Kickstarter Technology Projects Ship

An anonymous reader writes "Shocking Kickstarter news this morning, not only did I actually I receive my Brydge this morning, but a Kickstarter software project shipped on time! Connectify Dispatch, the load balancing software for Windows, was released today as well. Perhaps the Kickstarter model of funding technology is not nearly as doomed as some naysayers here would have it. Why are so many here hostile to crowdsourcing? Shouldn't we be glad to have Venture Capitalists cut out of the loop so that companies actually listen to us?"

Comments

Who Has Had Bad Experiences with Kickstarter?

[eldavojohn]

Shipped/Unshipped for Me People who say that Kickstarter is rife with scams might be right about a few projects but I think that the people who operate that site keep it pretty legit. My own personal history wtih the site (and, yeah, I realize this is going to reveal a lot about me but I don't really care) is that I have received:

• Nature of Code book PDFs (plan on doing a review of it after holidays)
• Two old forgotten sci-fi books (from Singularity & Co)
• Three separate physical magazines on special interests
• Four CD albums by new artists
• 20 of the same Rmashackle Glory vinyl album (don't ask)
• Several T-shirts like fangamer's kickstarter
• FTL (RTS game)

Now, that said, I'm still waiting on three or four video games to be released like Grandroids, NASA's Astronaut game, Kitaru and, of course, the OUYA console. I'm also waiting on a movie that is well overdue (although the dude running it is very responsive and was clearly in over his head), playing cards, a new cartoon from Ren & Stimpy's creator, a board game called "The New Science" (which I might also try to review for Slashdot) and another DVD/CD combo and T-shirt which were very recent so it's not a big deal.

Now, I've only put money in here that I didn't really care about. Yeah, it adds up to real cash but I've been quite happy with all of the things I've gotten out of this and super excited about the future projects. I agreed that the facebook glasses sound like a scam but I was really disheartened when people called the OCULUS a scam. Nobody seems to be covering Zeyez's engineering updates and all the comments are just that it's still a scam and they want their money back.

So why is there there so much negativity associated with Kickstarter? My experience has been largely positive although I would have thought I would be seeing the NASA game sooner (the other funding didn't hit until November of 2012) and I thought I would be watching "Flood Tide" by now. Aside from that, my experience has been largely positive. Do people have negative stories where they've been screwed or cheated or lied to on Kickstarter?

Re:Who Has Had Bad Experiences with Kickstarter?

[Jiro]

I *still* do not understand what an Ouya is going to be good for that cannot be done by buying an Android tablet with an HDMI port.

My worry

[crazyjj]

I just worry that its increasing popularity is going to bring in the scammers and con men. Any venture where honesty is important and there is money to be made seems to ultimately attract them.

Re:My worry

[geekoid]

That's true in any field, and it will be dealt with.
That said, you aren't buying a product, you are inviting in a project and if the investment works, you get a product.

It's Important people remember that.

Re:My worry

[MrEricSir]

Code Hero was a scam from the start. The guy in charge of the project previously ran a scam where he sold corsets online, hapily taking money but failing to fill the actual orders.

Code Hero's description should have set off a major red flag. It's software designed to teach people to program -- and it's being developed in Unity? WTF? Reminds me of the old saying: "Those who can do; those who can't, teach."

It's sad to see people getting duped, but on the other hand they should have done their research first, or at least Googled the name of the guy asking for money.

The negativity surrounding KickStarter

[QuasiSteve]

The negativity surrounding KickStarter is based on a number of things.

1. project issues
a. There are scam projects. Period. Sometimes they're easily outed, other times you won't know it's a scam until it's well over with.
b. A lot of projects - especially in technology/design (and why these are 2 separate categories is beyond everyone - the overlap is ridiculous) - do not deliver on the estimated shipping date. KickStarter themselves acknowledged this and made everybody using those categories add a 'risks' explanation in which the project creator will explain what difficulties a project may face and how they believe they can overcome these difficulties.
c. Some projects, delivered on time or not, don't deliver what was promised or do deliver what was promised but then the 'thing' falls apart or is otherwise not particularly useful. Think an iPhone holder using a suction cup that fails to keep suction. A fire piston that leaks and fails to ignite the material (fabrication issue, manufacturer has taken responsibility after the creator informed them of the issue, so backers will get a good one). A colorful iDevice cable that is rendered obsolete by the new design (yes, they pledged for the old connector design... more than a year ago before anybody even knew Apple would change things around, but deliver is after that change.
d. Some projects just don't deliver. You already mentioned Zeyez.. that one remains to be seen. But then there's projects like Hanfree. Its creator eventually had to file for Chapter 7 bankruptcy after some backers went to the courts out of principle - the guy received tens of thousands of dollars, then apparently mismanaged those funds (what they were hoping to find out through the case).

