Kickstarter is now open for business in the U.K. and is already posting about 200 projects from British creators on its first day. The crowd-funding site has been a huge hit in the U.S. with more than 75,000 projects launched and$ 343 million successfully raised but creators in other countries were not allowed to launch projects on the site.
Now, Kickstarter is now officially taking the first steps toward a larger international roll out. The plan is to take the service to other countries soon, after seeing how the UK launch goes, Kickstarter co-founder Yancey Strickler told the BBC.
U.K. Kickstarter projects operate very similar to U.S. projects except they lists money in pounds for U.K. visitors. Kickstarter is still charging a 5 percent fee on successfully funded projects but it’s using a different payment processor instead of Amazon.
Kickstarter first announced the U.K. launch three weeks ago and said at the time it was updating its shipping system to make it easier for project creators to ask for additional money from international backers to pay for international shipping costs.
We’ll be chatting with next week with Kickstarter CEO Perry Chen at GigaOM’s RoadMap conference, which is dedicated to the intersection of design and connectedness.
