Since its launch in 2009, Kickstarter has been a place to fund your next business idea.
On Tuesday, the company announced that it is opening up the service and offering new features, including an in-house marketing team to help users maximize the money they raise, and an option to keep the door open for more backers, even after a campaign ends.
“Here’s what we know: It takes more than money to bring an idea to life,” said Kickstarter CEO Everette Taylor in a Tuesday announcement. “You need solid marketing, to reach and grow your audience, a good grasp of fulfillment logistics, constant communication with your backers, and dependable connections with distributors and manufacturers.”
Everette Taylor, CEO of Kickstarter. Photo by Arturo Holmes/Getty Images
One high-impact feature, Late Pledges, allows creators to get more funding, even after a campaign officially ends.
Kickstarter’s previous model didn’t allow for campaigns to stay up forever, so companies were moving to competitors like Indiegogo to keep projects going.
Kickstarter started testing the feature last month and stated it helped one user raise 35% more than their original fundraising goal in two weeks.
Late Pledges is available to all Kickstarter creators globally as of Tuesday.
Related: Going Inside the Kickstarter Office
Another upgrade that the company announced Tuesday is the enhancement of its existing survey tool so businesses can get a better sense of how much it will cost to fulfill an order ahead of time.
Kickstarter also added an in-house marketing team to help creatives promote their campaigns. In early tests, the team helped raise close to $1 million in pledges for a select group of projects, the company noted.
More creators will have access to the service “when it’s ready,” according to Kickstarter.
Kickstarter has been around for 15 years; over 23 million backers have pledged more than $8 billion to creative projects through the site, in that time.
Over a quarter of a million projects have been successfully funded, or reached targets set by creators, through the service, according to the company.
The platform has helped entrepreneurs launch multi-million dollar campaigns to fund their ideas, like the AnkerMake M5 3D printer, which raised nearly $9 million in 2022.
Related: A 3D Printer Used By Microsoft, Ford, and NASA Is Now Commercially Available