Thread: Million Dollar Kickstarter Projects

Pebble
before February, no Kickstarter project had ever raised over $1 million, but since then, seven projects have surpassed $1 million, including the current #1, Pebble, which raised an astonishing $10 million. And this growth applies to multiple categories, not just sexy wrist watches.

Ministry of Supply
Ministry of Supply set out to raise $30K and has raised $288K to date, sneaking up on the $291K raised by Flint & Tinder for their men's underwear - currently the most-funded fashion project on Kickstarter.

Coffee Joulies
Dave Jackson and Dave Petrillo, two mechanical engineers from New Jersey, were tired of the foibles inherent to coffee drinking...The team set out to raise $9,500 but brought in over $300K and is one of the top 15 Design projects on Kickstarter to date.

Ramos Alarm Clock
The Ramos Alarm Clock was developed by a team of engineers in NYC. It’s an old-school, neat-looking clock that displays time in a funky way and includes a wireless alarm deactivation panel that forces you to get out of bed to turn off the alarm. The team set out to raise $75K, but made double that and was even teased on Saturday Night Live.

ZPM Expresso
ZPM Espresso, the makers of a high-tech espresso machine called the Nocturn, set out to raise $20K, but made nearly $370K on Kickstarter. The machine offers PID controls, programmable presets, adjustable temperature and pressure settings, and open-source software to boot — to the delight of coffee geeks everywhere.

Amanda Palmer
Amanda Palmer has the most-funded Music project on Kickstarter to date. She set a $100K goal and made over $1.1 million. Amanda’s goal was pretty simple: It was to raise money to release her new album.

Read the full article at Kickstarter Fastlaners

Originally Posted by InMotion

investors don't seem interested in investing money to actually develop the product, too risky, they usually want product+sales

Thats true for some investors. But for some startups, especially in the B2C space its important to "sell the dream" to investors. Of course a prototype and some users/customers always help. But this can also backfire if your user/customer base grows to slowly for investors to consider you worthwhile. For B2B you can try to get pre-sale agreements with customers to finance development.