Is it the end of Tindie Fundraisers?

[fenclu]

I'm a couple of months away from putting my product on Tindie. Since I'm on an INCREDIBLY tight budget I can't really afford to take the risk of putting 250 USD into my project. I decided to go with the Tindie Fundraiser - much simpler than a real crowdfunding campaign and seems to work pretty well. Perfect.

So, yesterday I asked Tindie a random question about the fundraisers at Twitter. Their response ends with the words "However we are sunsetting fundraisers today". WTF?

And that's it. I asked them for more details but they didn't respond. Now, I might just be an idiot and have misunderstood their tweet (ya know, I'm not a native English speaker). If it's true, though, I'm in the deepest shit, because my project will probably just die.

It's funny, cause that tweet was the only place I found this information. It's not mentioned anywhere else.

Here's the tweet: https://twitter.com/tindie/status/420332176484229120

[Lurch]

I speak English, due mainly to me being English, and I have absolutely no idea what they mean either.

[madworm]

Seems fundraisers have been "put to sleep". At least I can't create any new ones.

[mrflibble]

I speak English, due mainly to me being English, and I have absolutely no idea what they mean either.

Sunsetting sounds like something they would learn at the Euphemistic Management Resort.

[fenclu]

Am I the only one that thinks this is a little suspicious? Given that it's not just a misunderstanding, they seem oddly quiet about it. They keep announcing all these discounts, while not mentioning the end of their big feature.

[Len]

They keep announcing all these discounts, while not mentioning the end of their big feature.

Yep, that's called "marketing". You don't expect them to advertise that they're making their product worse, do you?

[gxti]

Am I the only one that thinks this is a little suspicious? Given that it's not just a misunderstanding, they seem oddly quiet about it. They keep announcing all these discounts, while not mentioning the end of their big feature.

It was literally announced in the same email as the discount you're talking about.

In that spirit and to follow our new terms, we will be retiring Fundraisers in two weeks. All existing fundraisers will be able to run their course, but we will be deactivating new fundraisers today. You can still create products & accept preorders - just set the number in stock as 0 & check the box for backorders. The reason for this change is we must focus on what we can be the best at, and crowd funding ended up not being one of those things.

Again, we apologize for not handling the fee change appropriately. By setting the January fee to 0%, we hope that makes things right. Internally we have already taken the steps to ensure a situation like this doesn’t happen again. We are living by these values and are wildly excited about the year ahead.

Personally, while it's nice to say nobody should ever remove features, I think it's a reasonable decision. Trying to be everything to everybody is not a path to success.

[fenclu]

Ah crap. I do subscribe to the newsletter, however that e-mail ended up in the spam folder. Gotta love the Google spam filter.

[headroom]

I am selling my own LED drivers on Tindie. I initially intended to do this as a fundraiser as well to mitigate financial risk. After long consideration and watching what is sold on Tindie I decided that it would likely not work too well.

Most of the stuff that is sold on Tindie are obviously not consumer end products but are the little things that make prototyping electronics easier and quicker. In that range a customer would not want to wait 3-4 weeks or months before they start their project.

If you're short on cash and need to rely on the money fundraiser to pay for materials then they'd have to wait many weeks before receiving their orders. That form of patience is relatively rare these days, particularly in electronics. An order from Mouser or any other of the big three her in the US rarely takes more than 3-4 days to arrive at my door.

That is also likely the reason that they stopped the Fundraisers. They've done this before temporarily BTW.

[PartFusion]

I sell a few products on Tindie too.  I think the workaround you might try, is to use back orders.

Create the new product, set your stock level to zero and enable back orders, then you have 90 days to fill the orders.  The customer will only be billed when your nearly ready to ship the orders.

We also have a new discussion forum for sellears on reddit, http://www.reddit.com/r/Tindie_Sellers/ if you have more questions.