Big Dreamers & Kickstarters

            I was a kid once. I had big dreams of super stardom at a real young age. I watched MTV's The Grind with the hopes of seeing those same people partying it up to one of my songs during their Spring Break in Daytona Beach one day. If I didn't spend the good part of my 20's fishing for a record deal in all the wrong places without a formal education to back me up, things might've been a little different but I'm here now and things worked themselves out the way they were supposed to. Who needs a record label, a distribution deal, a publisher and such when you have yourself, a few friends to join the cause and a little effort to achieve the impossible? If you told a big dreamer like myself that all I was going to need was a Kickstart to get my career going, we would have looked far and wide between every rock and hard place there was. Well, now we don't have to.
            Kickstarter is a Manhattan based private for profit crowd funding company launched in 2009 by Perry Chen, Yancey Strickler & Charles Adler. Kickstarter allows for the funding of a seemingly infinite array of ventures from all sorts of music, fine art, games, films and even food to name a few. These projects are big and small; they can be fairly inexpensive to multimillion dollar operations put forth by celebrities. The beauty of being the biggest crowd funding company of its kind is adopting a business model and safeguards that prevent individuals from investing in projects and pocketing earnings. Kickstarter also encourages hard work, fosters an entrepreneurial spirit and requires a certain degree of humility by bringing yourself to a backer's level with a tangible reward (like free tickets, a signed copy of the product, free posters or thank you letters) that supporters will walk away with to signify personal ownership of that project.
            If this system is confusing, overwhelming or too good to be true at first glance, all questions and concerns will be addressed upon entering Kickstarter's website. Kickstarter prides itself on its all-or-nothing business model. Though, there is no clear cut guarantee that any one project creator will meet their backers' expectations, use the funders' money on their project or even complete it for that matter, the creators must set a realistic funding goal and deadline and are bound by legal damages should they fail to deliver on a particular project. There are skeptics on the validity of Kickstarter and backlash from those disagreeing with celebrities participating in crowd funding but one thing is for certain: Kickstarter has revolutionized the way creative works are funded forever. Not having enough scratch to fund your next album, film, graphic novel, or new line of jerky products is no longer a viable excuse. You too could have been that kid that I once was and the next one to Kickstart your dream into a reality.