Why Did Jamie Siminoff Start Christie Street?

Jamie Siminoff started Christie Street, a crowdfunding site, because Kickstarter had stopped taking hardware, and the doorbell was only the product used to launch that site.

He was in his garage and could not hear the doorbell, so he built a fix. Kickstarter was becoming popular, then hardware projects showed up and none of them shipped, so Kickstarter put on a moratorium and he lost his distribution. He decided to launch his own Kickstarter and named it Christie Street, after the street Edison's lab was on in New Jersey.

Christie Street needed a product. At a friend's conference in Paris he went through ideas, a snap garden among them, and the doorbell was the one picked. He did not care which product it was. The crowdfunding site was the business. Charles River Ventures wrote the seed check for Christie Street.