11ty pauses its rebrand Kickstarter
March 6, 2026
Kickstarter campaigns live and die by momentum in the first 48 hours, and ours ran out of steam before most of our audience even knew it existed. Yes. We hit our initial goal, but if we can't email folks for the rest of the month, we're dead in the water. So we've made the tough decision to pause the campaign.[…] One thing we want to be clearer about in the relaunch: Build Awesome (née Eleventy) will always be free and open source. Always. Part of what this Kickstarter funds is the long-term health and sustainability of that open source project.[…] We're going to spend a little bit of time cleaning up our email infrastructure, making sure things are healthy, and will relaunch when our systems are humming.
The 11ty Kickstarter launched under Font Awesome's new "Build Awesome" brand and paused within hours, citing an email distribution failure.
The name "11ty" carries a lot of indie-web credibility. "Build Awesome" sounds like a corporate slogan. Many in the community felt that tucking 11ty into the "Awesome" brand alongside Web Awesome was sacrificing the project's quirky identity to fit a product suite. The backlash is real and underneath the brand complaints is a more practical worry: what does this mean for my 11ty site? Is it still the same independent project, or is it now just a feature in someone's SaaS roadmap?
When a high-profile creator cancels a Kickstarter over "technical issues," it usually goes one of two ways:
1. The Hard Pivot -- They realize the community backlash was worse than expected and use the technical excuse as a graceful exit to rethink the whole thing.
2. The Re-launch -- They fix the pipes, issue a humble apology, and try again.
I'm betting on the hard pivot, the email thing feels like a convenient out.