I remember this, as indeed they say, it was one of the very first Kickstarter projects. Kickstarter did a good job of seeding the site with cool artistic projects. I think this - and the fact that they only allowed creative projects for a long time - was what made it work.

Others had tried the same idea (Pratt and Helm's "Fundable.org", no relation to what's currently on that ___domain), but they had serious problems with project quality and credit card fraud.