The idea of Kickstarter first formed in the mind of Perry Chen in 2001. A native New Yorker, Chen was 25, living in New Orleans and working as a musician. He wanted to bring a pair of DJs he loved down to perform during Jazz Fest. He sorted out a venue, organised things with their management, but in the end the event didn’t happen – Chen didn’t have the funds to pay for the show if not enough people turned up. In his frustration, a thought occurred to him: “What if people could go to a website and pledge to buy tickets for a show? And if enough money was pledged, they would be charged and the show would happen. If not, it wouldn’t.”

Over the years that followed, Chen held on to that simple idea. He moved back to New York in 2005, still more intent on making music than starting an internet company – he had no background in technology – but the thought wouldn’t go away. He became friends with a music journalist, Yancey Strickler, who got sold on the idea, too. They talked about it with, Charles Adler, a designer and DJ, and the three of them formulated ideas and spoke to mates of mates who knew code or to people who might help fund such a thing. Eventually, in April 2009, eight years after the idea had first come to Chen, the three of them launched their website and waited at their laptops to see if other people thought it was a good idea too.

In the first few days, a few emails trickled in, from people pitching ideas, wondering how the thing might work. And then, after a couple of weeks, a young singer-songwriter from Athens, Georgia, launched a project to fund her album, Allison Weiss Was Right All Along. “Hello internet!” she wrote. “My name is Allison Weiss and I’m recording a new EP this summer. It’ll be eight songs long and packed with all kinds of awesome…” Weiss set a target of $2,000 for the project, beside a picture of herself in a red dress leaning against a wall in the Georgia sunshine. She offered potential backers a series of incentives – $10 would get you an exclusive track emailed to you when the album was pressed; $50 would merit a thank you in the liner notes of the EP. She raised the money – and more – in 24 hours and posted an excited thank you. “One day?!! SERIOUSLY?! You guys. I thought this was going to take two months. You have made my dreams come true.”

In the 10 years since then, on Kickstarter alone – newer crowdfunding platforms such as Patreon and Indiegogo have shown similar growth – more than 160,000 projects have had that “dreams come true” feeling of reaching their funding goal. More than $4.25bn has been pledged to those projects by 16 million backers; 5% of that total, plus handling charges, has gone to Kickstarter. The best of those projects, Chen suggested, when I spoke to him last week, shared something with the idea of Kickstarter itself: they are the ideas that have taken root in their creator’s imagination and stubbornly refused to go away. “It’s a place for those people who want to reach out to the world and say, ‘I want to do this and it is not trivial to me. Here’s my arrangement for you to support me.’” It is, Chen suggests, what Mozart did with concertos: “He would walk the streets sometimes asking people to help him with small amounts and he would give them a signed copy of the concerto or whatever – and the descendants of those people are no doubt pretty happy that he did.”

Not all Kickstarter projects have been Mozart. The most famous success stories on the site – the Pebble watch, which raised $20m before being bought by Fitbit, seemingly endless board and card games, such as Exploding Kittens (which had over $8m in pledges) – stretch the “help to bring creative projects to life” mission statement. And there have been plenty of absurdist pledges, of which the man who requested funds to make a potato salad and ended up raising more than $55,000, throwing a potato party for charity, is only the most notable.

The culture of Kickstarter has to be all about helping creative projects come to life

If one thing is certain in Chen’s mind as he looks back, it is that startup years are not like normal years. “Scratch your own itch” projects, which seek to address a problem that the founder has faced, are not always designed for the long haul and that is particularly true of companies that do not want to measure success in terms of money. Unlike most of their contemporary tech entrepreneurs, Chen did not create Kickstarter for stock options or a single payday. “We didn’t want to be a thing that sucks everyone’s blood and then sells on to some bigger bloodsucking entity,” he says.

Longevity invariably brings its own discontents, however. All three of the founders, Chen says, were anxious that they would lose connection with their own creative spirit as the company got larger and, inevitably, a little more corporate. In the first few years, it felt like simply trying to “bring something that is in your head to life”, he says, like an art project of the kind that the site itself attracted. But inevitably that changed: “Maybe you start as a musician then you become a conductor and you end up running a concert hall – and you look fondly down at the cellist and remember what fun that was.”

