What's the deal here? I don't think their price points for something like this are unrealistic, especially in the volumes they are talking about. I guess we'll see when they release their board files. Another one bites the dust....
Just another reason that crowdfunding needs to be regulated. It's the wild west, and 20-something buffoons with orders of magnitude more confidence than experience are behaving cavalierly with other people's hard earned money. Reprehensible.
Just another reason that crowdfunding needs to be regulated. It's the wild west, and 20-something buffoons with orders of magnitude more confidence than experience are behaving cavalierly with other people's hard earned money. Reprehensible.
if there was 20+ people working there, I wonder what was the remaining 15 doing. One person for electronic hardware, one for mechanical engineering, one for software +
I think it'll only take a few more bad projects before people lose confidence in the platform... Just wonder which one it'll be...
I don't think the government needs to be involved. But I think the platforms should bear some responsibility for fully vetting the creators of projects.
Never going to happen.
The whole idea of KickStarter is exactly as the name suggests, to kick start new businesses.
If you limit it to people who already know how to do this and have a track record of success, then you wipe out 95% of kickstarter projects and essentially the entire concept along with it.
If you get $300k for free...why bother making a product?
Just another reason that crowdfunding needs to be regulated. It's the wild west, and 20-something buffoons with orders of magnitude more confidence than experience are behaving cavalierly with other people's hard earned money. Reprehensible.
Yet another example of "I made a bad decision based on bad information and lost money on it. Please Mr Government write some new laws to protect me from myself". Suckerbait will always find new suckers.
Just another reason that crowdfunding needs to be regulated. It's the wild west, and 20-something buffoons with orders of magnitude more confidence than experience are behaving cavalierly with other people's hard earned money. Reprehensible.Who could regulate and ONLY kill off dumb things? You would end up with all the genuine innovation of crowdfunded things being stifled along with the garbage.
It's not like inexperienced 20 somethings could get man to the moon or anything like that...
Base decisions on the merits of the individual projects not on whether or not the people involved are grey headed.
I don't think the government needs to be involved. But I think the platforms should bear some responsibility for fully vetting the creators of projects. And perhaps they should offer a form of "crowd funding insurance"
Just another reason that crowdfunding needs to be regulated.
I must say that I'm very disappointed. I backed this project after supporting the original triggertrap and assumed that the management had learned from their previous mistakes and experience. Apparently that is not the case. My read of the terms of service does suggest that a full refund is indeed due and I will be asking Kickstarter to make a formal decision on what type of refund is appropriate in this circumstance.
Kickstarter is built around minimizing that risk through all-or-nothing funding, which allows the collective voice of the people to decide which projects reach their goal. On our end, we review projects, uphold our rules (link to kickstarter.com/rules), practice careful governance, and use anti-fraud filtering. The foundation of the entire system, however, is the collective wisdom of the people who back projects.
I don't think the government needs to be involved. But I think the platforms should bear some responsibility for fully vetting the creators of projects. And perhaps they should offer a form of "crowd funding insurance"
Mandatory insurance is the best way, it creates a single party with a claim on the project starters (which keeps them honest) and with a monetary incentive to vet them beforehand (which keeps the crowd funding site honest).
...
Crowd funding is a new thing for everyone, they exist in a legal loophole between regulated investments and consumer protection laws. Outright fraud is obviously illegal, but the majority of business ventures fail, even if they are done with the best intention. The general public have no idea about viable business plans.
The problem is one of learning and perception. Eventually people will learn that crowdfunding is quite risky, and is effectively like gambling. Some good quotes from the comments:
...
Just another reason that crowdfunding needs to be regulated.
Why? Gambling, poker and stock markets still exist, It's just another way to make or lose money, depending on luck and expierience.
I'm sure some see it as placing a bet. I also think the 1,971 backers learnt something here, and aren't broke.
On another forum, there was a discussion of millennials, and how they are way overconfident and way underexperienced. I've seen that in my own line of work... 20-something people who have spent a year or two working somewhere and believe they are experts at developing products and running businesses.
Does anyone know if the lawsuits over failed projects have ever got any money back? Or is that just throwing good money after bad?
