Think your idea is too niche? Think again.

Kickstarter is a strange beast. I follow the crowdfunding platform fairly closely, as a project creator and a backer, but would never pretend that I understand its dynamics.

I mostly keep an eye on Design and Technology projects, and for anyone who frequents those parts of the site, you’ll quickly start to notice some popular types of product showing up time and again.

The law of Kickstarter states that at any one time there must be projects for:

• A minimalist pen
• Tiny multi-tools
• Anything to do with coffee
• Headphones
• Anything made of titanium

I can kind of see why those neat little gadgets are popular on the site, but one thing that surprised me was the number of spinning tops on there. And I’m not talking about some clever modern tech that reinvents the spinning top. These are just round things that spin.

People can’t get enough of them it seems. In just over two years, 33 spinning top projects on Kickstarter have together raised over 1.4 million dollars in funding. Over half of that money has been raised by a single team at Foreverspin, who are currently running their third campaign.

Incidentally, my search only returned three spinning top projects that failed to raise their funding. A 90% success rate for a whole product category seems pretty damn good.

What’s going on here? In some ways it’s ridiculous that so many of the same types of product keep featuring on Kickstarter, and I must admit I’m getting a bit bored of watch campaigns, but in my view this is exactly what Kickstarter is for. People clearly want spinning tops, so let the people have spinning tops. Perhaps the traditional makers of spinning tops thought they were old-fashioned and no one wanted them anymore. Or perhaps, sadly, those type of companies have gone out of business because kids are playing Grand Theft Auto instead.

These are the opportunities crowdfunding platforms have opened up. We all have different tastes, but online you realise that plenty of people do share the same desires and values.

If you’ve come up with an idea, and perhaps a few friends also think it’s cool, you could definitely be on to something. You don’t need to be stocked in Tesco and sell a million, but if you can reach a few hundred or a thousand people via Kickstarter you will at least have an incredibly satisfying experience, and it might even be the start of a real, sustainable business.

If spinning tops can teach us anything, it’s that it’s a big wide world out there, and what seems at first like a small niche may actually be a big opportunity.

I’m sure there’s plenty of room in the market for an even smaller key-ring bottle opener. So what are you waiting for?

[Originally published on my blog]