Why we created Spotlight

Over the past six years, Kickstarter has helped artists and creators grow their communities by the millions; receive enormous amounts of attention for their projects; and raise more than $1 billion while keeping 100% ownership of their work. Empowering creative people to create and share is what Kickstarter is all about.

Today we’re announcing an important evolution of Kickstarter that we believe will empower artists and creators even more — a feature called Spotlight.

With Spotlight, successfully funded projects will now turn into living, breathing homepages after funding. Creators have complete control to customize the look and feel of their page, share their creative journey in a beautiful timeline, and add a prominent button that links to anywhere on the web where someone can buy or follow the output of the project.

Here’s a video that explains the feature:

And here’s a page that collects some early examples of creators putting Spotlight to use.

When we began working on Spotlight last year, the goal was to create a simple way for creators to continue telling their story after funding was over. To put progress and the evolution of the project front and center. Thanks to remarkable work by our designer Zack Sears — himself a creator — this product lays the foundation for creators to do that.

Browsing through some of the first projects to use Spotlight reveals just how exciting this can be. The Spotlight for Alison Klayman’s documentary on Ai Weiwei includes a real-time diary of the artist’s sudden imprisonment by Chinese officials. Pebble’s Spotlight includes a first-hand tour of the manufacturing process. And the Spotlight for the cool Gramovox includes a link where visitors can buy the product now.

For us, Spotlight represents something even bigger. While Kickstarter is the world’s largest crowdfunding platform, the heart of Kickstarter isn’t crowdfunding. It’s creativity. We designed this system to help artists and creators produce new creative works and share them with the world. The crowdfunding system we pioneered to empower these projects is less exciting to us than the output of the projects themselves. We’re thrilled to better demonstrate Kickstarter’s commitment to artists and creators — as well as the platform’s values, mission, and utility — with Spotlight.

We hope Spotlight adds a new chapter to Kickstarter’s story, and the story of each and every creator who has used our platform to help bring their project to life. Thanks so much, and we hope you dig it!