11+ Years of Kickstarter: MySpace widgets, missing vowels, & scrapped designs | Hacker News Reader

11+ Years of Kickstarter: MySpace widgets, missing vowels, & scrapped designs

kickstarter.com

109 pointsmecredis12 comments

Finally a story that doesn't repeat the notion of "if you havent executed upon your idea in two years, you should think of something else".

How about 3 years? Because that's how many years Kickstarter has existed.

That's how many years they've been live. Their ideas and initial work go back beyond that.

The web is too full of mutant versions for me to easily find the original quote, but I've always loved the line "It took me 20 years to become an overnight success."

Agree, but they were also very lucky that some other team didn't come up with the idea and executed during that time.

As I understood it IndieGoGo launched before Kickstarter. I think the luck lands more in the realm of positive press early on - something IndieGoGo didn't get the same amount of. And honestly - that has to do with (IMO) the polish Kickstarter had to it when it launched.

We're all familiar with the difference between idea and execution. But I'm really impressed by Kickstarter's understanding that they don't have a monopoly on either:

"the idea is one thing, and kickstarter is another. kickstarter is the manifestation of the idea in one way, by one set of people. but the idea will outlive kickstarter. people will be funding and building community around their projects, on the web, in this general way, for a long long time."

It reminds me of a piece I recently read - and for the life of me can't find again - that talks about the difference between starting with a product and moving up the abstraction path and starting with an idea and moving down that path, getting more and more specific until you find the product that is a manifestation of your vision.

I can't believe it took them 11+ years. It felt like a recent startup.

Having an idea for a startup for 8 years != working on a startup for 8 years.

I can totally believe it- it's just that we're repeatedly sold stories about startups that get hockey stick growth two days after launch.

I remember seeing an interview with the founder of Pinterest, who was slightly annoyed at the coverage they'd been getting- they had been working on it since 2008, but everyone was talking about it as if it had just launched.

If you dig into Crunchbase, it seems like a common theme is at least two years from inception to explosion.

How many of those hockey-stick startups have actually stuck around? How many of them had their graph of Actual Time In Use fall off as sharply as their initial userbase blew up?

I mean, besides G+. </snark>

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