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"Ryan Grepper likes to call himself a visionary, a mad scientist and a lover of all things DIY. Now he can add one more description to that list: King of Kickstarter.\nThe Coolest Cooler, Grepper's Kickstarter campaign for a souped-up party cooler \u2014 boasting features like Bluetooth speakers, a USB charger and a rechargeable blender \u2014 passed the Pebble smartwatch on Tuesday night to become the top-funded Kickstarter campaign in history. \nGrepper had raised more than $10.3 million by Wednesday morning, and his campaign still had two days to go. (Pebble raised $10,266,845 in 2012.)\nSee also: 10 Simple Kickstarter Campaigns You Should Have Thought Of\n\"I\u2019m honestly overjoyed to be in the same ballpark as some of these other amazing crowdfunding products,\" Grepper told Mashable in an interview earlier this month, as the Coolest Cooler campaign shot up in the rankings. \"Who wouldn\u2019t like to beat a record? But that's just not my goal.\"\nInstead, his goal was simply to make up for an earlier failure. \nGrepper, a self-professed inventor from Portland, Oregon, first heard about Kickstarter and the crowdfunding concept around 2011, but he didn't want to test out the service until he had a product that would be a good fit. That moment came at the end of 2013 when Grepper launched the first iteration of the Coolest Cooler. \nAs he describes it now, that campaign was riddled with mistakes: the target funding goal was relatively high ($125,000), the design for the product wasn't far enough along and the campaign launched over the winter when the last thing people were thinking about were coolers. Sure enough, the campaign fell more than $20,000 short of its goal.\n\"As most people who are first launching a project on Kickstarter do, you do some research, you put the product out there, and you hope for and secretly expect that because this idea is great, magically it will get funded,\" Grepper said of his failed first campaign. \"It was very disappointing.\"\nSeven months later, Grepper decided to launch another campaign on Kickstarter. He had a more fully developed product, some of those who backed the idea early on showed continue support for it and the summer seemed like a more seasonally appropriate time. Even so, he admitted, \"my confidence was pretty low.\"\n\"If it didn\u2019t get funded, I would have enjoyed my own prototype for many years to come, and I would have moved on to another concept,\" he said. \nIt became apparent on the first day of the Kickstarter campaign in early July that Grepper wouldn't have to worry about being the only one to own his cooler. Backers poured money into the campaign almost immediately. Less than 36 hours after the campaign launched, the Coolest Cooler hit its $50,000 funding goal. One day after that, the campaign surged past the $1 million mark and kept going, as press coverage of the product continued to grow.\nThe Coolest Cooler is now more than 20,000% over its original funding goal \u2014 a far higher percentage than any other campaign in Kickstarter's top 20.\n\nThe top funded Kickstarter campaigns.Image: KickstarterOf course, with great funding comes great responsibility. Pebble came under greater scrutiny from the media after raising $10 million, and then struggling to fulfill orders to backers on time. Grepper insisted multiple times in our interview that he has already begun scaling his design and supply teams, knowing that the campaign is already successfully funded. \n\"We're doing our best to study what has been done, what mistakes were made, what corrections were made,\" he said of previous high-profile Kickstarter projects that have encountered issues. \"My perspective right now is that every single day is a production deadline day.\"\nWhile the funding is most meaningful for Grepper and his efforts, it's also significant for Kickstarter. Like any service, Kickstarter is at least partly defined by its biggest successes. \nIn the early days after Kickstarter launched in 2009, it was associated with more artistic projects thanks to the success of campaigns such as the one from songwriter Brad Skistimas to release a new album. Later, it was the platform that helped give birth to Diaspora, an Internet phenomenon that promised \u2014 and later failed \u2014 to be a viable alternative to Facebook. In recent years, it has come to be associated more with hardware and Hollywood, as these efforts rake in millions on the crowdfunding platform.\nAll in all, just 12 projects held the title of being Kickstarter's top-funded campaign in its five-year history. Pebble held on to the top spot for more than two years, and seemed nearly untouchable with its $10 million-plus funding total. Now, Grepper and his Coolest Cooler are the 13th project to hold the title.\nThe Coolest Cooler is not like previous projects that have held the top spot. It isn't a hip indie artist's dream, or the product of a promising tech startup; the cooler is something one might expect to see flash on screen during a late-night infomercial, or fawned over by QVC hosts during the day. Likewise, Grepper is not some Silicon Valley entrepreneur, but rather a full-time product developer who says one of his biggest successes is the portable-luggage scale that ended up in the SkyMall catalogue for years. \n\nThe Coolest Cooler may not be as groundbreaking as a smartwatch was in 2012, but the people have spoken. Nearly 50,000 of them backed the campaign, and made it the one to beat on Kickstarter. \nFor his part, Grepper has little interest in holding the top spot for longer than necessary.\n\"If the Coolest Cooler becomes the top-funded project, my biggest wish would be that it's a short-lived victory. I would love to see more creative people put their ideas before the crowd,\" he told Mashable. \"It's certainly exciting to break a record, but I would be the no. 1 fan of whoever is closing in on me.\" \nHave something to add to this story? Share it in the comments."^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://mashable.com/2014/08/26/kickstarter-coolest-cooler/>