Yancey Strickler
CEO and Cofounder of Kickstarter
Discussion
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Yancey Strickler
@ystrickler · CEO, Kickstarter
Hello! Yancey Strickler here, co-founder and CEO of Kickstarter, the world's largest funding community for creative projects. I served as Kickstarter's Head of Community and Head of Communications before becoming CEO. It's an exciting time at Kickstarter — we recently announced our reincorporation as a Benefit Corporation. Benefit Corporations are for-profit companies that are obligated to consider the impact of their decisions on society, not only shareholders. I'm here to answer questions about Kickstarter, Benefit Corporations, creativity and making, or anything else!
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Luís Otávio Ribeiro
@luisofribeiro · Product, Catarse
Hello Yancey! Thank you for sharing your knowledge! I would like to understand what was the main acquisition channels and actions done by kickstarter during the early days and what has changed if you compare to how you do acquisition nowadays. Did the curated pages had some role in acquisition strategies at some point?
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Yancey Strickler
@ystrickler · CEO, Kickstarter
@luisofribeiro There's never been paid acquisition for Kickstarter. It's all been organic growth of the platform within creative communities, and then those artists and communities networking the platform to their worlds. It's really traveled within micro-pockets of the creative community. I remember about four months after we launched I was personally approving every project as it went live. And one day I came across an Indian classical dance project out of Chicago. I remember thinking, "oh this is cool, I've never seen an Indian classical dance project before." A week later and there were four or five of them. At that moment I realized that the platform was being validated community by community. And so then it became clear that we just needed to provide a medium for an authentic expression of people's ideas, and their passion would communicate the rest. Thankfully that has still largely held true.
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Yancey Strickler
@ystrickler · CEO, Kickstarter
@evelynhchin This is something very front of mind for me, especially post PBC. We see a future with a more expansive product than we have now. We are thinking constantly about the conditions and environments affecting artists and creators and how we can help them with products or services. Expect to see new things there in the future. But that's always going to be the focus: what's hard about being a creator at this moment? How can we help that? What are other people missing because they're looking for easy ways to monetize "content" and not thinking about how it's created in the first place? That's one of the core guiding insights for us since day 1.
Especially for me, coming from the music world, I was surrounded by people talking about how to monetize music in a post-Napster world. But all I could ever think was that monetizing is such a business question. It's not a music question. The real question was how can it be easier for that music to just exist??? Focusing on sales and a content model for arts and culture has so little to do with its actual creation
Nishant Arora
@nshntarora
@ystrickler Firstly, How did your shareholders react when you first told them your plans to reincorporate as a public benefit corporation?
How did you guys hack up the first prototype of Kickstarter? How much time did it take? and from where you did you arrange for the initial funds to operate?
And lastly, Who came up with the idea of that scissor surprise in the footer? :p
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Yancey Strickler
@ystrickler · CEO, Kickstarter
@nshntarora The shareholders were positive! We had a call with them a month or so back and sent along a big packet of information sharing a ton of background on what a PBC is and how we were approaching it. We've been fortunate to have great support from the beginning and it continued here.
The first prototype... a long time in the making. There's an old blog post called "Happy Third Birthday Kickstarter" that shows all the original designs. So the design was set as of October 2005, more or less, but building it took another 3+ years.
And credit for the scissors goes to the one and only Sam Cole. Sup Sam
Julie Wood
@juliewood · Kickstarter
@ystrickler @nshntarora ^^ here's that blog post with the early designs: https://www.kickstarter.com/blog...
Ryan Hoover
@rrhoover · Founder, Product Hunt
Welcome, Yancey! Big fan of Kickstarter and its impact on so many entrepreneurs' lives.
What Kickstarter campaign are you most proud of?
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Yancey Strickler
@ystrickler · CEO, Kickstarter
@rrhoover It's such a boring answer but it's so hard to choose. But one favorite is the Balloon Mapping Kits. This is where four folks in New Orleans wanted to investigated the Deep Horizon spill but BP was blocking people from going on the beaches. So they had the idea of flying kites over the gulf with cameras attached, and built a map that way. So creative. And fuck BP.
Ryan Hoover
@rrhoover · Founder, Product Hunt
@ystrickler wow, awesome. For reference, here's the campaign.
Melissa Joy Kong
@melissajoykong · Content, Product Hunt
Yancey, it is such a delight to have you here!
Was there a particular moment in the growth of Kickstarter where you saw user growth take off?
What factors/projects/strategic decisions do you attribute to the community's growth?
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Yancey Strickler
@ystrickler · CEO, Kickstarter
@melissajoykong The growth has always been pretty consistently gradual. We've never aimed for hockey stick moments, and have been fortunate to not have too many of them. But the big moment would be Feb 9, 2012, when Double Fine Adventure and Elevation Bock both crossed $1 million in funding within five hours of each other. They were the first to cross $1 mil. That set off a firestorm that culminated with the first Pebble project three months later. It went from 0 $1 mil+ projects to more than a dozen in the span of weeks.
That brought a huge influx of projects, traffic, and attention that we had mixed feelings about. We had been concentrating on growing the platform in a measured way, thinking longterm, and now we were suddenly the internet's new lottery ticket. That required a lot of thought and consideration to navigate, and ultimately that culminated in the "Kickstarter is not a store" announcement that October.
Melissa Joy Kong
@melissajoykong · Content, Product Hunt
What is the most challenging decision you've ever had to make as CEO of Kickstarter?
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Yancey Strickler
@ystrickler · CEO, Kickstarter
@melissajoykong The most challenging decision you have to make is a new, unprecedented one, and it's amazing how quickly that learning + challenge can fade into the background. So there have probably been 20 most challenging decisions and now I can't remember what any of them are.
In general the hard parts for me are when your principles are put to the test in new and unexpected ways. So all along we've stated we believe in X but now Y happens in such a way that you can't even tell what X is anymore so what do you do? Every company faces these tests regularly. In our history we've seen about one big public crisis per year, and it's always along these lines.
This is where the PBC charter is so helpful, because it clearly commits us to certain convictions and principles and makes us VERY accountable to them. So now I have a North Star in some ways to guide and shape my thinking.
But these things will keep coming up. They always do. Whether it's letting someone go, making a tough decision about the product, or having to stand true to your convictions, experiencing these things is a sign of growth. Patience and wisdom are key :)
Melissa Joy Kong
@melissajoykong · Content, Product Hunt
If you had to build Kickstarter from the ground up all over again...
(1) What would you do differently?
(2) What decision would you have made faster?
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Yancey Strickler
@ystrickler · CEO, Kickstarter
@melissajoykong I don't know that there's that much I would do differently. I don't look back and see any major regrets. I see plenty of mistakes, but I don't think we'd be the organization we are without them.
Dennis Passway
@dennispassway · I make things.
Thanks for being here Yancey! In another question I saw that you got much knowledge in books. What are the top 3 books that helped Kickstarter to get where it is today?
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Yancey Strickler
@ystrickler · CEO, Kickstarter
@dennispassway I mentioned these elsewhere, but I love Founders at Work and Not for Bread Alone
Yann Bertrand
@_yannbertrand · Pokémon Master
For you, what makes Kickstarter better than other crowdfunding platforms?
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Yancey Strickler
@ystrickler · CEO, Kickstarter
@mryannooo Brand, scale, and reputation. We're miles beyond anyone else on all of those fronts.