Upcoming.org founder promises that he won’t sell out again

Upcoming.org was a collaborative events calendar website that launched in 2003. It was acquired by Yahoo! and was eventually shutdown. But the website’s founder Andy Baio wanted to revive the website and so he launched a crowdfunding campaign on Kickstarter to make it happen. The Kickstarter campaign was successful and ended up raising more than three times the original goal. Baio wanted to raise $30,000 to fund the relaunch of the website. That goal was met in 90 minutes. After the campaign closed this past Friday, it ended up raising more than $100,000.

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.  “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.