Posts from crowdfunding

The Gotham Gal and I have been at the Sundance Film Festival this weekend. We’ve seen a nice mix of documentaries and feature films. And in the feature film category we’ve seen mainstream crowd pleasers like Mindy Kaling’s Late Night which Amazon bought for a bundle and indie films that may struggle to find a mainstream audience.

We tend to prefer the latter and among the best of the indie variety that we’ve seen was a film called Ms Purple that we saw yesterday morning at its world premiere.

Ms Purple raised almost $75k on Kickstarter (a USV portfolio company) a few months ago which funded much of the post-production costs and licensing expenses. A total of 373 patrons invested an average of $200 each (some way more, some way less) to help this film come to life.

From my experience yesterday morning, I would say it was a fantastic investment. Ms Purple is about the challenges that immigrant families navigate in the US, and about the tensions that exist in sibling relationships, particularly when a parent is dying.

Ms Purple’s filmmaker (writer and director) Justin Chon is exactly the kind of artist that Sundance and Kickstarter exist to serve. While I hope his stories can and will go mainstream, they need to be heard even if they don’t.

And funding mechanisms outside of the studio model/system insure that they will.

The Gotham Gal and I are at the Sundance Film Festival this weekend and we are going to watch all sorts of films, from features, to documentaries, to short films, and more. It is a blast to see such a variety of films and the filmmakers who made them. We will see a few of these films that were funded on Kickstarter.

So I’m featuring a documentary about surf culture in the 60s that needs another $30k (ish) to finish the film and show it at an upcoming film festival. I backed it this morning and maybe some of you will too.

I backed this documentary project on Kickstarter this week:

This film is about a bunch of things that get me going; entrepreneurship, the unlikely winner, rock, reggae, and live music.

I can’t wait until it is made and I can watch it.

Earlier this week, I backed this project from an artist in Iran.

The project is now over. It was funded with almost $10,000. So her photography book will be made and shared with the world.

It is too bad that I didn’t share this with all of you while the project was live so you could back it as I did.

But this project exhibits all of the things that makes Kickstarter so important to me.

It is from the heart, it is art, it is full of meaning, it is from a person halfway around the world that I don’t know and probably will never know.

And it moved me.

A friend of a friend is doing this project to make a workbook that can help us step back and take measure of our lives, what they are, and what we want them to be.

It’s a neat idea and I think it can be quite helpful, particularly if you feel stuck right now.

I backed it earlier this week and you may want to do the same.

The neighborhood where we live in NYC will be underwater with a 2-degree Celsius increase in global temperatures.

This Kickstarter project will create stickers that all of us can place on places like ours and remind everyone that climate change is a big deal.

I backed this project today and you can too right here.

I am a big fan of small creative projects on Kickstarter. And I also love supporting creators from other parts of the world.

As an example, I backed this project out of Mexico today. The designer is creating a tortillero, a tortilla warmer, that looks like a flying saucer.

And, naturally, I also love warm tortillas.

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I got such a chuckle(s) watching this Kickstarter video that I immediately backed this project.

I love it.

Dylan is a musician, an entrepreneur, a hacker, and a geek. That’s quite a combination and a good one at that.

He’s come up with a better way for live musicians to play their back tracks without the need for a computer and lots of cables.

It is called The Backtrack Box and he’s raising funds to manufacture it on Kickstarter.

I backed this project earlier this week and think it is the perfect Kickstarter project; creative, unique, and something that should exist in the world.