Eh. It's not called Kickpurchase, it's called Kickfund. (Okay, this one was actually on Indiegogo.)
You want something guaranteed to ship perfectly? That's what Amazon is for. The point of Kickstarter and its ilk is that it is a risk – that's why it usually comes with lower prices and the ability to have it first.
When you buy on Kickstarter, you aren't preordering. You're crowdfunding something that doesn't exist yet. On the Diffusion of Innovation chart, you aren't an Early Adopter... you're an Innovator [1]. The creators put in time; you're putting in money. As long as there's no fraud, I think failures like this should be treated as an acceptable part of this new method of funding.
(That being said, two caveats: first is that failures like this might be acceptable but they're still bad for Kickstarter+Indiegogo, and second is that I'd be a lot less rational and forgiving if I had lost money on this)
> When you buy on Kickstarter, you aren't preordering.
Its a really big elephant being felt by blind men. So... no.
One very specific example of a kickstarter that I participated in was a board gaming project by DVG which is roughly their thousandth product shipped and specifically was the 6th expansion to their warfighter game series. In that line of business they have extreme front end expenses for printing and shipping, and in exchange for what boils down to preordering, you get a modest, fair discount.
Sure it as a product didn't exist other than in the minds of the producer and the artist team, but the odds of them failing were approximately zero assuming the economy doesn't implode or DVG himself get hit by a meteor. And there are risks, they have had massive shipping delays. However as you'd expect everything eventually showed up and looked as good as the last five expansions and the base set.
No one in the traditional gaming community found this saga terribly interesting or unusual... Given the lack of surprise, its highly likely that in areas outside this and the area in the article, there are other fields of endeavour that are running a boring pre-order operation.
Seriously, does anyone think anything can stop Jason Scott from directing tech documentaries? It takes forever, but aside from getting hit by a truck, its as sure as anything that "something" will be released sooner or later. I have some money in for the 6502 documentary and I'm just not worried.
Interestingly Amazon offers preorders. I've already pre-ordered cstross's new Laundry Files book which won't be released until mid next year. Nobody talks about amazon pre-orders, but I've done it before with no problem and I've never even heard rumors of a logistical fail. Perhaps the lack of failure makes them too boring to discuss in public. What can you say about Amazon preorders other than they work, which isn't good clickbait, compared to "many or most kickstarter projects crash n burn" which gets the clicks.
For an Amazon pre-order, you risk nothing. You aren't charged until/unless it ships and you get price-protection. Neither of those is true for the crowd-funding world.
I never see the articles about how investors need to be more careful, because some of the companies they're investing in are failing. That's sort of the point of the platform - I give you money for something that currently does not exist, and I get the chance to get that impossible thing if you're able to make it exist. Stop telling me to "be more careful", and acting like I'd be better served shopping at stores that don't fail to deliver. Stores don't sell maybe-dragonfly-robots.
Crowdfunded pre-order campaigns generally can't afford to cover any R&D work, and it's a miracle if they even cover actual one-time manufacturing setup costs plus the cost of the rewards -- let alone funding the engineering team through all this time.
The incentives are almost backwards: the earliest pre-order customers have come to expect the biggest discounts at a time when the per-unit costs are highest and the up-front investment is yet to be done. If product survival is really the goal, the price curve should probably go in the other direction: from high to low over the product lifecycle.
Manufacturing hardware is really, really hard, even for teams with experience. Super hard if your past experience was in shipping software, because you don't realize how easy you've had it!
(Disclosure: after a successful Kickstarter campaign, we shipped https://www.pantelligent.com/ to all our backers and were only a few weeks late from our original delivery estimate. Even for a team that's shipped HW and SW before, it was still very challenging. Most importantly, our backers are telling us that the product really delivers on the benefits of what we promised in the campaign -- and apparently that's a rare and noteworthy occurrence!)
This is just the latest example of how consumers need to be more careful with crowdfunding.
You know, while I've only contributed to one such, and only because I thought it ought to be done, I view these as wagers. If the project works out, great! If not, my monetary loss is calculated to not grieve me.
Meh. They definitely gave the appearance of having a working prototype with the crowd-funding for a more refined model. If you look at 3:15 in their video there's some footage of a prototype looking dragonfly actually flying. There are also several photos of the same on the page.
Most backers assumed smoothing those prototypes out for production was a reasonable endeavor. Unfortunately as the project's unfolded it became more and more clear that the group of people running it didn't really have the experience to deal with production even though they clearly had a product. I think a combination of wanting the product to be significantly better than their initial prototypes and a poor idea of how to deal with Indiegogo/Paypal/Factories/Production kind of doomed things. Likewise, they haven't been very smooth or fluent in terms of their communications with backers.
All that said, as a backer, I'm mostly disappointed they didn't have someone with more communications fluency and experience with manufacturing to run things, as I think that alone would have enabled the product to be a success. I'm not in a position where the money makes or breaks me and I tossed it away several years ago. Pointless to get too emotional about a sunk cost unless it comes out that there really has been some kind of gross mismanagement/negligence and not just some random grad-student types getting in way over their heads.
