Kickstarter and XOXO closed their subscription platform before launch

Last October, Kickstarter announced it was ending its crowdfunding platform, Drip, but was planning to launch a new project with XOXO festival creators Andy Baio and Andy McMillan. Now this project has been stopped, according to its creators.

The anonymous Drip successor project aimed to provide "financial stability and transparency to independent artists". It was born from the conversations of Kickstarter's founder, Perry Chen, and Baio, former Kickstarter's chief technology officer, in an effort to migrate the creators of Drip before closing it down later. this year. Kickstarter provided start-up funding for the new platform and hired people to exploit it, but Baio and McMillan explained that while the concept was a good idea, they "could not find a way to make it happen. 'viable business'.

The problem seems to be related to how to generate income in a stable and reliable way. The two men explored several options: "voluntary user subscriptions, premium features, additional fees," but continued to find that "the resources needed to support a large number of low-volume creators still exceeded our revenues."

"We were determined to run a sustainable and independent business. Even though we followed the traditional and raised route of venture capital, it did not seem likely that it would survive once this funding ran out. We were building this for the community that was important to us, and many artists and creators in our community are already financially vulnerable and vulnerable. The idea of ​​launching something with so much uncertainty and risk was irresponsible and unfair. "

Baio and McMillan indicated that they had ended up closing the project last month and that they would return the remaining startup funding to Kickstarter. The Drip stop still seems about to happen: they say they will help the remaining creators on the platform to migrate to others.

This is a bit of a shame, as their description of what they envision seems particularly appealing: a subscription platform focused on new and marginalized artists, personalized discoveries and recommendations, and community moderation tools.