Chen was CEO for the first five years, then stepped back to be chairman, letting Strickler, his cofounder, run the company. Charles Adler left at the same time. Eighteen months ago, Chen returned to the chief executive role and Strickler, along with seven of his executive team, abruptly departed “to pursue other projects”. In March this year, Chen removed himself to be chairman again, appointing an interim CEO.

It sounds, I suggest to him, a little like the comings and goings of an indie band: was there an inevitability of break-up?

“I think the question is, ‘Is this what any one of the three of us imagined doing for the rest of our working lives?’” he says. “Probably not. The time you spend building something creates a real familial bond. It’s like being together in a hut in Antarctica or something for years; you don’t necessarily want to immediately spend all your time with those same guys when you get back to the city.”

From left: Charles Adler, Perry Chen and Yancey Strickler outside the offices of Kickstarter in New York, 2012. Photograph: James Estrin/New York Times/Redux/eyevine

One of his reasons for going back to the day to day seems to have been an effort to return Kickstarter to that original idea he had in his head. Kickstarter established itself as a public benefit corporation in 2015, with a commitment among other things to donate 5% of after-tax profits to charity and to “not use loopholes” to reduce its tax burden. “I think the culture of an organisation has to spring from the reason you are there,” he says. “If you are at Greenpeace, it has to spring from a relentless commitment to the environment. And for us it has to be all about helping creative projects come to life.” To resist creeping corporatism Chen, on his return to the CEO role, tried different ways of shaking up office culture, some more welcome than others (one week, he brought in a band of performance artists dressed as dinosaurs to wander the Brooklyn office).

One of the issues that Kickstarter, like all platform-based companies, has faced is that its profile is essentially at the mercy of whoever chooses to use it. After the enormous success of launches such as the Pebble watch, the site became weighted toward gadgetry rather than arts projects. It was not designed to be a crowdsourced venture capitalist – projects could only offer intimacy, not equity – but certain projects became victims of their own outrageous crowdsourced fortune. The creators of Oculus, a virtual-reality headset, having launched with pledges on Kickstarter, sold out to Facebook for $2bn a year later. Outraged backers tried to get their money back. Such clashes between the altruistic spirit of citizen patronage and the ultimate bottom line were not confined to tech projects. Amanda Palmer, a singer who asked for $100,000 for a solo album and received more than $1m, also incurred the wrath of her supporters by asking for unpaid volunteer musicians to tour with her, on a Kickstarter-esque promise to “feed you beer, hug/high-five you up and down (pick your poison), give you merch, and thank you mightily…”

Chen and his team have tried to use the rules they have to tilt the site back toward its original spirit and purpose (“Kickstarter is not a shop”) with partial success. “We never make aesthetic decisions,” he says. “For a music project, we will never say, lose the drummer and then come back to us – but the categories are quite broad.” Much of it comes down to an underlying question of what is creativity. “Is a new iPhone case a creative project? It can be if it brings something to life that is important to someone.”

How does he feel about the way that board games have lately become so significant on the site? $1bn of Kickstarter money raised has come from games and three-quarters of that from what the Americans call “table-top games”.

Chen has no issue with that. “I think the creativity of a lot of these games is exceptional,” he says. “We are at a moment in time when people are desperately trying to get off their devices. If their way to do that is with board games, table-top games, card games, what does that say?”

In the decade that Kickstarter has become synonymous with crowdfunding, other models have emerged to compete with it. GoFundMe pushed beyond creative projects, allowing backers to pledge money to things such as medical bills. Platforms including Flattr and Patreon offer ways of funding individual artists and creators rather than one-off projects.

In 2016 Kickstarter bought and developed a project called Drip, which looked like an attempt to compete head on with Patreon – offering a way for invited creatives to supplement their income by gaining subscribers; after a year, Chen discontinued the experiment, handing the project over to XOXO Fest creators Andy Baio and Andy McMillan, who are currently working on a new model for it.

Such decisions suggest a degree of uncertainty in Kickstarter’s future, but Chen is adamant that the core offering is not only robust – nine consecutive years of profit, expansion into 22 countries – but also crucial. “Creative work is the critical glue in our society,” he says. “We can’t think of it as, let’s solve all our social problems and then we will do some art. It takes a creative and vibrant and healthy society to solve problems.”

