Ivan Wong struggled with his camera strap. It would whip through the air when he turned his lens, occasionally flapping into the frame and destroying the composition. It’s a common issue, but for Wong it was more than an annoyance—as a professional sports photographer, he depended on his ability to capture the perfect moment. A wayward strap could kill an entire assignment. Wong talked to some fellow photographers—his brother, Ben, and his friend Anne Bui, a product developer at Fox Racing. They agreed it was a problem. So they did what any modern maker would: They designed their own solution. The idea was to connect the strap to one point on the bottom of the camera—the threaded tripod mount—instead of two points on the top. That should keep the strap out of the shot and reduce tangling. They grabbed some nuts and bolts from a local workshop and hit Ivan and Ben’s parents’ garage. Their prototype wasn’t pretty, but it worked. They called it the C-Loop and began to think it might have commercial potential.

The team had some manufacturing experience, but they had no idea how to bring a product to market. And money? They didn’t have that either, and it would cost $15,000 to produce a minimum run of 500 C-Loops. They considered pooling their savings (including Ben’s college money) and taking out a loan, but nobody relished that idea.

Then they found Kickstarter, a website where people post descriptions of their projects and anyone can chip in to help fund them. Ben had discovered the site after hearing about a couple of guys who wanted to manufacture a tripod mount for the iPhone 4. Ivan pledged $20—in effect preordering one of the gizmos. “I thought, that could be us,” Ivan says. Using Kickstarter was an appealingly offbeat approach, and there was no risk. Even if they couldn’t raise the full amount, they’d build a following and win some free publicity.

The C-Loop team started going through Kickstarter postings to see what traits made for a good project. They put together a video that described the device and conveyed their passion for it. Then they began thinking up rewards for various funding levels—for $5, contributors would get some stickers and their name on the new company’s website; for $35, they’d get a C-Loop in a microfiber pouch. And they set a fund-raising target of $15,000 in 42 days; if they didn’t hit that goal, none of the backers would be charged and no money would change hands. (This was a Kickstarter rule, designed to protect investors from sinking money into half-funded projects.)

Kickstarter approved the C-Loop, and on November 2, 2010, the Wongs and Bui posted it. Two weeks later, they had raised $8,000—more than halfway to their goal. Then, at 4:39 am Pacific Time on November 17, Engadget published a post about it, with a link to the Kickstarter page. By 10 am they had hit their target of $15,000. Four days later, funders had pledged $30,000. Bui quit her job at Fox, and Ben decided not to return to school. By the end of the funding period they had raised $63,163.

Two months later, the trio had manufactured and shipped 1,800 C-Loops. In addition to the presales they booked on Kickstarter, they have been selling the device through their own website; they say they’ve received calls from two dozen distributors around the world and are in early talks with some prominent camera retailers. The team has also launched a new product, the Split Strap—an ergonomic accessory for a camera, laptop bag, duffel, or guitar—which they think has even more potential than the C-Loop. After about two weeks on Kickstarter, fund-raising for the new project surpassed the team’s $5,000 goal. After a month, they had raised $10,000. A little more than a month after that, with 13 days still to go, the total stood at $20,772.

Build a better mousetrap and the world is supposed to beat a path to your door. It’s a lovely thought, one that has inspired generations of American inventors. Reality, though, has fallen somewhat short of this promise: Build a better mousetrap and, if you’re extremely lucky, some corporation will take a look at it, send it through dozens of committees, tweak the design to make it cheaper to manufacture, and let the marketing team decide whether it can be priced to return a profit. By the time your mousetrap makes it to store shelves, it is likely to have been fine-tuned and compromised beyond recognition.

But now some inventors are finding that promise rekindled, thanks to Kickstarter. The site launched in 2009 as a way to crowdsource the funding of idiosyncratic arts projects. Rather than run a gauntlet of agents, studios, producers, publishers, gallery owners, foundations, and philanthropists, applicants simply uploaded a description of their idea. Kickstarter empowered creators, who had a new, no-strings source of funding, as well as audiences, who had the opportunity to help realize the kind of art they wanted to see, rather than what some suit thought would be profitable. “It has changed who the gatekeepers are,” says Douglas Rushkoff, author of the anticorporate manifesto Life Inc. “It has opened up the things you want to do to the free market.”

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