Initially I thought kickstarter was this once off thing, but over time, the great successes of kickstarter continue to pile up, a couple of months back we had the pebble watch–a e-ink display watch that connected to your iOS or Android phone for display and control. Now we have Ouya an Android based console hoping to compete with the Playstation and XBOX but on a RM300 price-point. This are way cool products, that anyone with even a slight inclination to tech would love to have.
If you’re not techy, let me appeal to your business side. Pebble raised more than $10 Million US Dollars!! Ouya is currently trailing it with $5Million.
In fact, Pebble was so successful, the team behind it had to stop accepting backers because they were not sure they could manufacture that many pebbles. Try getting $10 Million of VC funding.
How about kickstarter in Malaysia?
For a long time, I’d thought kickstarter was only an American concept, that only Americans were profiteering from the crowdfunding phenomenon. However, a week ago a friend of mine actually decided to take his idea to kickstarter. Dev was just a regular guy hoping to take his idea from his head to the hands of other people, and he convinced me that kickstarter was the way to go.
So I did a bit of searching I noticed a couple of Kickstarter projects from Malaysia, and it was awesome.
As far as I can tell, the highest funded project by a Malaysian on Kickstarter was Ultra Fashion, who raised nearly $10,000 US dollars for their unique fashion line. However other notable mentions include Hujan Panas--a film by a Malaysian film maker and When I was a Kid–the childhood stories of a Malaysian. These are all really cool projects, that may have otherwise not been funded, and you could be forgiven for jumping to conclusion that Americans are funding the Malaysian art scene more than Malaysians themselves.
Only Heart on Kickstarter
Of course I’d also need to promote the Only Heart idea, partly because I believe in it, and partly because Dev asked me to 🙂
Dev is a straight out dreamer, every group has one, he’s the guy who thinks up of crazy shit and then refuses to believe anyone who tells him his ideas aren’t good. Dev has always stood by his ideas and that is something to be respected. More importantly, this is one of Devs better ideas.
Only heart is something that can only be bought once. You heard me right, once you buy one, you’re not getting another–EVER!
It’s a pretty simple concept, Only Heart uses your name and few particulars to uniquely identify who you are. Once they’ve sold you the Only Heart (which is a silver heart shaped pendant), that’s the last only heart you’ll ever get–hence the name Only Heart.
Why only once?
Simple, Dev plans to make it so that once you give someone an only heart it symbolizes more than the $99 USD you plunked down for it. It symbolizes that you chose to buy your one Only Heart for that one special person in your life you think deserved it.
It’s quite a cool concept, but one that requires a minimum order on the Silver Hearts and a IT system to enforce the concept of one person per one Only Heart. All of that stuff required money, to the tune of about Rm30,000 and Dev needed the money so he turned to Kickstarter for help.
To be honest it’s not going so well for Dev, so he’ll really appreciate it if you backed him up a bit (backing starts from as low as a dollar), plus this isn’t something you take a VC to get funded anyway.
What’s the future of Crowdfunding in Malaysia
A couple of months back, Amanz.my broke a story of a kickstarter clone launching in Malaysia, they then begin to criticize the bad design of the blog, claiming it to be unprofessional.
Fortunately, Pitchin has improved over time, but the success rates of the site is still in question. I’m not sure how long before crowdfunding becomes a mainstream way of raising capital for cool projects, but at least in Malaysia we’re heading in the right direction.
What about Dev?
Dev required about RM30,000 of capital to start with, at present he’s about 15% of the way. With just 18 days to go, it’s a 50-50 chance he’ll make it. That being said, even if Only Heart doesn’t get funded, I’m sure Dev will find someway to get his idea out, and the publicity from Kickstarter would be a nice to have at that point.
pretty posh house dev has there.
[…] couple of months back, I wrote a post for a kickstarter initiative by a friend of mine, in that same post, I touched on some other kickstarter initiative from Malaysians. One of those […]
[…] to home, my friend Dev didn’t manage to kickstart his idea of Onlyheart (although he’s launching it now without kickstarter funding), I helped Igor successfully fund […]