How Font Awesome Broke Kickstarter Records with a Hilarious Video

💥 How Font Awesome’s Kickstarter Became a Record-Breaking Success

What happens when a tiny team with an awesome idea turns to crowdfunding? You get the most-backed tech Kickstarter of all time. In this episode of Podcast Awesome, Matt and the Font Awesome team take you behind the scenes of their  2017 Kickstarter campaign for Font Awesome 5.

Hear how a failed campaign turned into a historic win, how a bakery became the perfect metaphor for icon design, and how humor (plus a 12-hour filming session) helped their story resonate with backers worldwide. Oh, and how it caught the attention of Y Combinator, too.

🚀 In this episode, we explore:

• How humor and storytelling powered a viral Kickstarter video
• Lessons learned from a past campaign misfire (RIP Font Awesome Black Tie)
• Why we set a modest goal — and obliterated it
• Behind-the-scenes of choosing a video partner (Knox Avenue FTW)
• The unexpected doors Y Combinator opened up for Font Awesome

If you're a designer, founder, or just love a good origin story, this episode is packed with laughs, lessons, and bakery metaphors you won’t forget.

⏱️ Episode Timestamps

• 00:09 – Reflecting on the Success of Font Awesome's 2017 Kickstarter
• 02:14 – Was Y Combinator Worth It?
• 05:32 – Lessons Learned from the Crowdfunding Campaign
• 07:30 – Finding the Right Video Production Partner
• 09:03 – Why the Kickstarter Video Was a Huge Risk
• 13:10 – The 12-Hour Shoot That Made It Work
• 14:58 – The Campaign That Changed Everything

🔗 Links & Credits

 🎵 Theme by Ronnie Martin
🎛️ Audio mastering by Chris Enns at Lemon Productions

• Font Awesome 5 Kickstarter Video 
• How Font Awesome became the most funded software project on Kickstarter  — and what we can learn from it 

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HIGHLIGHTS 

We have no idea how this is going to hit. But we think this is hysterical. We thought it was funny, so we launched the video. We did a few things right with it. We did a lot of things right. And we still got an article out there somewhere about all of the we think are good ways to run a Kickstarter. And it's a few years old, but most of it's going to be evergreen with that. And we set a goal for ourselves for $30,000.

If Brian hasn't shared his nerd about baking, that would yeah, we should do that. The parallel we come up with [for the video] is a bakery. Because a bakery is we think of Font Awesome as this intersection of art and technology. We think of it as how do we make these Awesome assets. You get your icons. How do you make these real? How do you get these where they need to be in the way people want to use them so that everything can be better? 

As a company, we like humor. This is actually a core piece of who the company has become. Is that we value this so much, and so we're like, okay, so humor seems a clear way that we can try to make this more interesting. But also, what if we have nothing overtly digital in this? What if we tell this in the real world? What if we tell the story of Font Awesome 5, what we want to build? What if we tell this story in the real world? And so what's the biggest parallel, right?
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