One of the best things about Kickstarter and crowdfunding and the collapse of the music business is a lot of artists like me have been forced to face our own weird mess about ourselves and what we thought it meant to become musicians.
Amanda Palmer
With Kickstarter, people are patrons of the arts. With Mosaic, people can be clean-energy investors like Warren Buffett.
Billy Parish
What I like on Kickstarter is when I see real innovation and I see people building something new. It makes me sad when I see things that are just the same technology; you aren't passing the technology forward.
Bre Pettis
We've been working with Paul Bettner and the Playful team since the beginning of Oculus. Paul was one of, I think, seven $5,000 Kickstarter backers.
Brendan Iribe
My first Kickstarter project created a book called 'Clear and Present Thinking', a college-level textbook on logic and critical reasoning, which was made available to the world for free. As a professor myself, I observed that the price of textbooks was too high for some of my students.
Brendan Myers
Today, dancers have so much more information and are much more mobile. Kids are traveling everywhere to go to summer programs, funding themselves with Kickstarter - putting their dreams on the Internet and seeing if they will pan out.
Carla Korbes
While I'm confident in Obsidian being able to deliver a quality title, it only takes one other Kickstarter developer to ruin things for everyone else and cast doubt on the donation process going forward.
Chris Avellone
What I like about Kickstarter is it helps games that people want to play still get made, even if you don't pump $20 million dollars into it to try and meet all the stupid bells and whistles that publishers feel must be in games nowadays.
Kickstarter has shifted from funding creative projects to funding products and videogames; the biggest funded are consumer electronics and video game projects.
Freddie Wong
People who support Kickstarter, we love them all. We're so grateful we have these products out here that allowed us to keep the copyrights and own them and everything, but people don't realize just how massive an undertaking it is.
Gail Simone
Kickstarter can get customers invested, both literally and figuratively, in a game before it is released. With nothing but an idea, a bit of video and a few screenshots, a developer can start building a loyal fan base.
Jason Schreier
One of the successes of Kickstarter is that it takes the guesswork out of greenlighting games. Publishers of larger games have to carefully choose which titles they publish, lest they lose a bunch of money on a quirky game that doesn't sell. Kickstarter is all reward, no risk, since nobody has to pay if the project isn't completely funded.
Game ideas on Kickstarter have found loads of success, even when they're not as unusual as 'BlindSide.'
One of the smartest things Kickstarter has done, in my opinion, is give people a great shopping experience related to the arts, that funds the arts. In essence, they've gotten people to pay $200 for a t-shirt plus the feeling of participation in another artist's endeavor.
Jessica Jackley
Kickstarter is such an amazing platform, it really is. It's something great for independent artists of all kinds because every musician and every artist needs help to produce the record, make the record. It's like the modern day patronage. It's turning to your direct fan. It's a good motivator too.
Jihae
I have a very warm feeling about Kickstarter 'cause I think it's the best of what we can be. It's people who actually help out our fellow artists. We actually kind of go into our pocket for something. It's very rare.
Joe Carnahan
I never understood using Kickstarter for commercial purposes. If you want to raise money for commercial purposes, I think you should give someone a dividend. They make money, then you make money. It should be an investment, whereas I think Kickstarter's true purpose is raising money for things that are in and of themselves justifying.
Kurt Braunohler
I really like Kickstarter because you don't have to be a Medici to fund the arts and sciences or to get behind a big idea or a person that sparks your imagination. It's a type of microfunding directed toward creators.
Lisa Gansky
Those projects most successful on Kickstarter - those that receive funding completely and quickly - do so largely because the creator has a strong social network and invites people to be engaged.
So, to see the response to the Kickstarter, and to see people actually really want to see, hear what I'm doing, hear what comes out of my own mind, is really an incredible experience.
Nita Strauss
When I look at Kickstarter, I see small businesses that have been funded by their customers. I see the acceleration of this shift away from the industrial manufacturing ideology to more of a maker economy. And I also see an idea so powerful that the company name has become a verb.
When I see Kickstarter, I don't see a company. Instead, I see a social movement. I see people doing things for people.
I've done a show at the Largo Theater called The 'Thrilling Adventure Hour.' We read, like, radio teleplays. It's a send-up of radio dramas from the '30s and '40s. We just did a Kickstarter for that so that we can do a web series and a concert film.
Kickstarter was already up and going when I got the Fellowship. Spending time with the other Fellows was about camaraderie, and I talked to a lot of amazing and creative people.
Kickstarter has been such a heads-down thing.
We'd love it if everybody had a Kickstarter project. I believe that everyone has some kind of creative project that they think about - whether it's something small they'd like to do over a weekend with friends, or it's the film they've always wanted to make, whatever.
The kind of system Kickstarter uses has been used for hundreds of years. Unlike Medici-style patronage, where the richest people in town give large amounts of money, Kickstarter's system relies on the general public for funding projects, and rewards those backers.
I remember early on, in the first couple of years especially, I would run into some people that would try to put Kickstarter under the 'social good' label. And I actually had this very visceral reaction - I just didn't like that at all.
Kickstarter is perfect for us. It wasn't something we heard about and just got to it. We did our research, met with the people at Kickstarter - they are brilliant, and they're excited to work with us.
It's a lot harder for an author that's unpublished to say, 'Hey, here's a new book.' There's nothing of theirs to read, so you don't know what it's going to be like. Kickstarter is great, but you also have to put your work out there whenever you can so you can build a reputation.
Kickstarter eliminates the risk that publishers and booksellers face. They have limited resources and limited shelf space, and Kickstarter is proof to them that something is going to work.
Kickstarter isn't a profit center, it's an organizer and an instigator.
The truth is I've been doing Kickstarter before there was Kickstarter; there was no Internet. Social Media was writing letters, making phone calls, beating the bushes.
I used the principles of Kickstarter to make 'She's Gotta Have It.' We filmed that in 1985 to 1986. The final cost was $175,000. I didn't have that money. It was friends, grants, donations. We saved our bottles for the nickel deposit.
I have no problem with bands using participant financing schemes like Kickstarter and such. I've said many times that I think they're part of the new way bands and their audience interact and they can be a fantastic resource, enabling bands to do things essentially in cooperation with their audience. It's pretty amazing, actually.
Twitter is maybe the worst thing. It's cool when you can tweet out your show and be like, 'Hey, come see my show,' or 'Check out this Kickstarter,' but it's also this weird 140-character vehicle for insidiousness.
