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Ten Of The Most Successful Companies Built On Kickstarter

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Since its 2009 founding, nearly 104,000 projects have successfully raised more than $2.3 billion on Kickstarter from friends, family and fans who want to help get those ventures off the ground. For entrepreneurs, especially those with consumer products like headphones, bags or video games, such crowdfunding has become a viable alternative to credit cards, bank loans or angel money. The backers, who give small amounts of money during the online fundraising period, get “rewards,” often the product itself, offered in advance and at a discount.

While the vast majority of campaigns raise $10,000 or less, an increasing number are raising $1 million of more. As those numbers have gotten larger, Kickstarter and other rewards-based crowdfunding sites have become an increasingly important part of the entrepreneurial ecosystem. Startups use these campaigns not only for fundraising, but also for marketing and product development. Some entrepreneurs find them so successful that they go back again and again, raising new rounds of money on Kickstarter as a way to launch new products. The campaigns allow founders to keep control of their companies rather than bringing in investors too early, while they give VC firms an easy way to vet startups for potential investment.

But raising a bundle on Kickstarter is one thing, building a company is another. And even those founders who are lucky enough to raise millions online still need to figure out production, pricing, distribution, hiring and all the other operational issues that separate a real business from a dream.

To come up with this list of 10 successful companies, I scoured Kickstarter’s list of the top 100 fundraising campaigns of all time (as of mid-March) for companies with innovative products that had moved beyond the fundraising stage. It’s a highly subjective list (listed below in alphabetical order), but all 10 of these companies are pretty darned successful in their own right.

1. Bragi

Founder: Nikolaj Hviid

Product: wireless headphones

Amount raised: $3.4 million

Why it’s successful: Bragi founder Nikolaj Hviid may have created the holy grail of wireless headphones with the Dash, an unobtrusive computer in your ear that sells for $299. The Dash can play music, track steps and act as a Bluetooth headset. “I’ve made way beyond 100 products in my lifetime, so I thought I had a good understanding of what it took to make these things,” says Hviid, the former manager of Designit Munich and head of design at Harman, the well-known audio company. “It has been the toughest thing I’ve ever done.” With the Kickstarter campaign and subsequent venture capital funding, Munich-based Bragi developed the buzzy earbuds – garnering 30 patents with another 150 in application – and sorted through the tricky issues of producing them in quantity and shipping them to more than 100 countries. Now, Bragi is on track to sell 600,000 units by yearend, and has another wearable in the works (that Hviid isn’t ready to talk about yet), that should push its revenues to $100 million. The Danish-born entrepreneur’s vision for wearables, however, goes far beyond earbuds to a view of how tinier and tinier products will make smartphones and other devices go by the wayside. “Eventually,” he says, “the screen will not be in your hand. It will be in a contact lens.”

2. Dwarven Forge

Founder: Stefan Pokorny

Product: modular gaming terrain

Amount raised: $8.2 million in four campaigns

Why it’s successful: As a kid, artist Stefan Pokorny was obsessed with fantasy games like Dungeons and Dragons. So, in 1996, he founded Dwarven Forge to create miniature handpainted dragon terrain. But it was only with Kickstarter that the business was able to become more than just a labor of love. Inventory costs are a huge thing for any gaming company, and for a company that produces lots of little, handpainted pieces, they could be a nightmare. The Kickstarter campaigns – with their pre-orders and extensive feedback from backers – allowed Dwarven Forge to develop a greater variety of product than would have otherwise been possible. It also worked as a way to sell its products to its loyal fans beyond relying just on its website. Last year, helped by its most recent crowdfunding campaign for its modular city building system, Dwarven Forge’s revenues topped $3 million. The question now for the company is whether it can move beyond crowdfunding and a direct-to-consumer model to develop a bigger audience for its castles and caverns at retail.

