Our friends at Know Your City (né the Dill Pickle Club) have just announced a campaign to open a mobile kiosk based in Ankeny Alley, where they’ll sell publications and tickets to their tours, and provide information about the city and local businesses.
From a tourism standpoint, it couldn’t be a more sensible place for an information kiosk: adjacent to the confused hordes of donut-chomping tourists who congregate in front of Voodoo all year round. And it makes a ton of sense for Know Your City, which is based out of a tiny office at Union Station, to have a street-level presence in such a trafficked part of town.
Their kiosk campaign has a decent rewards lineup that includes copies of their Portland-centric publications, tickets to their upcoming tours, a tote bag (!), and more. Support ’em right over here.
Not exactly related to this specific campaign, but:
What did we do before Kickstarter? How did bands put out records or go on tour? How did artists and programmers create games? How the fuck did a couple people make a business out of feeding poutine to the drunks on Hawthorne without crowd sourced funding?
Oh, that’s right: you have an idea/product, put it out there, and if it’s good, people will buy/support it.
Holy shit, Blabby hacked c&b!
I agree that crowd-sourced funding potentially clogs up markets with people who may be way better at making a trailer than at running a business, and that potentially makes it harder for people with good ideas and good business skills to survive, BUT: on the whole it’s just such a net benefit – if you think it’s worth throwing some cash to something, you do it, and they get the chance to make their turkey fly like an eagle.
Just like before, some will succeed, tons will fail, but at least the sources of funding aren’t artificially limited to institutionalized big money sources.
I mostly agree re: net benefit but it still irks me to see indie bands doing Kickstarters to put out an album or whatever. Do what everyone else used to: record it at home, put it online and on cd-rs, play shows, get noticed.
And then there’s stuff like those Treehouse(?) kids here in town that wanted to fund a reality show based on their super interesting lives.
(I’m feeling very grumpy old man after getting humiliated at Geek Trivia last night.)