Want to watch four kids launch a start-up and market a product they’re currently developing?

Check out the Kickstarter project Diaspora ^[2] (full disclosure: I’m a financial backer — to the tune of $36.). Once it’s developed, Diaspora will be an open-source alternative to Facebook.

Started by four college kids (who have yet to graduate), the new social networking site will allow you to manage your own content and privacy settings.

What I like about this project, however, is how the founders are marketing it. They have a blog and have posted a wonderful video about why they’re developing Diaspora. It’s raw, it’s unedited, and it suits their “12-hour days, coffee, pizza, and passion galore” ethos.

They also have posts available only to backers — one of which apologizes for the founders not quite understanding how the Kickstarter survey function works. (People have to fill out all the fields, even though the survey questions say you don’t.)

The responses to this post show a real marketing lesson: no matter how easy you make things, people will continue to ask lots of questions (sorta like school), so you had better be sure you have the bandwidth to answer them.

I also agree with one of the posters: the Diaspora founders need to hire someone to help them post interesting content on their progress as well as answer people’s questions versus making t-shirts available to financial backers.

And, they need to answer one really big question: Just how easy will it be to use this thing? Nodes? What is a node? Sounds complicated.