An interesting follow-up study would be to see the amount of money Kickstarter has saved by not wasting money on products that no one wants.

Maybe the downvotes misunderstood the question? I think he means, people who ran a campaign, discovered no demand, and saved the costs of building a company / product that would have failed.

That's a real value that Kickstarter provides.

Or a real deterrent to people doing creative work for its own sake. I no longer hear of people just building something new because they want to build things. Everyone needs funding, or else they just... don't.

Kickstarter as a validation tool for a business is one thing. But one of its original intents was to fund creative works. I think that intent has slipped away, sadly.

Another front page article now is a teenager that built a software-defined radio from scratch. For fun. With an FPGA, a home-designed 6-layer board, BGA parts, hand placed, and reflowed in an oven he made in only 3 spins. Ridiculous respect.

Now that he's built it and people are asking to buy it, he's not even sure if wants to (bother to) sell any.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12181350

I think there's probably about as much creative/hobby work getting done as before. Now, you're just hearing about the wantrepreneurs who can't get a Kickstarter funded. Those people probably weren't going to build something in the absence of Kickstarter/Indiegogo either.

I don't know why you're downvoted. I totally agree.

At some point it became "cool" to throw up a "smoke test" page and deceive people into clicking purchase button on a product that does not exist. All the "influencers" started encouraging people to do that. Till this point it was annoying but it wasn't like they actually charged for it, so it was still legal.

Then came Kickstarter and it became OK to ask for actual money for something they don't even know if they can build. Like the guy below said I don't think the world has significantly changed or anything, and creative people still do creative things.

The thing I'm most annoyed about is in the past I didn't need to see these fake products and their endorsements by people in my network. Now I'm forced to see these. In the past smart people could just avoid pyramid schemes because most people they hang out with are smart enough not to fall into that trap. Nowadays with social media, these scams get spread around way more effectively than the past and I am forced to see them. Not to mention finding out how gullible some of my friends are. I don't hate them for being naive and gullible, but I would rather not know about it if I could. That's what annoys me the most.

Yes, that is exactly what I meant. I am a fan of Kickstarter/validated learning.

It's hard to say whether that "wasting money on products no one wants" is a positive or negative economic impact. Curiously, this "spent" money would be income for somebody else and would actually show up as positive GDP, so fewer attempts at starting companies would be a economically negative.

This is related to which side of the "broken windows fallacy" you subscribe to.

The real question is whether GDP is a good measure of economic performance (hint: it isn't)

I was speaking with one of the founders of one of the first successful (multi-million dollar) kickstart campaigns and Kickstarter is missing its "maker" edge. It used to be a place where people could go to test ideas and now it's mostly just a marketing platform for fleshed out ideas and products.

We took a step back and started building Baqqer[0] to help makers find community and resources while they from from idea to prototype to product. You should check it out, we have a lot of cool stuff like splash pages for projects, newsletters, etc. We also dog food our own product. Any feedback would be cool. :)

[0] https://baqqer.com/

Depends on what kind of making you do. It's a boon to people who make independent comics like myself; I've got my third one going right now. https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/egypturnash/decrypting-...

Hmmm, what about all the failed Kickstarters?

Here's another one worth a half a million bucks, with a rock-star co-founder (Yugo Nakamura), and two years later almost zero delivery. Just more empty promises and lack of delivery (except they have been selling at MOMA since last September):

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1353046055/framed-a-rev...

Very, very cool. I hear some voices out there saying that crowdfunding is a played out space, and even speaking down about it as a method of getting started. But with numbers like these its impossible to argue against it, a real democratization of entrepreneurship. I'm working on getting my own platform built now, the twist being its competitive. Our first campaign is ongoing. The teams are trump supporters and Hillary supporters, the side that raises the most through pledges gets planes to flyover Denver carrying a message in favor of their candidate. On BART right now headed to SFO and the. Denver to get some canvassing in!