The bit i don't get is that if you have a genuinely commercially viable idea, why do you need crowd funding, and if it isn't commercially viable, how is it going to work just because it is crowd funded??
Civilized society works on trust, so it's important trust is maintained. If people can't play nice, then government will step in.
wait a minute ... if these blokes outsourced everything to the "real" people who actually designed more of it than they did ... then what have they been doing?
Some young people are cocky and overconfident. This is news? No, no, it isn't. That you think it is suggests your own experience, or your ability to learn from it is lacking.
Some older people thing that kids today are X & Y (where X & Y are unfavorable). Also not news.
While kickstarters like this seem like slow-motion trainwrecks, what's the harm, really? So, a bunch of people are out an average of, what $150 or so after refunds are paid out? Yeah, that sucks, and if it were me, I'd feel shitty about it, but, on the other hand, this is a tool for people doing high-speed photography, not exactly a cheap profession or a hobby. I doubt $150 is a very significant loss.
And lets compare kickstarter to some of the other things people spend their money on: Skying: I haven't been in quite a while, but I gather equipment still costs hundreds, lift tickets cost quite a bit, travel and lodging (if needed) add up, and there is always the risk that you'll injure yourself, that the snow will suck, or that the weather is too bad to ski.
This didn't seem like fraud or mania though, just too much foolishness, and to their credit, they finally figured out for themselves that it wasn't going to work, before they ran of money AND they decided to quit, rather than doubling down and refund the remaining funds.
Oh, and back to the topic of experience, or the lack of it. People learn as much from failed projects as successful ones, sometimes more. I don't have a problem with a world where people can raise modest amounts of money from a few thousand people and succeed or fail, and try again.
There's a common way of thinking that "ideas" are much more important than execution. If you have a brilliant idea you can just pay some techno-dweebs to do all the boring work of design, prototyping, testing and manufacturing (which of course is a purely mundane detail) while you pay them as little as possible and reap all the profits of your brilliance
One of the most shocking reality checks for would-be entrepreneurs when dealing with "real" investment capital is that their idea isn't worth shit. There are countless bitter self-titled 'entrepreneurs' out there who feel that the investment world failed them because it didn't recognize the brilliance of their idea and give them millions in VC money for a minority share in their greatness.
If you limit it to people who already know how to do this and have a track record of success, then you wipe out 95% of kickstarter projects and essentially the entire concept along with it.
Kickstarter makes it perfectly clear, legally it's a pre-order ...
There are also those ideas that are worth something. An investor wants to see xM$ in, 5xM$ out (at minimum). There are also truly worthless ideas, but there are also ideas in the 100k$ in, 250k$ out range. Worth of doing, but not with investors. Tough spot if you don't have the 100k and can't give guarantees to a bank. Crowdfunding works in this field. But...
People who already know how to do this and have a track record of success don't need kickstart, they either already have the money or can access cheaper funds. Therefore, kickstarter projects are by definition run by people who don't have the track record. Kickstarter doesn't make it clear enough that you are making a bet, not a pre-order.
The bit i don't get is that if you have a genuinely commercially viable idea, why do you need crowd funding, and if it isn't commercially viable, how is it going to work just because it is crowd funded??
The bit i don't get is that if you have a genuinely commercially viable idea, why do you need crowd funding, and if it isn't commercially viable, how is it going to work just because it is crowd funded??
The only reasons which make sense to me are:
a) a creator (and what a silly term that is!) has a product idea which has been prototyped and debugged and is ready to go into production, but the creator lacks the funds to start the production line (not independently wealthy, don't want to/can't max out credit cards, banks won't give a loan to someone without a track record, whatever), and
b) to gauge whether an idea which has been prototyped and debugged and is ready to go into production is viable. In other words, if nobody is interested in the product idea, the creator won't spend $50K and have boxes of unwanted things lying around the garage.
They should open source and publish whatever they've done to this point.
The funny thing is that in this case strapping some sensors on an Arduino would probably have been all they really need
They should open source and publish whatever they've done to this point.
STEP files are a bit lame. SolidWorks files are much more useful since minor changes will likely need to be made depending on how it is manufactured.
