With 31 hours to go, it’s safe to say that Kickstarter campaign, “The Leader’s Guide By Eric Ries” has been a grand slam success, having raised over $500,000 from over 8,000 backers.
Eric Ries is famous for pioneering the lean startup movement, which emphasizes rapid prototyping, validated learning, and hypothesis-driven experimentation in order to obtain product-market fit as quickly as possible.
This new Kickstarter publishing project was an extension of his bestselling book, The Lean Startup, and is “aimed at entrepreneurs, executives, or anyone leading a project or team. It will be full of stories about how companies both large and small are adopting Lean Startup methods to scale successfully and operate in conditions of extreme uncertainty.”
Unlike his first book, which focused on lean startup methodology as whole, this book is more geared towards examples of successfully implementing lean startup techniques both in new companies and in established organizations.
“This campaign is also an experiment designed to see how I can collaborate with all of you as part of the research process for my next book (working title: The Startup Way).” says Ries. “I want to capture the experiences, stories, and learnings of those who support this campaign as they put these ideas to use.”
Shocking many, Ries announced early on that the book will not be available for sale after Kickstarter, saying “In fact, I made an agreement with Crown (my publisher) that it will only be offered to Kickstarter backers and only for the length of this campaign. It cannot be sold in bookstores.”
With more technology-savvy authors turning to crowdfunding, like Seth Godin and “The Icarus Deception,” it will be exciting to watch and see how the publishing industry adapts to this new financial tool. In recent years, even niche crowdfunding websites centered around publishing have sprung up, like Pubslush.