3. Elevation Lab

Founder: Casey Hopkins

Product: docks and other accessories for Apple products

Amount raised: $1.6 million in two campaigns

Why it’s successful: Casey Hopkins, who has a background in product design, founded Portland-based Elevation Lab eight years ago with the idea of making a beautiful iPhone dock. When he went on Kickstarter in 2012 to raise funds for the company’s first Elevation Dock, “things just exploded,” he recalls. “You’re standing at the base of the mountain looking up at this insane manufacturing project you have, and if you fail it’s going to follow you forever. So it was pretty scary.” Hopkins scrambled, manufacturing the docks in Oregon, and they soon garnered praise – and sales. Today, the popular Elevation Dock is on its third version (to accommodate the iPhone 6), and the company also makes a variety of other Apple-esque stands for iMac and Apple Watch. Its accessories have become so ubiquitous that they’re now for sale at all 475 Apple stores – a big coup for a startup, and one that required the company to borrow money from friends to create enough inventory. (Elevation Lab has taken no money from outside investors.) The company is expanding so quickly with new products and new distribution around the globe that Hopkins is reluctant to guess what its revenues will be this year. “We’re just going seat of our pants right now,” he says. “We’re got like a dozen other products in the queue that we’re working on. With all this momentum, we’re trying to take full advantage of it.”

4. Exploding Kittens

Founders: Elan Lee, Shane Small and Matthew Inman

Product: quirky card game

Amount raised: $8.8 million

Why it’s successful: Call it a card game or call it a phenomenon. When Elan Lee, a game designer who’d previously worked on the Xbox, got together with his friends, Shane Small (Xbox and Marvel) and Matthew Inman (the cartoonist better known as The Oatmeal) to make a card game, it was something of a joke. “This was supposed to be a very simple fun, weekend activity I could do with my friends,” Lee laughs. Instead, when Exploding Kittens went to Kickstarter hoping to raise $10,000, it pulled in $8.8 million, and Lee and his friends realized they’d promised to get nearly 700,000 decks of cards to a few hundred thousand backers. Since then, Exploding Kittens has, well, exploded. The Los Angeles-based company has printed nearly 5 million decks of cards, introduced an app version of the game, and begun work on a second game that also will be drawn by The Oatmeal. Because of the crowdfunding campaign, Exploding Kittens – which has eight full-time employees who work out of an office in Lee’s backyard and more than 800 contractors – was able to skip the traditionally rocky, money-losing phase of startups and become profitable within months. It’s also become an object of attraction, getting calls from Hollywood studios that want to do animated shows and from toy companies that want to make plush dolls – and even early offers (that it rejected) for a buyout. Says Lee, who’s previously founded four other companies: “It’s the most exciting and terrifying new company I’ve ever started.”

5. inXile Entertainment

Founder: Brian Fargo

Product: video games

Amount raised: $8.6 million in three campaigns

Why it’s successful: Founded in 2002 by video-game designer and founder of Interplay Productions Brian Fargo, inXile  specializes in role-playing video games. Over the years, it’s also become a leader in raising funds on Kickstarter to develop those games, including Torment: Tides of Numenera, Wasteland 2 and Bard’s Tale 4. Video games are expensive to create, and inXile’s first Kickstarter “was a hail Mary pass,” Fargo recalls. “I asked for $900,000, and people said that I was crazy to ask for that much, but I really had no choice because it was going to cost me at least that much to make.” Thanks to the crowdfunding boost, Newport Beach, Calif.-based inXile is now a 50-person operation with a second office in New Orleans. But inXile’s campaigns have been about more than just fundraising: Video-game backers are extremely vocal about giving feedback online, and by listening to them inXile has been able to address gaps in the games before they shipped. “Our games are 100 hours, which adds up to more time than all the Star Wars films,” Fargo says. “We love their feedback in looking for problems, because there’s a lot to look for.”

6. M3D

Founders: David Jones and Michael Armani

Product: inexpensive 3D printers and ink

Amount raised: $3.4 million

Why it’s successful: College buddies David Jones and Michael Armani began experimenting with 3D printers five years ago, and raised money for the Micro 3D on Kickstarter in 2014 with the goal of becoming the leader in the sub-$500 3D printer market. Today, the Fulton, Md.-based company makes a tiny and beautifully designed 3D printer (in fun primary colors), and a variety of durable 3D inks to go along with it. With its product now available at Staples, Amazon, Brookstone and elsewhere, M3D has sales between $10 million and $15 million. “When we started thinking about Kickstarter it wasn’t about having a huge loss leader or getting media attention. We were looking to sell [the printer] as low as we could without losing money,” Armani says. Unlike most manufacturing companies that go to Asia looking for cheap production, Jones and Armani decided to keep all manufacturing in Maryland – betting, correctly, that the higher labor costs would be more than offset by the benefits of keeping control over the design and production. Now the company is focused on getting more distribution, both in the U.S. and overseas. “Part of the transition from a startup to a normal tech company is getting distribution and retail outlets,” Jones says. “It’s exciting to roll out into stores now.”

