Upcoming.org Kickstarter Clears $100,000, Founder: 'I Won't Sell Out Again'

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Upcoming.org founder Andy Baio.

Image: Flickr, Gabriel Shalom

By Karissa Bell2014-06-01 20:58:27 UTC

The Kickstarter campaign to fund the relaunch of Upcoming.org, the collaborative events calendar first started in 2003, has ended, raising more than three times its original goal.

Andy Baio, the site's founder, was hoping to attract $30,000 to fund the site's relaunch; he met that goal in 90 minutes. When the campaign closed Friday, it had raised more than $100,000.

See also: Upcoming.org Funds its Relaunch in 90 Minutes

"I'm going into this with a more experimental mindset and I hope the backers are too," Baio told Mashable. "I really want to bring them along every step of the way and they can help shape the direction everything goes, which is exactly the way I built Upcoming in the first place."

Baio launched the events site with two cofounders in 2003, at a time when Myspace was one month old and Friendster was the biggest social network around. "The problem Upcoming solved was that it was public and it was social and it didn’t make an attempt to be comprehensive so it ended up being really high quality, " Baio said.

Even though Baio says the site was never more than a side project in its first two years, it quickly became popular enough to catch the attention of Yahoo, who acquired the site in 2005 for an undisclosed amount.

A screenshot of Upcoming.org from 2007

Image: Flickr, Chris Messina

Baio says he and his cofounders were excited about the acquisition because it gave them the opportunity to work on the project full time.

"What we didn’t anticipate was how giving up ownership sells the community instead," he recently wrote in a lengthy post on Medium.

He and his cofounders left in 2007 and the site soon "fell into disrepair" before Yahoo finally shut it down for good in 2013.

"I definitely have regrets associated with it," Baio said. "I regret it because I feel guilty that the community entrusted me with this stuff and I made a bad call."

So when Yahoo, in a highly unusual move, reached out to Baio to ask if he wanted to buy back Upcoming.org for a "nominal fee," he jumped at the idea. He turned to Kickstarter—where he had served as an early advisor and chief technical officer— to fund the relaunch in a way that would allow him to keep it independent this time.

He doesn't yet know exactly how the new Upcoming will look, but the site will rely on Foursquare's API for venue information. He also plans to make Twitter integration a big component so users will be able to easily connect with the people they follow, though a Twitter account will not be required.

"I definitely prefer Twitter first over Facebook," he said. "Facebook already has an events platform. I think the following model for Twitter works much much better for Upcoming than Facebook does."

While hesitant to commit to a particular timeframe for the relaunch, Baio says he hopes to have a public beta ready to go by March.

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Topics: Business, kickstarter, Media, Twitter, upcoming.org