The duo came up with a novel design and offered it up at an unprecedented price-collectors would’ve lined up to buy the watch either way. Auffret, meanwhile, is a former recipient of the F.P. Laidet has a long resume in the watch world, spanning stints at Zenith, Girard-Perregaux, and Jaeger-LeCoultre, as well as other funded Kickstarter projects like William L. “But nothing would have been possible without the watch community and all the watch meetups we did to introduce the prototypes.”Īs Auffret admitted himself, Argon didn’t need Kickstarter to launch the Spaceone. “Theo truly admitted, ‘We didn't need to use Kickstarter, we could have done it ourselves,’” Adams said.īut Laidet saw Kickstarter as a way to reach consumers beyond the core watch community: “We used Kickstarter as a tool to reach not only the watch nerds, but also the design and space aficionados,” he said. A couple of days before our interview, Adams recorded a podcast episode with Theo Auffret, Argon’s other co-founder. Argon seems like more of a one-off than a trendsetter. “Is it happening on Kickstarter? Not necessarily.” “The idea of pre-ordering is alive and healthy,” Adams said. Adams points out, however, that while Kickstarter may have lost its luster, it helped introduce collectors to a buying behavior that’s stuck. What at first seems really novel-like you’re getting in on the ground floor of something-quickly sours when a project you backed results in an inferior product to what was advertised, or worse, it never delivers at all. This was the moment Kickstarter was truly alive.So what happened? People started to lose faith in the Kickstarter model. She did a Skype chat with the backer that put her over her goal and posted it for all to see. Allison was using Kickstarter in the exact way we had always dreamed. In January 2010, nine months after we launched, we moved into a tenement building in the Lower East Side of Manhattan along with Cassie Marketos and Fred Benenson, our two new teammates.īut before all that, three weeks after Kickstarter launched, a young singer-songwriter from Athens, GA, launched a project to fund her album, Allison Weiss was Right All Along. People stepped up to support projects over and over again. Filmmakers took their natural-born hustle and wrapped it around our template. Designing Obama, Robin Writes a Book, and Mysterious Letters were all landmarks. There are so many projects that defined the early days. It was amazing! You cannot imagine how excited we all were. Yancey jumped into gear to handle all the new emails from people actually using (or wanting to use) Kickstarter. We told as many friends as possible, and Andy announced it on his awesome blog. We were a scattered team that lived through Skype and email (Charles had moved again, this time to Chicago), but we were finally building - even as the economy started to collapse.įinally, on April 28, 2009, we launched Kickstarter to the public. Soon after, Charles and Andy found a few developers - including Lance Ivy all the way in Walla Walla, Washington. I was introduced to Andy Baio, who, though he was living in Portland, started to help us out. In the summer of 2008 things finally started to move again. We had this money from our friends and not much was happening. Charles moved to San Francisco and took some part-time freelance work. There were months where not much happened. We had a few false starts hiring people to build the site. After months and months of collaboration, we ended up with wireframes and specifications for the site.īut none of us could code. The day after we were introduced, Charles came over to my apartment and he and I started working together almost every day. Clearly we needed more help.Ībout a year later, I was introduced to Charles Adler, through an old friend. At some point I made this rough design of the site. I convinced some friends to give us a little bit of money. In the fall of 2005, I met Yancey Strickler, and we became fast friends. Once back in New York, I started to try and tackle the next steps: Who could build the website? How much it would cost? Where could I get money? I talked to a bunch of folks and I learned a ton. In the spring of 2005 I moved back home to NYC, knowing it would be much more possible there. Yet slowly over the next few years I started to work on the idea more and more. I loved the idea, but I was focused on making music, not starting an internet company. I thought: “What if people could go to a site and pledge to buy tickets for a show? And if enough money was pledged they would be charged and the show would happen. The fact that the potential audience had no say in this decision stuck uncomfortably in my brain.
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