This article was published on September 4, 2012

Meet Outgrow.me, the marketplace that puts completed Kickstarter projects back in the spotlight


Meet Outgrow.me, the marketplace that puts completed Kickstarter projects back in the spotlight

There’s been much discussion of what should be done when successful Kickstarter projects fail recently, but one site has been working to return to our attention to the many fascinating projects that did make it.

Outgrow.me is a marketplace for Kickstarter and IndieGoGo projects that were successfully funded and are now available for purchase. Here, you can go beyond thinking about how cool it would be if something did come to market and start benefiting from all that the best of crowdfunding entails.

Of course, for a site like Outgrow.me to work, there still need to be risk-takers funding the latest and greatest ideas, but it’s fine proof that the Kickstarter concept does work despite the (admittedly warranted) pessimistic coverage of crowdfunded failures.

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There are plenty of tabletop games available, such as a card game called Creatures and a role-playing game called Agents of SMERSH. And that’s much as you’d expect — the simpler manufacturing considerations mean it is much easier to complete such a project than it is to bring, for example, the Nifty Minidrive to fruition.

There’s the simple but handy CableKeeps charging cable manager, and the already well-known Jot Stylus, a capacitive touch stylus that allows people to create art and design on devices such as the iPad with a more suited tool than the cumbersome finger.

The site does allow listings for projects that are successfully funded but can only be pre-ordered. We don’t know whether Outgrow.me restricts these based on the project’s level of readiness for the market, which again raises concerns about the failure of funded Kickstarter projects, but these can be filtered out quite easily right at the top of the homepage.

Making it easy to fund great ideas is just one part of the equation, a process that is done well by Kickstarter. But to support this, we need an ecosystem for promoting these indie ventures and getting them into the public eye again after the funding effort press has worn off and it is time to become self-sustaining with sales. That’s where Outgrow.me and sites like it come in.

Image Credit: Trey Ratcliff

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