Guy Raises $20,000 on Kickstarter to Make Potato Salad
Last month, crowdfunding site Kickstarter loosened its strict(ish) guidelines for projects, allowing users to ask the internet to pay for basically anything that's not illegal. So Zack Danger Brown was well within the rules when he asked for $10 to make potato salad, and his 1,700 backers didn't violate the site's terms by giving him $23,000 and counting.
His project began last Thursday with a simple mission: "I'm making potato salad. Basically I'm just making potato salad. I haven't decided what kind yet."
He offered rewards like a bite of the potato salad or the chance to pick one potato-salad-friendly ingredient to add to the dish, and people just ate it up. (Sorry.)
What started as a ridiculous gag has now turned into an effort to spend tens of thousands of dollars on a simple side dish. Brown will spend some of his thousands renting a venue and turning the creation of the meal into a live event. He's also paying to broadcast it live online.
Brown jokes that making the meal could take weeks, because for each type of potato salad he makes—the project has expanded to include multiples recipes—he'll be saying every backer's name out loud.
Why not just make the original potato salad and donate the huge excess of cash to charity? That's actually against Kickstarter's terms, because it could result in backers inadvertently funding causes they don't agree with.
So, instead, we get what may be the most expensive potato salad in the history of the world. Congratulations, internet. You did it.
