Enter StarterKit—an iteration of our in-house agency offering to provide the storytelling every crowdfunding campaign needs. It’s a fast, customizable package of creative, strategic, production, and promotional services designed to fund ideas, and anyone can apply for it using a simple form we’ve posted online.

Most pre-launch crowdfunding projects are also pre-revenue, so for StarterKit, we ditched our traditional upfront compensation structure in favor of a success-based model that shares in the financial success of the project. If a campaign doesn’t meet its crowdfunding goal, the creator doesn’t get paid and neither do we.

We could invest our money in these projects, but instead we’re investing our creativity as a multiplier for their success. We’ve launched an incubator without actually launching one, and we have our pick of all who apply.

So, just like an angel investor, we field pitches and evaluate investment opportunities. We seek promising ideas and creators based on a variety of measures, including fundraising potential, creative potential, relationship potential, and storytelling challenge, and we constantly reexamine our selection criteria, adapting and iterating as we go.

StarterKit has also inspired a new operational model: lean, cross-disciplinary teams selecting their own projects and deploying quickly; clearing schedules to eliminate distraction and accelerate campaign delivery; direct partnerships with founding creators and a shared stake in the ultimate scoreboard of success—the campaign funding counter—intensifying the importance of every creative and strategic choice.

It’s our testing ground for optimizing the way we work, inspired by the needs of tomorrow’s brands.

StarterKit began as a minimum viable product test with a restaurant—Travail—that became the highest raising restaurant in Kickstarter’s history.

That success led to StarterKit’s announcement in FastCo.Create and the launch of our online application. Since then, we’ve received hundreds of submissions, with volume steadily increasing month over month.

For our first official StarterKit campaign we selected Sabertron, a project that failed in its first attempt on Kickstarter. With our help, these “foam swords that keep score” raised over four times their goal the second time around.

Our latest campaign for Tiko 3D has raised over $2.4 million while amassing more backers than any other crowdfunded 3D printer (13,000+ and counting).

And, during StarterKit’s “Storytelling for Crowdfunding Ideas” pitch event at SXSW, five finalists competed to become our next project. There we selected SunPort, a new way for consumers to invest in solar energy.

StarterKit is changing our culture, making us faster and closer to entrepreneurs as we accelerate their innovations. We’re learning from our applicants and experimenting with new models. As crowdfunding continues to proliferate, we’re building credibility as storytellers who fund ideas while getting in on the ground floor with high-potential prospects. And we’re only getting started.