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Comment by nhangen | Hacker News Reader

I feel exactly the same way. I pay for Codeschool because I enjoy playing around with it, and would have assumed that my payments would be used to fund the development and advancement of their curriculum. To see this leaves me feeling soured on the whole thing.

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I feel the exact same way.

What's funny/weird about this sentiment is that if Envy Labs/Code School got $2mil+ in funding from an investor I would be totally cool with it and happy for them. The fact that they are crowdfunding while I am a paying customer just rubs me the wrong way.

ditto

Think it this way: crowdfunding the development of this new Code School project, YOU are the investor.

Does it really feel that bad?

Not really. You aren't able to make a return (exit or dividend) on future profits from such a course when sold to others after development is complete.

sponsorship !== investing

I'm a paying member and I have no problem with them also using a KickStarter for a special project. This is for several reasons. First, I'm not funding them, I'm paying for access to the videos. Second, I expect them to keep making web development vides, though if this stopped I wouldn't feel violated, since I'd still have access to the videos that are there. I would be disappointed and would re-evaluate whether I want to keep paying for them. Finally, this really is a special project, both in content and what's required to deliver it, and they talk about what they're using the money for in the video. I'm confident that videos unrelated to iOS will continue to be released as this is being worked on, just like they were while they developed the prototype.

The only downside I see is that a paying customer might have thought that $25/mo was getting them all CodeSchool had to offer, and now some people are paying $60 to fund the KickStarter and getting a shirt. To me that's because they misinterpreted what the $25/mo is for. It's really for something much simpler: unlimited access to all the Courses and Code TV.

We've gotten a couple of questions about this so far, and I just added an FAQ item in the Kickstarter project about this. Here is the answer:

Most of our courses do take a lot of time and money to build, and we've been able to fund those courses by charging money. But there is a much larger initial capital investment to build an iOS course like the one we want to build. We had a couple of different ideas on how to raise the money, from taking out a loan, to getting a more traditional VC or angel investment. We decided to try the Kickstarter approach so we could get funding from the people who would actually want the course.

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