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. The Coolest Cooler, Grepper's Kickstarter campaign for a souped-up party cooler — boasting features like Bluetooth speakers, a USB charger and a rechargeable blender — passed the Pebble smartwatch on Tuesday night to become the top-funded Kickstarter campaign in history.
Grepper 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.)

Grepper, 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. As 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.

"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."

Seven 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."

It 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. The Coolest Cooler is now more than 20,000% over its original funding goal — a far higher percentage than any other campaign in Kickstarter's top 20.