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Ask Slashdot: At What Point Has a Kickstarter Project Failed?
skywiseguy writes "I have only used Kickstarter to back a single project so far, but one of the backers of that project pointed us to a project promising video capable glasses which was once one of the top 10 highest funded projects in Kickstarter history. After reading through the comments, it is obvious that the project has not met its expected deadline of 'Winter 2011,' but the project team rarely gives any updates with concrete information. All emails sent to them by backers get a form letter in reply, they routinely delete negative comments from their Facebook page, and apparently very soon after the project was funded, they posted pictures of themselves on a tropical beach with the tagline, 'We are not on a beach in Thailand.' Their early promotions were featured on Engadget and other tech sites but since the project was funded they've rarely, if ever, communicated in more than a form letter. So at what point can a project like this be considered to have failed? And if you had backed a project with this kind of lack of communication from the project team, what would you consider to be the best course of action? Disclaimer: I have not backed this project, but I am very interested in funding Kickstarter projects and I do not want to get caught sending money to a less than reputable project. According to the above project's backers, Kickstarter claims to have no mechanism for refunding money to backers of failed projects and no way to hold the project team accountable to their backers. This does not seem like a healthy environment for someone who is averse to giving their money to scam artists."
Other than requiring a sign agreement with project meetings, milestones and checkpoints you'll have to go on faith.
You don't give your money to strangers without some kind of collateral. All this "microfunding" or "crowdfunding" nonsense will not work, for the same reason that we don't have a gift economy: there are incompetent fools (who will fail to use the money well), or just greedy bastards who will take the money for themselves. Try investing in individual stocks after researching them.
Pretty much what you said - there's no way to guarantee people will use the funds for the purpose you've donated them for.
I was talking about a Kickstarter-type model ages ago on my blog, and I pretty much got it all right with Kickstarter except for one thing: I said that a crowdfunding system would have to essentially operate a trust, that released funds as certain project milestones were released, or on receipt of invoices, etc.
Obviously, Kickstarter managed to operate without such a mechanism, but I think it's definitely needed if the crowdfunding concept is going to grow. Maybe not for all projects, but ones that reach a certain amount of capitalisation, certainly.
Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean there isn't an invisible demon about to eat your face
Crowdfunding works only together with reputation. If you simply give money to any unknown person who starts a project, then it's your own fault if they run away with it. Reputation means that creators seeking funding need to do their first few projects for free until there are enough fans who believe that the creator will really deliver and who like the quality of the previous products.
"Someone who is averse to giving their money to scam artists" shouldn't be giving their money to random people on Kickstarter without some sort of contract or reputation. Full stop.
Which is why I don't touch Kickstarter. Sure, it'd be nice to get a few "crowdsourced" ideas up and running but, you know what? Those that *CAN* make sense, end up getting made anyway, and often making money anyway.
As soon as someone says "We need X amount of money to do Y", you have to look into exactly who they are and why they need it and what they'll do with it. Those Kickstarter projects that are basically "We'd like to make an indie game that does X" really annoy me. You do? Bugger off and do it then! One of the "big" ones a while ago had signed up a famous voice artist before the project had even been funded - sorry, but that's the LAST thing to worry about and probably the LAST thing I'd ever want added to a game I was funding (no matter how small) - the bloody janitor probably has a good enough voice that you'd never notice the difference.
Save your cash. Give it to established developers, those who have written games you've enjoyed, and those with proven results. Like indie developers in the Humble bundles, or things like Altitude, or whatever. Don't give it on the basis of promises of what they *think* they *could* do until they've actually done it.
Now, if we were talking about things like hardware manufacturing costs, etc. of something that someone has designed in order to get into mass production, then that's a different matter but the same principles apply. Too many "crowdfunded" projects (OpenPandora, etc.) fail miserably even when they have the best will in the world, purely because they've never done certain parts of it, or only handled smaller projects, etc. Where's my "Open Graphics Card" that was being designed / manufactured what? Ten years ago? Hell, it had AGP as an "option" last I looked, so it's already dead in the water for any commercial backer.
