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Comment by bdibs | Hacker News Reader

I understand the general consensus in this community will be one of "pro-business" (large corporations should crowdfund), but I'd like to share the contrary.

The whole purpose of crowdfunding is to hedge the financial risks of bringing a product to market. This is something that "3 college kids" should consider (and may even be necessary), but a business with hundreds of millions in revenue should be able to avoid for the consumer's sake.

Why should we, as the consumer, accept to pay for something before it's even made? If the product ends up being subpar, the company has nothing to lose, so what's their incentive to make a quality product?

I'm not coming from a legal standpoint, this is just my opinion, of course they can do whatever they want.

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I agree in general, if the product was going to be made anyway.

But one situation where crowd funding might be appropriate is where a product manager or developers can’t get budget to fund development. So unless a crowdfunding project is successful, the product will never get developed.

That may or may not be the case here, but in general I can see a few scenarios where crowdfunding in large companies might be appropriate as a way of seeing if a real market exists and gaining traction internally, prior to development.

That's a fair point of view.

But evidently, lots of people disagree with you and, and, for one reason or another, do want to pay for some products before they are made.

I'm sometimes one of them - I will pay for a prerelease. Sometimes it's to help (e.g. I'll buy books on preorder to help authors I like), sometimes it's to help get a product made, sometimes I get benefits (it costs less than it will later, at least supposedly).

Usually there's some type of incentive for customer to take this risk: you either get it cheaper or you get some extras or something. It's a gamble, but companies wouldn't be doing it if there was no customers interested in it, so obviously customers don't mind taking this risk.

> If the product ends up being subpar, the company has nothing to lose, so what's their incentive to make a quality product?

That's an interesting thought. Assuming that the company is already worth millions/billions of dollars, I wonder if it can give extra assurance of a money back guarantee to unhappy consumer backers. Especially if the company primarily intends to use crowdsourcing as a form of product validation.

There's also the risk of unhappy but influential backers going public about what they think. Crowdsourcing for big companies must not be as fun as your typical Kickstarter campaign!

I disagree. It's a tool like any other and good tools have multiple applications. If there's no reason it can't do both other than falsely imposed limitations that's a bad tool. The best tools have many uses.

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