And in 'd' lies a bigger issue, along with 'a'.
2. KickStarter's responsibility
a. KickStarter doesn't really vet projects. They have gotten better about this - demanding prototypes in design/technology and all that, but once live they are very hands-off.
b. If it turns out to be a scam, or the creator fails to deliver, KickStarter tells backers their issue is with the creator and they can go pursue legal matters but leave KickStarter out of it (in a recent case, KickStarter was actually named - this was covered at Slashdot).
c. KickStarter - and amazon - still take a chunk of the funds. On paper they're doing some tricky business where - supposedly - legally the funds they receive is separate from the funds pledged to the creator. But common sense says that KickStarter benefits financially - on an individual case - from scam projects. In the long run, it might hurt their platform which reduces revenue overall, but purely for an individual project.. they already got their chunk of money and are keeping it well out of the hands of backers seeking to get their money back.

C. Ambiguity of KickStarter as a platform
Simply put.. is KickStarter a (pre-order) store, or not?
Legally, it might be. Others believe you're investing (you're not - no dividends, shares, etc.). Others see it somewhere in between. This ambiguity - and with it more questions than answers, rights-wise.

Now, you asked about personal experiences.. pretty sure I posted about this before, but basically.. so far most projects have delivered, albeit late, and the delivered projects have been pretty much as expected or better.
That said, just today one of the projects I backed seems to have delivered the product to pre-sales outside of the KickStarter backers before the vast majority of KickStarter backers received the product themselves. That's disappointing. Of course the pre-sales people paid a good chunk more and didn't get to 'experience' the KickStarter development process, but it does feel like slighting the backers in a way. I would certainly recommend to any KickStarter project creator that they fulfill their KickStarter obligations first.

Re:The negativity surrounding KickStarter

[Anonymous Coward]

I think the only real problem is in your "C", and not through any fault of Kickstarter's. I'm not sure when people lost all their brain cells, but it has always been a crowdfunding site, not a store.

I don't know about everyone else, but to me that says, "You're funding a proposed project. That means it may fail. Do not expect to donate $5 and get the cure for cancer shipped to your doorstep by 3pm tomorrow. Make good decisions with your money." And for those that are too dense to infer that, Kickstarter spells it out.

But as with most things, people just up-and-decide that they want goodies without risk. And that's not to say Kickstarter shouldn't police (as best they can) for outright scams... but there's no logical reason they should be on the hook for failed or behind-schedule projects.

All of this throws all the issues surrounding crowdfunding for equity into sharp relief. You'd think people would understand that "risk" means "might not be good for you". Unfortunately it sometimes looks like people really do want to be protected from themselves.

Re:The negativity surrounding KickStarter

[LordLucless]

I called Kickstarter on my blog (I know, I'm going to start calling myself a futurist soon). When Kickstarter popped up, it was almost exactly as I'd thought of it, with one key difference - and I think they're really going to have to address that difference as investment ramps up and confidence in their brand name becomes more important.

In my model, I assumed that the crowd-sourcing service would also act as escrow - that they'd release funds as-needed to projects, instead of handing it over in one lump sum. The project owner would have to specify milestones and demonstrate completion before they could access the rest of the cash. Now, obviously, with small projects gaining only a couple of grand, that's probably not going to fly, but with million-dollar projects becoming ever more common, I think either Kickstarter is going to have to start adopting that sort of model, or someone else will, and will eat their lunch.

Re:The negativity surrounding KickStarter

[QuasiSteve]

Dangit AC, I had two "C"s - which one are you referring to? ;)

I think you meant 2c, though, from the "there's no logical reason they should be on the hook for failed or behind-schedule projects".

That depends on how you look at it (though, legally, it doesn't depend on that at all, of course).

If you consider KickStarter to be a store with pre-sales (and for some projects this is actually pretty close to the truth as they have finished products but need to bump up to mass production, for example), then you pay that store $N, of which the store itself will take $x and the creator gets $y.
So time goes by and it turns out that the manufacturer the store was supposed to get the product from, fails to deliver. In any normal store, you wouldn't have to go to the manufacturer and demand $y back from them; you go to the store and demand $N.

KickStarter, however, likes to explain it as if they were, let's say, a marketplace owner. They just lease lots to stand holders asking 10% of their revenue from the market, and your business is purely with them. So when you give money, all of that money goes to the stand holder, and that stand holder pays the marketplace owner the lease money. So if the stand holder doesn't deliver, your beef is purely with them.

This is actually reflected in the Amazon payment processes; it suggests that the project creator (the stand holder) got all the money.
( source: http://www.kickstarter.com/blog/accountability-on-kickstarter#comments )
Yet the project creator does not, in fact, get all the money. They get the money minus the chunk KickStarter and Amazon get.