He can point to the cultural impact of projects – a host of Emmys and Oscars from Kickstarter projects, surprise bestsellers such as Good Night Stories for Rebel Girls, literary magazines and art shows and new music, all of which support his contention that Kickstarter has revolutionised the way creativity is funded. In 10 years, the total raised eclipses that granted by America’s National Endowment for the Arts (though none of the latter went on potato salad). I wonder of all the thousands of pitches in that time, which are the ones in which Chen takes most pride?

He is reluctant to pick out individual projects. “For me, it is always the ones where you just think, ‘This never would have happened without us,’” he says. “Those where there is no way that this person would have got money from any investor or grant organisation – and they had no rich uncle. They just wanted to get this thing in their head and in their heart and in their notebooks and their endless coffee chats with friends out in the world.” It’s nearly 20 years since Chen first had that need himself with Kickstarter, but he still knows exactly how it feels.

Five of the best Kickstarter campaigns

Adverts by C.A.T.S. at Clapham Common tube station. Photograph: Glimpse/Will Bunce

The Citizens Advertising Takeover Service (C.A.T.S)

Founded: May 2016, created by Glimpse

Backers: 683

Pledged: £23,131

The Citizens’ Advertising Takeover Service used Kickstarter for its project to replace every advert in a London tube station with a picture of a cat. James Turner, who had created Glimpse, a “creative collective”, when he left Greenpeace in 2015, wanted to try out a campaign that “challenged the idea that buying stuff made us happy”. The question, he recalls, was: “If we want to represent something other than commerce in adverts, what do we do?” Because it was a Kickstarter project, he felt they had to do something that could go viral – and what is the one thing that the internet loves more than anything else? “It was proof of concept really – to show that you could get an idea off the ground with no institution or NGO or financial resources behind you,” he says. “So much of what we see and think is dictated by big brands and media; it is interesting to have people focus just on cats for a while.” When they launched the project they thought it would attract a lot of hipster types who wanted to critique advertising. In reality, its most fervent financial backers were cat lovers.

Alex Bartsch’s photograph of the Smiley Culture album cover in situ. Photograph: One Love Books

Covers: Retracing Reggae Record Sleeves

Founded: 2016, created by Alex Bartsch

Backers: 717

Pledged: £28,877

The idea for Covers first came to photographer Alex Bartsch when he bought the 1969 LP Brixton Cat by the reggae band Joe’s All Stars. Bartsch lived in Brixton, south London, and took the record down to the market where the cover photo had been shot, holding it up and matching the LP sleeve exactly to the background, then rephotographing it at arm’s length. He liked the effect and started to look for other records. As the project developed and the research got harder – he tried to trace original band members and photographers to ask if they could recall exactly where the covers had been shot – he decided to use Kickstarter to raise the funds for a book. It was the perfect project, he suggests, both visual and viral. “All sorts of people started sharing it – lovers of reggae, record collectors, people interested in the history of London – it took off really well.”

A friend helped him publish the book, which was widely covered in the media. The hard part in the end, Bartsch suggests, was fulfilling and mailing all the signed prints and first editions to those who had pledged money. One man had pledged £400 for a bike tour of all the sites, but he turned up with his family, so they improvised a walking tour instead.

The slippers from The Wizard of Oz. Photograph: Kris Connor/Getty Images

Conserve Dorothy’s Ruby Slippers

Founded: 2016, created by the Smithsonian Institution

Backers: 6,451

Pledged: $349,026

After a successful Kickstarter campaign to restore Neil Armstrong’s space suit, the Smithsonian crowdfunded another magical element of its collection. It was advised by Kickstarter that only very specific items would capture the imagination, so what better than the most famous shoes in Hollywood history? Linda St Thomas, spokeswoman for the Smithsonian, explains how the idea was a way to “reach new audiences and new donors”; those who pledged received at different levels posters and tote bags designed by the Broadway costume designer William Ivey Long. The response way exceeded the target and helped to create a new relationship between the museum’s audience and its exhibit: “They could come here and see the slippers all shiny and new, and say, I’m a part of that,” St Thomas says. The restoration of the slippers, which were given to the museum by an anonymous donor in 1979, was a surprisingly expensive job; it involved 12 different materials and netting to keep the sequins in place. Even so, there was money left over to also restore Ray Bolger’s Scarecrow costume for the same exhibition.

