This is a guest post by Tomas Ericsson, Founder at Axess Front Wallets
The Scandinavian countries have already been quite prolific on Kickstarter, but the quality of the projects is far from even!
Some quick background: In September of last year, Kickstarter announced that creative types from Scandinavia and Ireland will be eligible to launch campaigns starting October. Finland seems to have been excluded from the mix due to its legislation banning the collection of funds via Crowdfunding. Too bad for the Fins!
The Scandinavian countries have already been quite prolific with a multitude of successful and (at least as many) unsuccessful projects. Some of the more notable projects are “the Sandby borg massacre”, where a team of archeologists have unveiled a real-life “iron age massacre” with perks ranging from a book to a full-fledged archeological visit to the excavation site, as well as a spaced out movie project from Umeå in northern Sweden featuring “arcade-robots, dinosaurs, nazis, vikings, norse gods, mutants and a super kung fu-cop called Kung Fury” which raised $630,000.
I have been reading a lot about the review process from Kickstarter, (supposedly being quite strict), but can only make the conclusion that it is rather lenient since some of the newly created Scandinavian Kickstarter projects are truly sketchy, like the “Bacon Chips with flawors in Sweden” or “making Making all of Kramer’s imaginary business ideas come to life,” where some random young dude promises to send you pasta statues and put ketchup and mustard in the same bottle as perks.
It’s also striking how many campaigns are unsuccessful. A lot of campaigns haven’t been able to raise 1 cent. There must be such a Kickstarter craze among creators now that they think anything is possible and launch prematurely, without any prep work and vague perks.
A common mistake among the newly created Scandinavian projects is that they are simply not credible. The claims are too bold, and the authors fail to present how they will be able to accomplish them. How will the aforementioned young dude be able to create “A cologne that smells like the beach” when his only credential is the vague “If i get enough backers for my projects I’m going to put all my efforts to this?” When that question remains unanswered, no money is likely to be flowing into the project.
On the other side of the spectrum, we find creators like Jens Anso. He looks like he’s been groomed for Kickstarter with his Matrix card wallet, which is closing in on 200,000 Danish Krona. Since I am also making a wallet, but not competing in the same subcategory, I pay close attention to such developments.
More common problems are the backers who actually write their project descriptions in Swedish, when Swedish speakers/Scandinavians merely represent a fraction of Kickstarter’s monthly visitors. Even listing the prices in Scandinavian currencies should be advised against when Kickstarters around 16 million global monthly visitors consists of at least 50% Americans. Why confuse things with foreign currencies nobody’s ever heard about?
Still, despite the many failed projects, the future looks bright for Scandinavian creativity with such a diverse flurry of projects already flourishing after a mere 3-4 months since Kickstarter opened its doors to us Scandinavians.
Tomas Ericsson, Founder at Axess Front Wallets
If you want to know more about Tomas upcoming Kickstarter campaign, check out www.axesswallets.com and sign up to get an early notification when he launches.