So who are you really paying - the stand holder, or the market owner? And if the latter, why shouldn't they be on the hook for the full amount?

KickStarter would benefit greatly from greater transparency on this matter.

It would also benefit greatly from making S&H costs for projects easier and clearer (I and others have pointed out solutions many times - but project creators are still stuck having to spell out to backers that they need to manually add S&H costs to pledges if they're international/etc. ) That's another topic, but it goes to show that KickStarter is, on these matters, very confusing through - absolutely - KickStarter's own fault.

The problem with being open about funding...

[Lord_of_the_nerf]

I'm waiting for venture capital to start cherry picking ideas from Kickstarter and racing them to market. Kickstarter is almost like free market research.

Sure, a Kickstarter project might engender loyalty, but how long will that last after Kickstarter projects get a reputation for late delivery and failure?

Re:The problem with being open about funding...

[LordLucless]

Most projects when they list on Kickstarter are already well advanced. Depending on the type of project, they've probably already made pilots/mockups/prototypes, done their own market research, looked into manufacturing costs, etc. There's also not enough datra released on a Kickstarter prospectus to really give anyone else a really big edge.

People with big funding wouldn't race to market anyway - they'd clone the project after it's released, then out-market the original.

Wait, what?

[tgd]

Why would a data set of three have any statistical relevance out of a set of 50,000?

Oh yeah, it doesn't. But congrats on avoiding being scammed.

Re:Wait, what?

[QuasiSteve]

Perhaps this is more to your liking?
http://www.appsblogger.com/behind-kickstarter-crowdfunding-stats/

It doesn't state anything about scams - in part because it's difficult to determine if something is a scam (never intended to deliver) or the project just failed (intended to deliver, but couldn't, because [reason]).

The big ones relevant here:

Only 25% of projects delivered on time!
According to Prof. Mollickâ(TM)s model, after 8 months of delay, 75% of finished products (as opposed to give-aways like t-shirts) will have been delivered.

Re:Kickstarters Aren't Venture Capitalists

[LordLucless]

"Shouldn't we be glad to have Venture Capitalists cut out of the loop so that companies actually listen to us?"

They aren't the same, but they don't have to be for that statement to be true. Kickstarter projects do have to listen to backers to some degree, or they won't get them. Now, there's a lot less control than the VC relationship, but there's also a lot less commitment from the backer too. My interest in this whole model is it's potential long-term effect on copyright issues - if creators are paid for their work before it's produced, then copyright as a model for providing income starts to become unnecessary.

Note to editors

[wonkey_monkey]

Kickstarter Technology Projects Ship

Try not to use words in a context that is ambiguous as to whether it's a noun or a verb. I thought someone had created a system that could generate holograms of sea-going vessels.

Also, is this a story, or was the submitter just unable to fit it into 140 characters for Twitter?

Re:Furries are ahead of the curve

[Seumas]

That is similar (but not identical) to an idea I've batted around for the better part of a decade:

Bounty-Porn.

The public determines who it would like to see do hard core porn and pools all their money. Then a representative approaches the people the public wants to see do porn and offers them the ridiculous amount of money in exchange for doing it and the directors and producers and distributors take a small cut off the top.

Think of it. If every person who wants to see Scarlet Johansen do porn chipped in ten bucks, it might be hard to turn down that half billion dollars for a few days of work. :)

Teensy 3.0 shipped on time

[pjrc]

My own Kickstarter project, used to launch Teensy 3.0 (a low-cost Arduino compatible board with a 32 bit ARM chip), shipped on time.

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/paulstoffregen/teensy-30-32-bit-arm-cortex-m4-usable-in-arduino-a

We had 2 levels of rewards shipping, half within 2 weeks, the other half the next month. We did end up shipping the last several September rewards on October 1st, so technically we slipped 1 day for small group of rewards. Otherwise, all the September rewards actually shipped in September, and the rest shipped before the end of October.

Of course, a tiny number of backers didn't respond with their address or had other logistical problems with their info. Most of those shipped late, but even then, we resolved nearly all of them in October.

Re:Teensy 3.0 shipped on time

[Jarik C-Bol]

I think this is an excellent example of the difference between a good kickstarter campaign, and a bad one. This guy with his Teensy3 had developed a product, finished the design, and basically knew what needed to happen; cash to mass produce a working product. In short, the ideal kickstarter project. This is what people need to look for if they are going to fund projects, vs funding people who get on kickstarter and say something like 'I have this fantastic plan for a revolutionary new display made of lasers and unicorn dust! I just need a quarter million dollars to finalize the technology!"
of course, its generally a lot more subtle than that, but my point is, people who are at the final stages of bringing a product to market are going to be far better choice than the people who have some vague idea of glorious technology 'if only there was money'.