But incompetence is a risk when you throw money into a Kickstarter/Indiegogo-shaped hole that smells like interesting technology. If it's obsequious and insidious incompetence, lump them in with the hand-less criminals. If they gave it a good long try, had consistent updates, release project IP and open source software, well... That's what we're here for. To try and get ideas off the ground. You're going to lose money at some point in the process. I regularly throw money into all kinds of electronics-shaped holes on Kickstarter and Indiegogo. It happens when the stars don't align that I lose my money. But if they aren't criminals about it, well, shit happens.
shrug this is kind of in the same category as glowing plant - didn't really expect a usable end product but sounded like a cool longshot. I don't feel bad about my "lost" hundred bucks. It's the projects that fritter away the money that I feel bad about, but as long as a serious shot at it is taken it seems like the platform is working as intended.
Stories like this are going to kill the crowdfunded gadget market, and it's going to go the way of GroupOn as another mid-2010's Internet fad.
I would much rather pay 2x the price for a real product that has been shipped to stores and has a review, as opposed to a pre-order Kickstarter campaign. It's really interesting to me that based on a video, people are willing to drop hundreds of dollars on gadgets simply on trust.
Kickstarter or Indiegogo need to take more responsibility for these campaigns, otherwise they will find themselves dead in 5 years.
They need to:
1) Have the creators set the number of funders to a reasonable level. If you know how to build 100 devices, you don't know how to build 100,000 devices, it's an entirely skillset and price point.
2) Have the creators set an execution plan, where they need to his milestones with firm dates before money is released. Once it has been determined it hit a milestones, then the next round of funding gets sent to them. IF they miss a milestone, funders get the option of refunding the rest of their money back.
I think 2 would result in worse outcomes. The people getting partial refunds probably won't be happy. The people remaining will probably be disappointed as well as a run on refunds will probably kill any chance there was of delivery.
You're assuming that campaigns that can't hit their deadlines still result in products that please their customers. I'm assuming that if the campaigns can't hit their own deadlines that the end result will lead to disappointed end users anyway, either in no product, or a really crappy product. Better for them to give up and get their money back than lose everything.
The thing that galls me is that they massively exceeded their funding target, but still couldn't do anything.
What was their plan if they only hit their target?? They didn't have a product --- they had to do all this development. So if they only took in like 100k of the kickstarter, what were they going to do?
They totally misrepresented the status of the project. It's right and proper that Paypal and Indiegogo didn't immediately release all the funds to them. The project didn't say they needed those funds for development. Otherwise, how could the funding target have been 100k?
$99 for a robotic dragonfly is / was definitely a punt -- what gets me are people who price their campaign rewards effectively at the targeted retail price of the product, then don't deliver. That's not a wager, because you don't "win" if you get the product -- assuming it materialises, you could just buy it then, for the same "price". You can only come out even or lose.
Kickstarter is not a casino. The TOS requires companies to deliver. Those that don't open themselves to lawsuits. My recommendation to anybody who does a kickstarter is to price it at the retail price or even more if you're talking about limited or first run sales.
Not really. The original unrealistic TOS were amended a while back. Among the terms in the current TOS "they offer to return any remaining funds to backers who have not received their reward (in proportion to the amounts pledged), or else explain how those funds will be used to complete the project in some alternate form."
Yeah, but that's what Kickstarter decided to become at some point, they weren't always that way. I'm hoping that other crowdfunding platforms don't go this direction, and allow me to choose my risk without opening the creators up to lawsuits (which feels like the most un-Kickstarter thing ever).
I went to a special screening of Iron Sky. Some of the production of that was done in Australia. During the Q&A they were saying that due to Australian laws they can't do something like Kickstarter in Australia. If they took money to finance the film, the people giving the money would have been investors with rights. Basically a legal and logistical nightmare.
It looks like they had a functioning prototype at the 3:15 mark of their pitch video. (Obviously who knows - flight time might have been < 1 minute, impossible to land, etc., but it does look like they had something that flew.)
You want something guaranteed to ship perfectly? That's what Amazon is for. The point of Kickstarter and its ilk is that it is a risk – that's why it usually comes with lower prices and the ability to have it first.
When you buy on Kickstarter, you aren't preordering. You're crowdfunding something that doesn't exist yet. On the Diffusion of Innovation chart, you aren't an Early Adopter... you're an Innovator [1]. The creators put in time; you're putting in money. As long as there's no fraud, I think failures like this should be treated as an acceptable part of this new method of funding.
(That being said, two caveats: first is that failures like this might be acceptable but they're still bad for Kickstarter+Indiegogo, and second is that I'd be a lot less rational and forgiving if I had lost money on this)
[1] https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/4/45/DiffusionOfIn...