The bit i don't get is that if you have a genuinely commercially viable idea, why do you need crowd funding, and if it isn't commercially viable, how is it going to work just because it is crowd funded??
I've faced exactly that problem... demonstrated the first level of disclosure (and sometimes working prototypes) to 'interested' corporate parties - sometimes very substantial multi-nationals - and as soon as their legal / risk management people see it - I get a photocopied letter back that says -
"We do not accept or entertain unsolicited offers of intellectual property"
- i.e. we don't want to know what we don't know - in case we may have already been thinking about it already - but we don't know, so we can't look at what you're doing in case it overlaps what we may or may not be doing.
I think you missed the part where... I offer to present under an NDA etc - a working hardware prototype (or in the case of software a functional POC) for them to review as relevant/suitable to ...
buy outright
licence
take equity
... we never get to the offers, as they have no idea of the product capability!
The weirdest case I had was a multi-national auto component supplier actually went most of the way with me (almost a year of presentation, negotiation etc) and eventually they hit the same barrier! The car manufacturers wouldn't accept their presentation unless the car co had expressed a need for such a product development beforehand! it's just their protocol?!
I think you missed the part where... I offer to present under an NDA etc - a working hardware prototype (or in the case of software a functional POC) for them to review as relevant/suitable to ...
buy outright
licence
take equity
... we never get to the offers, as they have no idea of the product capability!
The weirdest case I had was a multi-national auto component supplier actually went most of the way with me (almost a year of presentation, negotiation etc) and eventually they hit the same barrier! The car manufacturers wouldn't accept their presentation unless the car co had expressed a need for such a product development beforehand! it's just their protocol?!
The weirdest case I had was a multi-national auto component supplier actually went most of the way with me (almost a year of presentation, negotiation etc) and eventually they hit the same barrier!
The developer of the failed Trigger Trap product was on a podcast explaining the whole saga and why it failed:
http://thisweekinphoto.com/triggertrap-saga-itl-07/
The developer of the failed Trigger Trap product was on a podcast explaining the whole saga and why it failed:
http://thisweekinphoto.com/triggertrap-saga-itl-07/Listening to that, it seems the fundamental problem was they had no in-house electronics people, and were relying entirely on a subcontractor who were either incompetent, or were cynically taking advantage of being given a woefully inadequate specification.
Both Triggertrap and ourselves were thrown a few curve balls during the development of Ada, the benefits of Kickstarter meant that Triggertrap could keep in contact with their customer base directly, but this did mean a change in dynamics. Triggertrap had a set of extremely complex specifications and expectations from their customers, so the race was certainly on to smooth any bumps in the road which appeared along the route to getting The Ada into its backer’s hands.
AFAICS the product was basically little more than a flexible timer with a few simple interfaces, and its own UI.
How they got to a $100 BOM and 1% of their intended battery life is beyond me.
It wasn't mentioned if they'd made good on their earlier promise to open-source everything.
Regardless of the actual detail - any company going into something like this without in-house electronics expertise, even if only to keep specs under control and realistic, is taking a colossal risk.
Considering how much they've watsed, hiring an engineer would have been small change.
Lesson 5: Get the right skills.
We thought we had all the skills we needed to deliver this project. We were incredibly wrong. As soon as the Kickstarter money hit our account, we should have hired an experienced hardware product manager.
Lesson 6: Don’t be naïve.
Towards the end of the project, we engaged an extremely experienced hardware project manager, both to discuss how things were looking, and to see if we could salvage the project.
To kick it off, I figured I’d ask him how we should have run this project. The challenge we set him: “If you have £300k to develop a consumer electronics product, how would you go about it?” He looked me straight in the eye, blinked twice, and said “I wouldn’t. Not with a budget of under £1m.”
In my experience, having in-house engineers is not necessarily an advantage, if you don't have the right management skills. It is easy for bad managers to indulge in feature creep, and the engineer usually feels obliged to accommodate, rather than say "no way, that was not in the original spec".
I did actually work for a start-up as the sole engineer (the rest marketing/management), and it was pretty hopeless. Requirements changing every day, no spec of any sort, completely ridiculous expectations of cost and timescale.