Fascinating (and successful) experiment by Jeremy Olson and his team, who ran a private crowdfunding campaign to sustain the development of Hours Cloud – a web version of the excellent iOS app:

Despite the evidence against the idea, we tried it anyway and I am happy to report that the campaign has so far blown away our expectations.

We have shared the campaign privately with only 16,000 newsletter subscribers over the past few weeks and up to today it has already generated $38,428.00 from 378 backers — an average of $101.66 per backer.

It might not be Pebble but remember that this was a completely private campaign — no press and no virality potential. I’ll be watching results now that the campaign is public and will post an update once we have those numbers.

His post has a lot of interesting details on how and why they approached potential business customers with a private campaign, which is now open here.