Andy Baio crowdfunds $30,000 in 90 minutes to relaunch community event site Upcoming
Serial co-founder Andy Baio re-introduced Upcoming, the collaborative events site. Purchased by Yahoo in 2005 and shutdown last year, Baio is relaunching the site via Kickstarter.
Context & Ripple Effects
Upcoming is a rare case of a founder getting his site back from the acquirer's graveyard: Yahoo bought the collaborative events site in 2005, starved it, and shut it down last year, a decline Andy Baio documented plainly in his 2013 eulogy for the service. A year after writing that obituary, he is relaunching it himself — and the market signal was immediate, with backers committing $30,000 inside 90 minutes on Kickstarter.
The pickup was modest but telling: Cult of Mac, Turnstyle, and Waxy.org all carried it on the day, with Baio's own blog amplifying it. The story matters less as a funding round than as proof that a dormant community property retains enough residual loyalty to be crowdfunded back into existence rather than rebuilt by an incumbent.
First-order effects
- Baio exits with a fully funded mandate and no investor gatekeeping — $30,000 raised in 90 minutes means the rebuild proceeds entirely on his terms and timeline.
- Yahoo's decision to shut Upcoming last year now looks costlier reputationally: the community it abandoned has demonstrated it will pay to have the site back.
Second-order effects
- Kickstarter gains a fresh template beyond gadgets and games — founder-led rescues of shut-down web services — which other displaced community-site owners can copy directly.
- Incumbents holding similar neglected acquisitions face a new benchmark: if they won't maintain a community asset, its founder or users may fund a competing revival out from under them.
Third-order effects
- If founder-led crowdfunded revivals keep working, the lifecycle of community websites shifts toward what amounts to an archive replenishment loop — properties cycling between corporate ownership, abandonment, and grassroots resurrection — weakening the assumption that an acquirer's shutdown is permanent.
- It also strengthens the case for platforms like Kickstarter and Indiegogo as arbiters of which dormant services deserve a second life, inserting crowd demand signals into decisions that used to belong solely to the company holding the domain.
The trend: Founders of shut-down community sites are increasingly bypassing corporate buyers and using crowdfunding to reclaim and relaunch their own abandoned products.