Making a video card work is far from easy - but you have to consider your investment like any other. If you don't trust the people involved to follow through, or you just think that throwing money at these sorts of problems is what's lacking, then you're going to be doomed to failure.
from the description.. and when the description makes no mention of actual how they're going to hide the electronics in the frame(at the sides?).
that hiding of the electronics is what would have made their product unique.
btw the frames look like shit and look like they'll be shit for your nose at that weight(add prescription lenses and it's only worse)
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
The real problem is a lack of accountability.
There are no consequences at for creating a "scam" project, collecting donations, and doing no work at all.
It's difficult to tell those from projects that fail honestly, either from lack of funds or mismanagement.
Required communication won't really help; that's too easy to fake. They'd need required deliverables, which won't work for ultimately commercial software projects or hardware projects.
Short of only releasing funds after certain milestones have been met might help, but the project would need enough capital already to achieve each milestone ahead of time. (To say nothing of intermediaries to verify progress!) The trouble is that honest groups may not be able to even begin a project until there were enough promised funds. Even then, if they fail they'd be on the hook for more than they may be able to reasonably afford. But that's the very risk that programs like KickStarter are designed to mitigate!
Required reading for internet skeptics
Between this and the above it might signal the end of the road for this form of funding. Lots more people are probably going to get burned. I backed the MARIE music robots after reading about them on Slashdot. It gave me a good feeling plus the promise of stuff sent to me in the post was a nice thing to have. I eventually got the stuff out of the blue, over a year later, and was very pleased to receive it having pretty much given up on it. When kickstarter works - it works well as in this case. One thing that projects should do is at least try to keep their backers in the loop. However we can only hope that the JOBS act isn't going to give this type of investment/funding a bad name.
Money put into Kickstarter is probably best regarded as venture capital, where there is a significant failure rate of projects.
The question perhaps ought to be how can failing projects be detected and prevented from being a complete waste of "investors" money?
Donte Alistair Anderson Roberts - hi son!
Karma: Chameleon
Alright, to start, full disclaimer is that I don't see anyway how I will get around mentioning projects I've kickstarted so I'll try to stick to ones that are done and no longer able to hit.
... I'd pretty much pass on this one and just buy them when they're out.
But the simple answer to me is "What do these people have to lose if they meet their goal and don't deliver? And would it be worth 'cashing' out all of your good faith with the community at that price?" I've never kickstarted something that costs more than a million dollars and if I kickstarted something over a hundred dollars, it had a company's name and site associated with it that was already in the business and would be smeared with mud if they decided to fleece a bunch of people trying to help them out. Using this guidance, I haven't had many poor experiences -- although a lot of my experiences are funding musicians to record albums or video. That's something that's pretty hard to fail at although, they're musicians, so I'm still waiting on a movie that was started filming over a year or more ago ("Flood Tide"). I kickstarted a book on programming ("The Nature of Code Book") and this dude has been sending me links to PDFs left and right and I'll probably review the book here on Slashdot when he has it finalized. So far we're talking $25 donations to each of these projects. But I did dump a couple hundred into the NASA space MMO and I sort of expect to be waiting 2-3 years on that one because it's a team of 20 developers making an MMO and I want them to make a nice product. But also, they have a reputation at stake and I know they'll put out something.
Anyway, keep your donations at levels you can afford to lose -- don't ever think you're "buying" something on kickstarter. And look at the reputation of the individuals involved with your project. Also keep in mind it takes a long time to go through all stages of development and you'll find projects at all stages. It looks like ZionEyez started at concept. Do you know how long it takes to go from concept to hardware product? Large companies with massive budgets who are in those businesses take a longtime, I would imagine smaller teams would take even longer. You might get your ZionEyez in 4-5 years and, like a lot of vaporware, maybe never. ZionEyez looks like they were offering you $50 off MSRP to kickstart them and you got some "limited edition" run of them. So
As for criticism, if this is a scam, they're sure committed to it with updates from yesterday. Hell, their site looks like it would cost 10-20k to develop so they're spending their money somewhere. These guys sound like they'll probably come through, they just don't understand FCC testing, engineering problems, etc. So I'd expect your ZionEyez 4 years from now when some Chinese manufacturer already has some knockoff out there. But it's a bad idea to kickstart a lot of money to these guys as I don't see them at risk of losing any reputation, just losing a really good idea (people are obsessed with putting their boring personal status updates online, think about them putting their mundane day-to-day video up).
