No, he's not a chef. Yes, his middle name is made up. And no, there are no exciting incentives to inspire funding for his project and its $10 initial goal.
Zack Danger Brown is just making potato salad, and he's getting more than $40,000 through the crowdsourcing service Kickstarter to do it.
But the Columbus, Ohio native's brazen, tongue-in-cheek pitch has gone viral and earned him more than 3,000 backers since he posted it last Thursday.
With tens of thousands of dollars pledged and nearly a month left until the project closes, Brown has added many new "stretch goals" and is promising to throw a potato salad party for the internet community as a thank you.
Simple crowdfunding pitch
His magical pitch was simple: "I'm making potato salad," he wrote on his Kickstarter page. "Basically I'm just making potato salad. I haven't decided what kind yet." Then later, he posted: "UPDATE: WE DID IT."
Brown's initial stretch goals included making four times the potato salad ($35), holding a pizza party ($75) and trying two – yes, two – different potato salad recipes ($100). After blowing through those targets, Brown set slightly more ambitious goals like using better mayonnaise, live streaming the salad-making process and, at $3,000 in pledges, renting out a party hall and inviting people to have some of his potato salad.
The project blew up online thanks to the social link-sharing site reddit, where Brown is an active member of the online community.
He hosted an "Ask Me Anything" session Sunday to answer questions ranging from "Why?" to "Will there be onions in it?"
"I never thought it would go this far," he said in the AmA. "$10 seemed like a good, conservative goal. I think the people are responding to the opportunity to come together around something equal parts absurd and mundane. Potato Salad isn't controversial, but it seems to unite us all."
Other users upset
But not everyone online is jumping onboard. "I can't even raise the money to complete a 4-year degree and this guy gets 23k for a bowl of potato salad… I feel dead inside," user greywizard77 said on a related reddit thread.
"I feel terrible for all the legitimate Kickstarter projects that just barely fell short of their couple hundred or a few thousand dollars," user Equeon added.
Brown's project offers plenty of potato salad-themed incentives for its backers, including a potato salad haiku for $20 pledgers and a spot on the dedication page of his potato salad recipe book for pledges of $50 or more.
But even the minimum $1 pledge comes with it perks. "You will get a 'thank you' posted to our website and I will say your name out loud while making the potato salad," Brown’s Kickstarter site says.
Those perks carry through to all higher levels, meaning Brown will have a lot of names to say out loud while making his salad.
Brown listed only one risk to the project on his Kickstarter page."It might not be that good," he wrote. "It's my first potato salad."
