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When Everette Taylor became CEO of Kickstarter in late 2022, he took over a company in decline. Kickstarter had once pioneered the idea of online crowdfunding, but its revenue was down 20% year over year.
“The light was dimming a bit,” Taylor says. “You had increased competition, and the company was like, ‘Here, take it, try to fix this thing.'”
Three years later, Kickstarter has a different story to tell. Revenue has grown every year — and 2025 became the company’s best year in history, both in terms of revenue and amount of dollars spent on the platform.
So, what changed?
“It’s something that a lot of CEOs and entrepreneurs should be doing,” Taylor says. “Just listen to your audience.”
Taylor and his team talked to creators — that is, the people who launch campaigns on Kickstarter — and identified all sorts of pain points. For example, creators often struggled to build highly optimized campaigns, and then struggled to fulfill purchases after a successful campaign. This had given rise to an ecosystem of third party companies, which promised to help people launch and manage their Kickstarter campaigns.
Taylor realized: Kickstarter should be offering those services itself.
“Kickstarter has only ever made money in one way — taking a cut of every dollar spent on the platform,” he says. “But there’s a lot of other ways we can potentially make money.”
Kickstarter’s product engineering team started to build what Taylor thinks of as Kickstarter 2.0 — a more “professionalized” service with end-to-end creator support, including performance marketing services and a pledge manager to help with shipping and taxes.
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