Why kickstarter doesnt work

Diving into the comments will often help as well. Kickstarter has public comments, and enthusiast sub-reddits, forums, and sites will often be the first to flag these issues. But we have noticed some trends that tend to disappoint.

Is it another smartwatch? Though there have been notable successes like the Pebble both IndieGoGo and Kickstarter are built on a cemetery of smartwatches that have failed to ship entirely or functioned abysmally. Even major electronics companies have trouble getting it right , let alone crowdfunded startups like the aforementioned Kreyos Meteor, as well as the Buddy , Neptune Pine , Leikr , and Agent. And these smart devices often have major flaws, like when a service closes or is bought , vulnerability to hackers , and breaking for nonsensical reasons.

There are exceptions, but there is always a risk. Why is there potentially more creativity than ever but fewer projects on Kickstarter? You see people doing drills around their creative work, like deepening their craft and things like that. Are you looking for alternative ways to make money? And what the pandemic really put into focus for us was how resilient to shocks we might be as a business, and that we have to do more to make sure that the platform remains kind of available and nimble.

The second is actually just making sure that we are out there helping the projects that are coming to our platform and showing that that support exists. How could you help backers find projects that are most interesting to them?

Would it be a change to your algorithms? The other thing we spent a lot of time working on over the last year was our recommendation engine. Are you focusing on keeping people on the platform or finding new backers? I think you have to have both. The more people that can understand the value of creative work, and the value of having these projects be out in the world and the immense contribution that those make to society, the better.

And so the opportunity here, I think, is to find the right balance of new backers and repeat backers. Now looking forward, assuming the pandemic wanes and the world starts to somewhat go back to normal, would you rehire for the roles that you laid off?

With this, what we did — and as I kind of mentioned how we can look at the business and make sure that the platform is long-term and sustainable — what we did in this moment was actually try to set the business off with the structure that it needs to kind of go forward. My interest is that we really can make as much value and impact as we can with the company as it is.

What teams did you cut and which did you keep for the future of the company? Did you keep customer support representatives, engineers, or how did you prioritize roles? I sense that there is something else behind it, and I would not be surprise if its the fact that you can actually make much more money than you really need….

And last note. The open-source system for crowdfunding is quite nice, but at the same time it is yet another cancer for web. It will have exactly same effect on internet as had last year boom of discount sites systems like Groupon. Crowdfunding is an amazing idea, unfortunately due to article like this and open source half-baked solutions like selfstart. I guess good that we are launching our campaign within a month :.

The founders have creative backgrounds. Our experience is part of a trend for hardware companies to move away from Kickstarter and host their own campaigns. What that model looks like is still up for discussion.

I look forward to seeing how it unfolds in Best of luck with your campaign! We had a similar experience. Though we were not rejected, we were turned off by the application process. I like the idea of an independent platform like Ignition Deck, which is especially attractive as I contemplate raising 10x or more in future crowdfunding campaigns.

Very neat project, and congrats on your success. Hosting I guess is what it comes down to. But as long as one has the capacity to deal with a lot of a sudden surge of traffic, something like Ignition Deck is a perfectly acceptable substitute it seems. Or am I missing some other benefit of a third-party crowdfunding portal? Hosting helps. Name recognition is another. Right now KS is cool and hip.

Those are two areas I do think someone needs to address, and quickly. Having worked with the kind of indie companies that innovate hardware for the last four years, I know that the vast majority of them lack meaningful marketing expertise. Their independent campaigns would be doomed to failure. Aggregating demand is the whole point of these funding platforms…. The natural evolution in the space is simply for IndieGogo, CircleUp, RocketHub or other platforms to sweep up the product hacker population.

We are seeing a record number of patents over the last two years. Access to technologies like 3-D printing means they are only going to increase. But they will need funding. What really interests me are the businesses that are forming to respond to all these new products and emerging companies.

Getting the product into initial production is hard, but making a business of it is much much harder. THAT is where really interesting opportunity exists…. That people succeed on Kickstarter MUCH more by marketing over by delivering the actual product is increasingly a problem for Kickstarter.

The most interesting aspect here is the evolution of crowdsourcing. Crowdsourcing is common now. As of September , only products had shipped. Sometimes Kickstarter and Indiegogo projects fail. Pledging money towards a project is not a guarantee that the project will be fulfilled as promised. Kickstarter changed its terms of service last October to give project creators a way out of fulfilling their obligations as long as certain criteria had been meet including posting a report showing how funds were used and stating what is preventing the project from finishing as planned.

But that terms of use only applies to project that launched after October 17, If neither conditions are met, backers have the right to sue the creator, according to a conversation I had with a Kickstarter representative.