I’ve been fascinated by Kickstarter for some time now. The service has been a paradigm shift in funding for entrepreneurs and small organizations that were forced to rely on angel investors or unreliable traditional funding methods for their products or ideas to come to market. I’ve invested in several, and most of the campaigns I’ve been involved in have reached their funding goals and have gone into production.
So what happens after a successful Kickstarter campaign? While reaching your funding goals is an exciting achievement, it is merely the starting point for what creators hope to be a successful and profitable venture. Where you take your product or service after that isn’t as simple as running your Kickstarter campaign, unfortunately.
But where there’s a problem there will always be innovation. Enter Outgrow.me, the logical prologue to your new product or service. The site acts as a marketplace for Kickstarter products that have (or soon will) come to fruition. Products can be sorted by availability, product-focused (such as iPhone-related products), or general terms like ‘fashion’. Outgrow.me also includes products funded by Kickstarter competitor Indiegogo.
If you’re looking for something unique, clever, or like supporting small businesses and entrepreneurs give Outgrow.me a look. I’ve spent just a handful of minutes perusing their listings and have already found several fascinating offerings.
I’ve spent the last couple days exploring the kickstarter projects I find to be the most interesting on my blog, but this is another interesting angle that I confess I have never heard of before? Does it strike you that this site is like training wheels to some extent?
I mean, shouldn’t a good product – once funded – be able to stand on its own two feet? Does it really need a special catagory of reseller to spotlight it?
My first reaction would be no, but it’s potentially just as difficult to market a product as it is to find funding to produce it. I’d imagine most manufacturers would try to sell via their own website first, but how do you generate traffic to your website? You’d also have to negotiate with resellers to carry your product, and you need to decide on a strategy: online retailers, hybrid online/physical stores, even attempting to get your product into one of the megaretailers like Wal Mart. You may have a hard time even getting negotiations started because of the hordes of competing products. Something like Outgrow.me wouldn’t replace other outlets, just augment them, and considering many of the entrepreneurs that receive funding have no formal training in business or experience in retail I’d think that any help would be more than welcome.