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Comment by designium | Hacker News Reader

I am amazed that the founder didn't plan the exact cost of each unit during the kickstarter phase and I'm even more amazed that people are so careless to put money in projects with no clear plan and cost figured out.

Please send me some money now for my virtual cat project. I just need to raise $100MM. I promise it will deliver!!! =<O.0>=

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I have a family member who knows the founders and apparently they're completely nontechnical "idea guys" who have a trail of shitty projects like this and have already moved on to other projects. So it's not that surprising to me.

This isn't an "everyday joe" who loved camping and hit upon a neat cooler design...

He had been working to perfect his pitch on all sorts of novelty items. Washington Post had an article on prior failures (https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-intersect/wp/2014/08...).

Professional crowd funder looks like his only skill.

The WashingtonPost article linked by another reply mentioned he was a sign welder at one time, and talked about him working in his workshop. Do you think the article overstates these things? It seems like he has at least some hard skills.

It said in his part time he welded, it never said he did it as a career.

In my spare time I engineer electronic devices, fabricate parts, enclosures, mounts and simple machinery, manage data networks, and perform landscape and automotive maintenance. And you'd be an idiot if you hired me to do any of those things professionally.

I'd imagine a large amount of kickstarters don't have BOM/Exact cost of products when they launch kickstarters.

Which makes it additionally funny when this guy actually has a prototype which in an unscalable way costed <x> $. Simple depreciation would put it at an order of magnitude higher price for early, mid scale production. That's per unit.

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