My work here is dung.
I ran a $2000 Kickstarter to fund a book called The Future We Deserve. The project was to collect 100 essays about the future from 100 people, and then write an analysis which drew out common threads and told a story about the future. The material that came in was so strong, individualistic and subtle that it was simply impossible, after a year of trying off-and-on to make an analysis so we simply accepted that the original task didn't make sense in the face of such strong material, and published it as-is.
We've had a few people be like "where's the book, man?" in that year, and we kept in pretty good touch ("it's in the oven, refusing to cook!")
The book is up on PediaPress now, and people are buying copies and are well pleased with the results, but it was an akward year!
Hexayurt - open source refugee shelter,
While you don't have a guarantee, at least one lawyer (registered with AZ state bar) believes you as a project backer do, in fact, have a contract with the project creator.
Therefore any failure to deliver as promised can be seen as a breach of contract, subject to whatever laws apply in your jurisdiction.
That lawyer is exploring filing a court case as a matter of principle. I'd point you to him, but 1. he's limited to AZ and 2. even though he's a lawyer, he's not your lawyer and I don't think he has any interest of becoming it either, limiting himself to a particular project. It's not difficult to Google anyway.
You do also have refund options. For one thing, you can dispute the charge with your credit card issuer (as KickStarter only goes through Amazon at the moment, which wants a credit card). I believe somebody also said you can go through some Amazon hoops, but I haven't really looked into this.
But I think the easiest route to begin with is to just ask the project creator about a refund. Many are willing to oblige if there's a good reason (and keep in mind that they do lose money on this, as they can only personally refund the amount they got - which is minus the charges by KickStarter and Amazon).
Startups don't all work out (not even fucking close).
The idea of kickstarter, the entire idea of it, is to distribute the costs among many people so that each is investing no more than an amount they are comfortable losing.
Instead of a share of profits like you would get with a large investment in the business, you get token rewards if and when it succeeds.
Kickstarter is entirely clear about all of this, and anyone who invests in something should a) do their homework and ask the right questions and b) not give up more than they can walk away from.
The whole idea is that for the price of a theatre trip (for one!) you can help fund a cool idea, and lots of people are willing to do that. It's not about contracts and buying stuff it's about good will and helping something you believe in come to life.
You should have quoted the entire answer:
Eyez will weigh less than 200 grams, slightly more than a standard pair of sunglasses. When the glasses are worn the weight will be distributed equally on both ears.
Assuming 200 grams is the maximum, this is not just *slightly* more than a standard pair of sunglasses. even 100 grams would be pretty heavy for sunglasses, and heavy for 3D glasses. Around 80 grams would be the weight of two Twinkies (international standard of weight), which is fine for 3D glasses that are typically worn when seated. These things are going to have to be pretty light to be worn while physically active. Also, anyone seen the quality of video that normally comes from having a camera mounted on the head? Without a lot of self-control, you may as well be attaching a camera to a piece of string, twirling it around your head. They're going to have to be using pretty good image stabilization to avoid most of the footage coming out like shit.
Using z instead of s is not cool. It never was, except among 10-year-old boys and old men trying to impress aforementioned boys.
-- Using the preview button since 2005
"If you can't afford reps to handle customer relations then a techies last resort would possibly be to delete posts. The alternative would be to spend time to deal with potential customers instead of building the damn thing. Any engineer will tell you what he'd rather do. It's clumsy, it's not wise, but if you don't have the time..."
Sorry, this is the sort of excuse that lots of projects hide behind.
You know, it takes NOTHING to put up a small update at the end of your working day saying what you've done that day on the project. Literally seconds in some cases, for a fast typist. Sure, you can work all hours, and be doing it outside a job, and have a family, etc.
But if have any sort of smartphone or computer, it takes SECONDS to post a "Still struggling with X. Mr Y says it will be another week." or similar post onto a project page each day. If it's nothing to do it each day, then each week or each month is EVEN EASIER.
