Marseille edit
It has been 5 years since the platform of crowd funding Kickstarter was launched and allowed to start up less than 65,000 projects. Among these projects, we find it ambitious, original and sometimes even emergent and totally absurd ideas!
Everything began on July 3rd, the day before the Memorial day in the United States, when the American, Zack Danger Brown had a simple idea: make a salad of potatoes.
But in the digital age 2.0, and participative Web, which still launches a culinary project without inviting the whole world to participate? Not our dear Zack in any case! As an apprentice cook but Web savvy, he created Kickstarter project to ask for 10 dollars, by specifying that he simply would like to prepare a salad of potatoes, without guaranteeing its excellence since it is the first one.
What is the peculiarity of this project like? Within 5 days, our young American collected 40,000 dollars to buy more than a semi-trailer of tubers!
The project was financed quickly and the information did not delay circulating. At first it is a simple curiosity, then the salad of potatoes became a real buzz which has inflamed the Web.
From a simple joke to a big buzz
More than 3,000 Internet users mobilized "to support" Zack's project, which a little bit overtaken by events, tries to supply its offer.
Due to funds increased, the latter added Stretch Goals (objectives) to supply the project. The latest amounted of $3,000, but it is widely exceeded now. Zack will thus have to make 3 different recipes, use some mayonnaise of much better quality than the one that he planned to use, contact a leader to obtain a better recipe, streamer the realization of his salad, create a movie to thank all the participants and finally, rent a festive room "to invite all Internet users" to a "salad-de-pommes-de-terre-party".
To motivate the Internet users, Zack had also set up the rewards to thank backers. For $1, Zack will pronounce your name during the salad preparation, from 3$ you can enjoy it and receive Zack's photo of cooking, with 5$ you can choose an ingredient, etc. For higher amounts, Zack also offers a little more original awards, as a haiku personalized, a hat on the theme of the potato salad, a dedicated jar of mayonnaise, a T-shirt and even a cookbook! Don’t forget, of course, the possibility of assisting this epic creation in the first ranks of cooking.
We can only wish good luck to Zack, who obviously overwhelmed with the excitement of his project, will have probably difficulty in meeting commitments. There will be more than 3,000 people to thank verbally. Fortunately, he had the ingenuity to limit the number of places in his kitchen!
A salad is not the taste of everybody
It is possible only to applaud the success of this project in which the strong media coverage, within 3 days, made the increasing number of participants in a exponential way. This salad of potatoes was the biggest success of the crowd funing platform this day, showing that this project has collected (for the moment) 3,500 times of the initial amount requested.
However, for any buzz, certain Internet users disapprove this slapstick joke, so mayonnaise is taken rather too much. In fact, many people wonder about the utility of such a project and the reasons which urge the Internet users to give some money for something that they consider "trivial", whereas numerous ambitious or wealth-creating projects have difficulty in obtaining the finance. Some shout in the injustice, others denounce the human stupidity but all seem to forget one thing: the beauty of Kickstarter and the resident Internet in the freedom left with the users, who can fund the ideas which mean a lot to them, seem to be promising or simply funny.
Certainly, other projects would much more deserve to collect funds ... But you should not lose sight that its success is not due to immense love of the Internet for the potato salad, far from there, simply effect snowball which was caused by this buzz. The Internet users participate by imitation effect, ready to give a little to further carry an absurd idea which amuses and helps them probably forget a little bit their own concerns.
If we have to hold only one thing: our success does not depend on the quality of what we have to offer but simply in the way we can affect the Internet user and convince him/her to speak about us. (At least, about Kickstarter)
How is Kickstarter positioned to deal with such a project?
When we see this kind of project, we can quickly wonder how this takes place in the conditions of Kickstarter’s use. After all, the first vocation of the platform remains the financing of the creative projects, which relate to the art, music, movie and even video game. However, which places does the preparation of a potato salad occupy with regard to all things?
It turns out that Kickstarter aims to be a rather flexible project which is free to exist in the condition of respecting some rules: projects have to focus on creating something to share. The projects have to show the transparency:
You can find an exhaustive list here:
https://www.kickstarter.com/rules/prohibited
Since the project of our improvised cook respects all the rules which we have just expressed, it joins perfectly within the framework of the general terms of Kickstarter’s use. Showing that Zack Danger Brown offers a participative content, the notion of sharing is respected. He can thus take advantage of his thousand dollars as he hears about it... It will just be necessary not to forget to buy a mayonnaise of " better quality " as promised!
Article written by Jérémy J.