As of today, people in the UK will be able to launch their creative projects on the crowdfunding platform Kickstarter, as the website is now open for UK registrations.
There isn’t a separate site for the UK; instead projects will appear on the main Kickstarter site.
Earlier this month, Kickstarter announced, via its blog, that people in the UK could start building their projects to prepare for a 31 October launch date.
Set up in 2009, Kickstarter focuses on funding creative projects. Techies, filmmakers, artists, illustrators, musicians, foodies and designers have been launching their projects on the platform by setting a target funding amount for each project, with the aim of garnering funding pledges in exchange for rewards.
Kickstarter operates by an all-or-nothing funding method. This means projects must be fully funded or else no money changes hands. To date, more than 75,000 projects have been pitched on Kickstarter. Apparently, almost 32,000 projects have been successfully funded via the site, with 5pc of each successful pledge going to Kickstarter.
According to the site’s data, most successfully funded projects raise less than US$10,000.
In the US, users must have an Amazon payments account but pledges for UK-based projects will instead be processed through a third-party payments processor.
Right now there are more than 180 UK projects featured on the site.
As a taster of the type of projects already popping up on the platform from the UK, Picade is a creative project that’s aiming to create mini arcade cabinets for people’s Raspberry Pi. At the time of writing, Picade had gleaned 27 backers who had pledged stg£1,975. The project must reach its stg£32,768 funding goal by 27 November for it to launch.