Those people PAID for you to be there, working. At least have the decency to keep them up to date and in the loop and LOOK busy (the same as you would if your boss was getting frustrated by your lack of feedback). They (and others looking at that page) are also CUSTOMERS. If you disappear for weeks or months at a time with no word, there's no reason to believe that in the future you WON'T do that one second after I place my order and I won't see product for months.
In the time it took you to read through the posts, you could have done it ten times, and you could ignore replying to the ones that your post answered. If you took the time to DELETE posts, that means you're conscious that the project looks bad with those posts and you don't have an answer. Instead of DELETING them, answer them. Even if the answer is "We're not sure yet".
If you're on a large project and you honestly can't take 5 minutes out of EVERY WORKING DAY you work on it in order to post an update (sod individual replies, that's just pointless with Internet-scale projects without a large team), then you're going to cause yourself ten times more problems - it means you aren't checking paperwork, aren't sitting and thinking things through, aren't considering exactly HOW you're going to deliver something the customers want, etc.
It's not a hardship to write a status update and forgo replying to a thousand people, and actually works BETTER. It's not a hardship to reply to recurring-themes of comments specifically. If it is, then you're trying to hide something, or just setting yourself up for future failure.
Failure depends on your personal definition.
I think we can all agree that if the project creator takes the money and goes vacationing on a tropical island with it, then the project definitely failed as it was little more than a scam. Unless that's actually what the project was (not applicable to KickStarter, but there's plenty of fund-my-life crowdfunding platforms).
So that leaves failure modes that are a bit more intricate.
Say the developer throws in the towel - so you don't get the 'thing' you pledged for (be that a widget or a book or a movie or whatever) - after trying to make things work, and there's good reason to believe that they did indeed try.
That's a failure to deliver, but was the project a failure? Maybe they learned something from it, maybe others can take what they did and expand on it, etc.
Personally I still see it as a failure, but in the grand scheme of things, there are people who pledge just because they think the idea is interesting and deserves a chance. If in the end it doesn't work out, at least it was tried, and that's good enough for them.
Then there's those projects that do deliver, but they deliver late. How late is too late?
If a movie takes not 3 months to complete as written in the pitch, but ends up taking 9 months instead, does that mean the project failed?
You did, after all, get the movie in the end, so how is that failure?
Well, if the movie is supposed to be on-topic for fairly recent events (let's say the movie is supposed to come out just before the U.S. presidential elections to make people think about their choice) and ends up being so late that it becomes irrelevant, then I'd say it probably still failed. Otherwise, i.e. if the movie isn't really time-sensitive, then I don't see the problem other than the frustration of having to wait longer than expected to see it. That's enough for people to download movies rather than wait for release in their countries, so movie project creators can take away from that what they wish.
For widgets, it's much the same thing. The HexBright Open Source light, for example, is running late - way late - and some people are requesting refunds despite the progress shown in updates. In some ways, it has been overtaken by other flashlights (i.e. brighter, maybe more compact). If that's what a person backed that project for, then that project has failed. On the other hand, it still has the unique programmable features, its grip, the tailcap indicator, and open source implementation - so it still has an edge over other flashlights in that area and those who backed it for those reasons are less likely to consider the project failed.
Then there's projects that promise thing A, but end up delivering thing A'.
Recently there was a metal iPhone case, for example, that looked pretty good and - being an iThing project - got plenty of backers. Turns out that once delivered, people realized their signal dropped significantly.
Did that project fail, in terms of exploring whether what they wanted to do was actually a good thing?
To those who could no longer actually place any calls - yes.
To those who still could, and thought their iPhone now looks like the hottest thing since the iPhone - nope.
In fact, that project's creator adjusted their FAQ to indicate that some signal loss may be apparent, but if you like the look then you'll just take that for granted.
Another project was a capacitive touch stylus for tablets - it initially shipped with a nib that didn't work very well for some people. Did it fail? Largely, no. Why? Because the project creator got right on top of it, had better nibs made, and sent those out at no cost on request.
In this particular project, the Eyez, it really depends on whether or not you believe the project creators' updates (and their lack of updates for a long time does not instill confidence), and whether or not the product is quickly becoming irrelevant ('spy' glasses are available on ebay for cheap - they just generally don't connect to your
Reply to self, would post anon if there weren't that annoying timer telling me it's only been 15 minutes since I last posted when I do so.
