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Want to buy Kickstarter? Try Kickstarter

Can comedian Eric Moneypenny raise enough money on Kickstarter to buy Kickstarter?

 

Kris Holt

IRL

Posted on Mar 16, 2012   Updated on Jun 2, 2021, 7:56 pm CDT

Eric Moneypenny wants to buy Kickstarter. And to raise the funds, he’s launched a Kickstarter.

“I live with a simple dream,” the comedian writes in the project’s description. “A dream to own Kickstarter. I would like to raise the funds necessary to make my dream a reality.”

Moneypenny reckons he needs about $19 million, based on estimates from the the site WorthOfWeb.

It’s an ambitious proposal, to put it mildly. The most-funded project on the crowdfunding community to date, a video game and documentary project, managed to accrue only $3.3 million. Moneypenny would need to raise more than five times that.

That’s not the only problem he faces. The project appears to be in limbo.

A note on the page reads, “Preview. This project page is not live.”

Moneypenny’s plan may have fallen foul of a basic Kickstarter rule: “fund my life” projects aren’t allowed. As the guidelines state: “Starting a business, for example, does not qualify as a [Kickstarter] project”

Taking over a business surely follows along the same lines.

Additionally, Kickstarter only allows projects that fall into a few specific categories. While Moneypenny has listed his as a technology project—which fits into Kickstarter’s guidelines—it clearly has nothing to do with technology.

The company reviews projects only after they’re built and ready for launch. That might explain why Moneypenny’s project is visible on the site, even if it’s not live.

This is Inception-type stuff. Trying to buy Kickstarter using a Kickstarter project on Kickstarter? Crazy, but we can go deeper. I might create a Kickstarter to buy the rights to the story of Moneypenny’s attempt to buy Kickstarter through a Kickstarter. BRRRRRM.

Photo by seanmcmenemy

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*First Published: Mar 16, 2012, 4:05 pm CDT