Kickstarter, the crowd-funding platform celebrated, their third birthday last April and to commemorate the event, the company traced their roots to show everyone how it all got started.

When they launched, Kickstarter was spelled without an “e” as in KickStartr, and it even featured a MySpace widget aside from the present all-or-nothing goal, the deadline, the project video, the tiered rewards, “back this project,” “backers,” and page architecture.

But before they officially kicked off in 2009, they decided to go with Kickstarter and their very first project was Grace Jones Does Not Give a F$#% T-Shirt (Limited Edition).  On May 3, 2009,  Drawing for Dollars, became their first successfully funded project, which raised $35.  But their very first project funded by the crowd was New York Makes a Book, which raised $3,329 with 110 backers.

After three years

Since 2009, almost 50,000 projects sought refuge on Kickstarter.  Startups who were turned down by venture capital firms turned to Kickstarter in hope of finding enough people funding their dreams.  And as of April 2012, over $200 million has been pledged to Kickstarter projects.

Based on this recent infographic (see below), 60% of funders are more interested in backing projects related to film and video.

In 2011, there were 27,086 launched projects on Kickstarter, with 11,836 of them successful, or 46% of them reached their funding goal.

Milestones

The first Kickstarter project to exceed $1 million pledges was the Elevation Dock, an aluminum iPhone dock, with a funding goal of $75,000.  They received $1,464,706 in pledges.

But the most funded project on Kickstarter is the Pebble – the e-paper watch compatible with iOS and Android smartphones – that displays text messages, caller ID, social media updates and reminders.  Pebble has 67,693 backers with $10,181,483 pledged funding.  Those numbers are still expected to rise with four more days to go until it gets funded on May 18th.

Trouble in crowd-funding paradise

On April 24th, in time for their 3rd anniversary, Kickstarter launched an API in conjunction with their new homepage.  Unfortunately, the API introduction came with a bug that “made accessible the project description, goal, duration, rewards, video, image, location, category, and user names for unlaunched projects,” but Kickstarter claimed that no account or financial data was made accessible.

“Obviously our users’ data is incredibly important to us,” said the Kickstarter blog.  “Even though limited information was made accessible through this bug, it is completely unacceptable. We want to underline once again that zero account or financial information was at any time made accessible by this bug.”

Kickstarter stated that the bug had been fixed.