Lost It's Way?

Twenty dollars. That's how much the first successful Kickstarter campaign wanted to raise.

L.J. Ruell, a Kickstarter user from Long Island City, launched a campaign in April 2009 to raise a small amount of money to make some drawings. "I like drawing pictures. and then i color them too," Ruell wrote in the proposal for his Kickstarter project, which was simply titled Drawing for Dollars. "So i thought i would suggest something for me to draw and then if someone wants me to draw it then they can put in some pennies and then ill draw it. and color it."

On May 3, five days after Kickstarter launched publicly, Ruell became the first user to hit his funding goal and went on to raise a whopping $35. In the four years since then, Kickstarter has raised nearly half a billion dollars for more than 40,000 successfully funded campaigns, including some particularly big successes like the $8.5 million amassed for the Ouya gaming console and the $10 million raised for the Pebble smartwatch. But Kickstarter still holds up that first successful project as the embodiment of the perfect Kickstarter campaign.

"As more time passes, I increasingly think about that project as a perfect microcosm of Kickstarter," Yancey Strickler, Kickstarter's co-founder, told CNN in an interview in December. "Here's a simple idea. Here's an invitation. Let's work on this together."

In recent months, however, some of the most buzzed-about Kickstarter projects have had a slightly different equation for success: Here's a celebrity. Here's an idea. Here's an invitation. Fund. View The Full Story