7. Oculus (acquired by Facebook)

Founder: Palmer Luckey

Product: virtual reality headset

Amount raised: $2.4 million

Why it’s successful: Oculus is one of the legendary success stories of Kickstarter. Palmer Luckey, now 23, started out building the prototype for the Oculus Rift in his parents’ garage in Long Beach, Calif. When Oculus turned to Kickstarter in 2012 to develop its product, it quickly blew past its $250,000 fundraising goal. The crowdfunding campaign was just the beginning for the nascent VR company: In March 2014, while Oculus was still in the prototype stage, Facebook agreed to acquire it for $2 billion in cash and stock. The deal showed the potential for virtual reality, and for the Oculus Rift, far beyond gaming. “We’re making a long-term bet that immersive virtual and augmented reality will become a part of people’s daily lives,” Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg said at the time. Since then, VR has moved closer to reality, with Samsung, Sony and Google also getting in on the market. Oculus opened pre-orders for the Rift in January, priced at $599, and started shipping units to customers in more than 20 countries in March; it has said that it expects to open pre-orders for its Oculus Touch wireless controllers later in the year. Just how big is a deal is this? Wedbush Securities analyst Michael Pachter figures that Oculus could sell 1 million Rifts this year.

8. Peak Design

Founder: Peter Dering

Product: gear and bags

Amount raised: $7.1 million in five campaigns

Why it’s successful: Since its first successful campaign in 2011, Peak Design has used Kickstarter to help it launch more than 20 products; its most recent campaign, for its everyday messenger bag, raised $4.9 million. But San Francisco-based Peak Design gets more than just cash from its crowdfunding campaigns. It also uses the feedback from its backers to create new products that loyal customers want, and it considers Kickstarter a third sales channel along with its own website and the more than 1,000 retail stores that stock its products. Now, it’s planning two more campaigns, one for a line of bags, the other for a mobile offering – which should push revenues past $25 million this year. “We are doubling or tripling every year in terms of profits and revenues,” says Peter Dering, Peak’s chief executive, “and the only reason we can do that without outside investments is because of Kickstarter and its relative predictability.”

9. Pebble

Founder: Eric Migicovsky

Product: smartwatches

Amount raised: $30.6 million in two campaigns

Why It’s Successful: It’s impossible to talk about successful Kickstarter companies without mentioning Pebble, whose crowdfunding campaigns for its smartwatches (in 2012 and 2015) are Kickstarter’s number one and three of all time. Propelled by Kickstarter, Palo Alto-based Pebble’s first watch was one of the first mainstream smartwatches, getting to market long before the Apple Watch. For its recent launch of Pebble Time Round, which looks more like a wristwatch than a piece of wearable technology, Pebble – which subsequently raised $26 million from outside investors – skipped Kickstarter and simply offered the product for pre-order on its website and through retailers like Target and Amazon. Market intelligence firm International Data Corp. (IDC) figures that Pebble sold 1.8 million units last year, representing 8.6% of the global smartwatch market. But times have gotten tougher for smartwatch makers recently, and this spring Pebble cut the prices of its Time and Time Round watches, and laid off 40 employees, some 25% of its staff. That’s a comeuppance for Pebble's Eric Migicovsky, but doesn’t change the fact that the early crowdfunding campaigns put the startup on the map up against Apple and Google.

10. WobbleWorks

Founders: Max Bogue, Peter Dilworth and Daniel Cowen

What it does: 3D printing pens

Amount raised: $3.9 million in two campaigns

Why it’s successful: Max Bogue and Peter Dilworth founded WobbleWorks in 2010 as a small toy company that mainly licensed its concepts to larger firms. But the Hong Kong-based firm really hit its stride with the 3Doodler, a 3D printing pen, launched on Kickstarter in 2013. Since then, the company has shipped more than 135,000 of the first version of the pen, and more than 260,000 of the second (priced at $99), and it recently released a 3Doodler pen for kids that’s made of child-safe plastic. One of the biggest advantages of the Kickstarter campaigns is that inventors can circumvent the stage of begging retailers for an audience, says 3Doodler cofounder Daniel Cowen, who oversees marketing and business development. Instead, they can simply prove the concept in a crowdfunding campaign, and then line up stores that want to sell it. Michaels Stores began testing the 3Doodler in certain stores in late-2014, and today the 3D pens are available for sale at Michaels, Amazon, Hammacher Schlemmer – and retailers as far afield as Turkey, Spain and Nigeria.