Kickstarter mini drone kicked out | Hacker News Reader

Kickstarter mini drone kicked out

bbc.co.uk

7 pointsoinkgrr7 comments

One thing that consistently strikes me as a problem with Kickstarter is that the investment is open ended. In this case, they received 15x the funding they were initially asking for. In some ways, this is good (it spreads your NRCs) but it also can lead to the scope of a manufacturing project dramatically increasing. Giving an inexperienced team millions of dollars and expecting their project to go smoothly is asking for trouble.

There is absolutely no proof the product they advertised ever existed, there was never a single prototype made. So yeah cost of manufacturing is tricky, but for that you need something to manufacture at first place. This stuff never flied .

Edit : the sub mysteriously 'disappeared' from HN's homepage ...

That's not a problem with Kickstarter so much as using Kickstarter as a pre-order system by having the product output be the main backer reward.

The worst bit here is the lack of communication.

"Everything's fine. Almost there. All on track. Any minute now. You're getting nothing."

As someone who's backed plenty of projects, I'd much rather have clear, honest, communication than pretending that everything is fine up until the day the project goes bust.

As it is, I have no idea if this project was inches away and then ran out of cash, or if they never produced anything usable and have been smokescreening the whole way.

"'No more Kickstarter for me. Willing to pay more after the product hits the shelves,' wrote another."

Despite several fairly high-profile Kickstarter's that did not deliver, this line still seems to come out after new failure. I wonder if Kickstarter needs to do more to explain what a donation is and is not. Or if, given the number of people backing Kickstarter projects, there are just always going to be backers who don't understand the funding model.

Part of it is the dream, that new startup type euphoria and adrenaline you get, despite previous failures it seems like anything is possible. The buyers get that too. I don't think more fine print would make a difference.

Now what might make a difference would be if Kickstarter had coaches that could coach the project teams up and then maybe give their own feedback. Perhaps less granular time lines unless they are coach assisted timelines.

There are some definite patterns, overly aggressive timelines to raise funds, underfunding, overly aggressive responses to over funding. When dates slip, the community of backers turns nasty pretty quickly, when things become challenging the communication drops which further increases the nastiness. If not a coach, perhaps a group of five independent consultants from that field could provide their opinions or something, there would be some challenges to keeping it fair.

It is insanely frustrating when you've given someone some money and you don't hear anything at all and the project is already 6 months to a year later than their initial projections, it doesn't seem that unusual on Kickstarter or indigogo

You hand the company money, you get stuff for it.

And for most kickstarters, that's exactly how it works, and it's fine. You're paying for something that's basically done, and just needs the cash up front to pay for production.

It's only really in tech that there's a problem.

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