Spider Martin’s photograph of civil rights marchers in 1965 used in Mississippi as part of 50 States, 50 Billboards. Photograph: WyattGallery/ForFreedoms

50 States, 50 Billboards

Founded: 2016, created by For Freedoms

Backers: 2,221

Pledged: $172,264

For Freedoms is a project created by two American artists, Hank Willis Thomas and Eric Gottesman. With America ever more politically divided, the idea was to make, in the months leading up to the 2018 midterm elections, an arts festival and campaign that spanned all 50 states. The idea coalesced around sponsoring artist-made billboards, one for each state, which promoted the four freedoms – the freedom of speech and worship, the freedom from want and fear – enshrined in the constitution. “Kickstarter bent its rules to allow us to run 50 campaigns simultaneously,” Gottsman says. “The plan,” Thomas explains, “was really to raise $10 from 300 people in each state, kind of fool’s errand, but it worked. It proved to be a great community building tool; some people contributed money; other people used it as a rallying cry to put on their own For Freedoms events.”

If they had tried to raise the funds in more traditional ways, he says, they “might have got the money, but not the momentum.” The great thing about the project, they suggest, is that it used the social power of the internet to “drive people to real life events”. The mix of old media in the billboards and new media in the sharing brought it alive.

Eric the robot. Photograph: REX/Shutterstock

Rebuilding Eric

Founded: 2016, created by the Science Museum, London

Backers: 861

Pledged: £51,813

Eric was built in 1928, the first known robot to be made in Britain. He was, as the Science Museum’s curator, Ben Russell, explained to potential Kickstarter donors “everything you would expect a robot to be: a talking, walking man of steel”. He originally toured the world and, when he launched into a speech beginning: “Unaccustomed as I am…” was deemed “an almost perfect man” in the New York press. Though Eric himself had long since met an unknown fate, some of the plans and drawings that had created him survived.

For its 2017 Robots exhibition, the Science Museum, and the artist Giles Walker, recreated Eric, complete with his lightbulb eyes, though much of his internal working had remained a closely guarded secret. The electronics that allowed him to move, and which caused authentic blue sparks to fly from his teeth, were now partly digitised. The rebuild took three months after the target of £35,000 was quickly reached and surpassed; those eight devotees who pledged £300 were able to go to Walker’s workshop and watch Eric return to animated life. After the exhibition, Eric resumed the world tour that had begun almost a century earlier.

Facts and figures

• Since its launch in 2009, over $4bn has been pledged through Kickstarter to 162,350 projects. In 10 years, 16 million people have pledged 53m times, with project success rates of nearly 37%.

• The first project to raise $1m was an iPhone dock in February 2012, followed the same day by the first project to reach $1m in 24 hours, video game Double Fine Adventure.

• At the end of October 2012, Kickstarter opened up to projects in the UK, its first effort to expand outside the US. The site hosts crowdfunders from 22 countries.

• In March 2013, Kickstarter proved its power in bringing communities together as over 90,000 Veronica Mars fans collectively pledged $5.7m towards a film sequel to the 2004 TV series.

• Oculus, one of the most popular brands ever launched on Kickstarter, promoted Rift, its first VR headset, on the site in August 2012. In the first 24 hours, it exceeded its funding goal of $250,000, collecting a total of $2.4m. In March 2014, Oculus was acquired by Facebook for $2bn, shocking the games industry and leaving many funders feeling exploited.

• Having worked independently on his blog for two years investigating war zones, Eliot Higgins launched his website Bellingcat in 2014, helped by 1,701 Kickstarter donors. He returned to the platform in 2017 to raise a further £68,000. Since then, it has published evidence on the use of cluster munitions by Russia against the New Syrian Army and helped identify the Skripal poisoning suspects.

• In February 2015, the Pebble Time, the second generation of a smartwatch, reached its goal of $500,000 in 17 minutes, a record-breaking $1m in 49 minutes, $10.3m in two days, before becoming the most funded Kickstarter to date, with $20.4m.

• Memorable as one of the highest-funded project that never happened, the Skarp laser razor launched a Kickstarter campaign in September 2015, promising to be the “future of shaving”. Yet because the company did not have a functioning prototype, Kickstarter took down the campaign, cancelling the $4m in pledges it had received. The crowdfunder moved to competitor Indiegogo where it raised $500,000 and promised a prototype for March 2016. It hasn’t arrived yet.

Lisa Wehrstedt