RocketHub

» see rockethub.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

RocketHub was incorporated in 2009 by Brian Meece with three co-founders, and the first campaign went up on 1 September of that year. Kickstarter had launched four months earlier and was already setting the shape of the thing: curated creative projects, with everybody refunded when a goal was missed. RocketHub took the opposite position on most of that. A science department or a school band could run a page there, and the site did not much care what the project was.

The other difference was the money. Kickstarter refunded everybody when a goal was missed. RocketHub let the campaign keep whatever it raised and charged a higher cut for the privilege, which meant a campaign could not fail in the way a Kickstarter could. It could only fail quietly, with a few hundred dollars in hand and a fee taken off the top.

It got real traction for a stretch. RocketHub's own announcements put the Penn State Lunar Lion moon lander campaign at a crowdfunding record, and in 2013 the site worked with Wieden+Kennedy and Chrysler on the Dodge Dart Registry, which let people crowdfund a car purchase the way you crowdfund a wedding gift and got shown at Cannes that year.

On 15 April 2015 eFactor Group bought the company in a deal valued at fifteen million dollars. Three years later the parent switched the brand off. There was no farewell post that anybody kept.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ the fee schedule ~

The pricing is the clearest statement RocketHub ever made about itself. Hit your target and the site took four percent, with another four for payment processing. Miss it and the site took eight, with the same four on top. Twelve percent of a failed campaign is a real number to hand over for the experience of not raising enough money.

I was in Ankara through all of this, watching the crowdfunding era from the wrong side of a payments border, because getting money out of an American platform and into a Turkish bank account in 2012 was its own project. The Turkish version of this arrived later and locally. RocketHub was never going to be the site I used, and by the time that mattered to me it was already owned by somebody else.

~ the dodge dart ~

The Dart Registry is the campaign worth remembering, and not because it worked. An advertising agency noticed that crowdfunding had produced a socially acceptable way to ask your relatives for money, and pointed it at a mid-size sedan. You built a page that split the car into parts and let your relatives buy you the transmission. It is the exact moment the mechanism stopped belonging to independent projects and became a marketing format, and it happened on RocketHub rather than on the market leader because RocketHub would say yes.

~ the second sale ~

In 2022 the domain was bought by Charlie Patel of a newly formed RocketHub LLC, and rockethub.com today sells lifetime deals on software, mostly WordPress plugins and small SaaS tools. It is a live site with a 2026 copyright line and no connection to the thing that used to be there. The name outlasted the company by four years and now belongs to a business the founders never had anything to do with.

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