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Comment by angilly | Hacker News Reader

The idea is that we help you find your first 100 customers while your building your MVP. Money changes hands, but not a lot. Don't think of it like crowdfunding in the traditional sense. It's simply a way for a founder to come out of a 30 day campaign with ~100 customers a few thousand dollars committed, and give them a better chance at succeeding.

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Please elaborate. How do you do this? I mean, kickstarter's an established brand. It seems like a good idea but how will you develop the marketplace that really will be "better"?

BTW, saw the video on your site, the general idea is really awesome. Wishing you the best of luck!

It's going to take a lot of work :) However, contrary to popular belief, Kickstarter doesn't drive much traffic to projects with their own discovery features. From their own stats page [1], 72% of backers only back once. What I take from that stat is that most people are only going to Kickstarter for a single project that their friend asked them to back.

It may take a year, but we hope to establish a culture where people browse the Ramen Marketplace. We look at it like being a zeitgeist of what is currently being built.

In the mean time, what is "better" off the bat is The Kitchen -- the area where project owners can collaborate with the customers: vote on features, get comments on mocks, poll on pricing, etc.... This area gets opened up once a project hits it's goal.

Thanks for the kind words. We're really excited to get this off the ground :)

[1] http://www.kickstarter.com/help/stats

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