Before there was a manuscript, a publisher, or even a finished title, there were 221 people who said yes.
Most business books start in private. The author sits with the manuscript for a year, the publisher acquires it, the marketing team prepares the launch, and only at the very end does the world get to weigh in. We took a different approach with this book. We started it on Kickstarter.
On 26 June 2025 we launched a Kickstarter campaign for a book then titled Create the WOW: A Practical Guide to Innovation and Ways of Working in the AI Era. We asked the world to back us, not because we needed the money to finish writing, but because we wanted to know, before we started, whether there was an appetite for the kind of book we wanted to write. I want to write down what happened, because the result of that campaign is the reason the book exists in the shape it now does.
The numbers
The campaign ran for 50 days, from 26 June to 15 August 2025. The goal was €25,000. By the close of the campaign, 221 backers had pledged €35,895. We finished the campaign at 143% of our goal.
The numbers were healthy, but they were not the most important thing. The most important thing was that 221 people, in 50 days, had decided this book was worth supporting before a single chapter was finished. That signal told us two things. First, the topic was real. Second, the audience was real. We could keep writing with both feet on the ground.
Why we put the book on Kickstarter at all
The book itself argues that the best work emerges from groups thinking together, that meaningful work rarely reaches its full potential in isolation, and that ideas become stronger when they are exposed to friction early. Writing the book the conventional way, in private, would have contradicted everything it argued for. The Kickstarter was the first practical expression of the book's own thesis. If we believed what we were writing, we had to expose the work to the world before it was finished.
It was also a hedge against the most common author mistake I have watched in twenty years of producing business books. Writing in private for a year and only then asking whether anyone cares. Kickstarter inverted the order. We asked first. We wrote second.
The 221 became the foundation of the 250
Many of the people who backed the Kickstarter became early co-creators of the book. Some moved straight into our weekly Miro sessions. Some introduced us to colleagues and clients who joined the project later. Over the year that followed, the original 221 grew into a community of 250 co-creators across more than 50 countries, each one bringing a perspective, a question, or a sharper version of a chapter we thought was finished.
If you have read other articles on this site about the #badversion, the 7 Faces, or the Customer Problem Canvas, every one of those parts of the book was shaped by people who were on the Kickstarter list first. The campaign was not fundraising. It was recruitment.
The title has since changed
The Kickstarter ran under the working title Create the WOW. By the time the book was eight months in, Alex Knezevic and I realised that title was lying about the book, and we renamed it to Augmented Collaboration. The full story of the renaming is in another article on this site. The 221 backers were updated on the change and supported it. The work the campaign funded did not change. The frame we used to describe it did.
A thank you to the 221
I want to say this plainly. Without the 221 people who pledged in the summer of 2025, this book is a different book or, more likely, not a book at all. They put their money behind a title that had not yet been written, by an author and a team they trusted to deliver something worth their time. We have spent the year since trying to honour that trust. The finished version of the book that lands on 1 September 2026 will be dedicated, in part, to them.
If you backed the campaign and you are reading this, thank you. The book is in your hands because you put it there first.
Where the book is now
The #badversion of Augmented Collaboration is available now in print and as a digital edition at augmentedcollaboration.com. The final version, with QR codes linking each tool to a live Miro template, lands on 1 September 2026. If you have been part of the project since the Kickstarter, you have already received your copy. If you are new to the project, you can step into the same conversation now.
Every book has an origin. This one's origin is 221 strangers who said yes before there was anything to say yes to.
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