Comment by ChrisArchitect
15 hours ago
This. Totally confusing. Sounded like a very successful campaign, met goal. Why is the rest of that blog post (https://blog.fontawesome.com/pausing-kickstarter/) so negative and like it's a big disappointment? Like Font Awesome was expecting some lengthy constantly growing source of income from it? So weird. (and also, first I'm seeing anything about this or given any reason to pay attention to what Font Awesome is doing despite being a regular user of 11ty and involved with its small ecosystem for years)
And if '11ty devs' aren't big fans of the change etc, then who was rushing to support the Kickstarter? Who's funding this (and why?)
Sounds like they had a much larger actual goal in mind and the low “initial” goal was some kind of calculated marketing trick that didn’t work due to emails landing in spam.
This is how pretty much all big kickstarters work these days - the goal is set artificially low to be able to show off momentum and claim "funded in 24 hours!", and often the initial goal amount is funded by friends and family to further the illusion of success.
Most Kickstarters have a fake low goal so that they can hit it and "blow past it by 1000%!!!" If a Kickstarter hits its goal, but then still cancels, that typically wasn't their real goal.
Maybe fans of font awesome? I backed their first kickstarters a few years ago and got notified about this one now. Possible that enough prior backers were interested enough by the pitch to feed the new one.
And about pausing the kickstarter: only makes sense if the initial goal wasnt the real goal. A successful kickstarter raises more overall money when users jump onboard the successful campaign, so you ask for less than you need to get more than if you asked for how much you really need. Pretty common.