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IndieGoGo, another crowdfunding platform, does actually spell out the option of taking the project creator to court yourself:
http://support.indiegogo.com/entries/20501033-how-does-indiegogo-deal-with-fraudulent-campaigns
( emphasis mine )
So while most platforms (try to) stay away from legal responsibility, you may have recourse against the project creator directly - and you'd certainly do wise to check the terms of the crowdfunding platform of choice.
IANAL, but it seems to me that backers of a project that doesn't actually happen (not referring to your Musopen example, which is merely progressing slower than promised, in part due to expanded goals from its high funding) might have grounds for a breach-of-contract suit, and possibly outright fraud charges could be filed.
As part of the deal between and backer and the project, the backer is promised one of various rewards, typically including a copy of the finished work. If I fulfilled my side of the deal, but they didn't deliver the promised reward, that's breach. Although I'm sure there are terms in the Kickstarter agreement to prevent suits like this, the courts get to rule on whether those terms are enforceable. Similarly, if someone says that they're raising money to do one thing, then take the money and immediately do something entirely different with it (e.g. going on a tropical vacation), then they solicited the money under false pretenses, and that's fraud. In either case, the $5/10/20/50-level backers individually don't have a practical recourse to get their money back. But major backers or backers as a class might in fact be able to take legal action.
http://alternatives.rzero.com/
Kickstarter and the like are not investment vehicles. They are supposed to be a fun way to give a few dollars of disposable income to an interesting project. If you are considering sending so much money that you start to worry it might vaporize, then stop and put that money into stocks, bonds, or canned goods.
If Slashdot were chemistry it would look like this:Cadaverine
I "invested" in ZionEyez, since it sounded like an interesting project, and something that I'd be pleased to see come to market. I use "invested" liberally here, since I don't for a second think that this gave me ownership in the project, or anything like that. Perhaps "gambling" would be a better term.
I gave my money to help a project get sufficient funding to go ahead. The "reward" level I paid for was listed as "You will receive the Eyez by ZionEyez HD video recording glasses with clear and shaded removable lenses" but I read this as being dependent on the project succeeding — if I don't receive the glasses, I'll be disappointed, but I wouldn't consider it a breach of contract. I expected the project to give it its best shot, and to put effort into attempting to succeed, rather than taking the money with no intention of creating the project, but it's inevitable that some projects will fail.
Whilst I'm disappointed that the project has been delayed quite considerably, and I'm mindful of the fact that I may never see the glasses, to me, this was an "investment" which did not materialise the way I had hoped rather than buying a product which was not delivered.
I feel particularly sorry for some of the feedback posted to the creator of the Hanfree project too...
First you won't and shouldn't get your money back, at least in my opinion. I get that you don't want to get caught up in the fraud side of things but that's just a risk that supporting people you don't personally know (and sometimes people you do) carries. The whole point of investing is to spread the risk of failure out to as many people as possible while also spreading the rewards of success out.
The real question to me is how to make the system better and discourage the bad actors. I believe there needs to be some sort of reputation management features added to things like Kickstarter. First there should be a mechanism to identify users of the service (maybe a premium service that certifies identities of those asking for money). Verified accounts should carry more clout and be safer investments than unverified accounts. There should also be a reputation/feedback system that lets you know the success rates, communication frequency, general satisfaction of investors, etc. associated with a verified account on past projects. The more information that is out there and the more there is a threat of loosing something valuable (i.e. verified status and reputation) the more likely that the bad actors will be the anomolies not the rule.
None of this fixes the problem but it gradually makes things better which is all you can really achieve when you're trying to manage risks.
Hmmm... prizes have been in for a bit of criticism as effectively slave labour. Get 100 teams coding a solution to your program/drafting an advertising campaign/designing your new corporate headquarters, and then pay one of them what would have been a living wage for 4 or 5 of them -- even 10, maybe-- and what looks like a major bonus to each and every one of them. In the end, the backer gets a better end product than it would have got if it had hired ten teams to start off with, and 99 teams go hungry.
Hardly a good way to build a stable economy.
Got them moderator blues I blieve I walk out the do', With these mod-points I been gettin', I 'most never post no mo'