bit of funding and do something fun, that's a worthy and noble creative service. But it might not be able to do both.
Kickstarter declined to comment for this story.