In essence, we wanted to build an alternative to Kickstarter so that we could run our own show, and help others do the same.

Why Do We Need a Kickstarter Alternative?

I think it’s important to state that we at Virtuous Giant have absolutely nothing against Kickstarter. We think it’s a great product, and have supported many successful (and unsuccessful) projects. The reason we choose not to model the Kickstarter process has nothing to do with its performance, but the way it is used.

We have many friends, peers, and heroes that have attempted to raise money on Kickstarter. They busted their ass, often burning out email lists and social channels in order to reach that coveted 100%.

While some did achieve 100%, many of them did not, which means that at the end of the day they are left with nothing but a burned out group of friends and a goal they didn’t meet.

As you can imagine, this is incredibly disheartening to an entrepreneur.

Backer Oriented

From the backer’s point of view, the 100% threshold is great. It allows them to take a gamble, knowing that many projects won’t take off and their money will be safe. It’s a fun game to play.

But for the entrepreneur, raising money is anything but a game.

Entrepreneurs are the builders, the dreamers, and the inventors. Failing to raise money is often the death knell of their dreams. No one likes to see dreams die, particularly those of us who are working to achieve their own.

Your Way, Right Away

We believe that entrepreneurs should be able to raise money on their terms. We don’t believe they should play by an arbitrary set of rules designed to turn crowdfunding into a game.

We built IgnitionDeck to even the score.

And then something interesting happened…

With the rise of Kickstarter, the crowdfunding model became hip and cool. Business development types, not builders, began to see an opportunity to extract even more of the entrepreneur’s flesh.

A whole new level of crowdfunding platforms began to appear (and more are coming), many with the intention not to help entrepreneurs, but to scrape another 5% from them.

Some even used IgnitionDeck to do so.

We think it’s great that so many people are being creative with IgnitionDeck, and we support that 100%. That doesn’t mean we are any less deliberate about the manner in which we build the core product.

We get a lot of questions about why certain features do not exist in our plugin, such as the 100% funding payment mechanism made famous by Kickstarter.

Our answers to questions like these are usually simple:

1) We haven’t had a chance yet

2) We don’t feel this feature supports the entrepreneur

Number 1 is simple, Number 2 is slightly more complex, but at the end of the day, it’s absolutely necessary to us that each and every new feature arrives with a purpose, one that aligns with our goal of helping entrepreneurs raise money to build great things.

So when people ask us why we don’t support the 100% model, and why payments are processed and delivered immediately upon a pledge, we explain that we aren’t here to help people build crowdfunding sites, we are here to help entrepreneurs achieve their dreams.

It’s as simple as that.

Instead, we thought we’d search for a plugin so that we could raise money slowly, in our own fashion. We looked, found nothing, and eventually forgot about the idea.

Our First Crowdfunding Attempt

Several months later, Shawn and I started working on a variety of iOS app concepts, one of which was DJ’s vs Ninjas, an idea that Oleg had mentioned in one of our frequent phone conversations. The more I talked with Shawn about the idea, the more he wanted to do it, the only problem being that once again, we lacked the resources to make it happen. We’d need a bigger team, and a bit of runway to focus on development.

Once again the topic of crowdfunding came up, and once again we thought of Kickstarter. This time we went ahead and submitted a proposal, got accepted, and began to craft our campaign.

As we started brainstorming funding levels, rewards, and the amount of financing we needed to secure, we realized that Kickstarter might not be the best fit for what we wanted to do.

They wanted us to craft our campaign in a very specific manner, often in contrast to our approach. Additionally, the more we researched the difficulty of running a successful campaign on Kickstarter (we were hoping to raise 50-80k), the more we realized that a long-term approach might suit us better.

So in the end, we decided to abandon our Kickstarter campaign and try to find an alternative solution.

Solving Our Own Problems

By now, we thought for sure that a crowdfunding plugin for WordPress would have been created, but once again came back empty handed.

Stymied by our search for a perfect crowdfunding solution, we decided to do what most entrepreneurs do when they need a tool that doesn’t exist – we decided to build it ourselves.

IgnitionDeck started as a simple prototype, just a widget, and nothing more. In fact, we didn’t have a name for it at first – working title ‘Pre-Order Widget.’

But as we talked to friends about our new project, we learned that most people loved the idea. Many started suggesting features we hadn’t thought of,  and others wanted to be notified as soon as we had something ready to test.

At that point we realized that this wasn’t just our tool, but one that would be useful for any entrepreneur looking to raise money.

Soon we added new features like Paypal integration. Then it was email, then social, until eventually IgnitionDeck had evolved into our full-time passion project.

8 months later, after spending far more time and energy than we expected, we launched a small closed beta, followed by an open beta in October of 2011.

Today, as we announce our most recent beta, we’ve released 9 versions, spent hundreds of hours of design and development time, and have earned nearly 300 supporters.

While we’re just getting started, we’re very proud of how far this project has come, and excited by its potential. We can’t wait to share our vision with the world.