Show HN: We open sourced Lockitron's crowdfunding app | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: We open sourced Lockitron's crowdfunding app

selfstarter.us

463 pointsccamrobertson74 comments

Outstanding. I was going to try to contact you privately and beg for advice on how to run something similar.

My hats so far off to you guys, it's on the floor in front of me. Can't wait for my Lockitron to arrive.

Thank you! We are no PR experts, this took on a life of its own.

Awesome idea. You should consider adopting http://freedomsponsors.org and http://gittip.com as crowdfunding platforms for that - it just makes sense, recursively so. :-)

When they mentioned that they would open source their code, I started looking at payment gateways that did cool things. Here's my research so far: http://www.geekphd.com/lockitron-selfstarter-us-payment-gate...

Thank you for doing the leg work with this. I think that anyone who wants to use this needs to look at payments very carefully so as not to run the risk of rampant chargebacks or getting shut down by your processor.

This could start a trend towards moving away from Kickstarter. So far, the more famous projects that have pursued funding from a similar model without using Kickstarter itself (e.g. Lockitron, App.net) have done so out of necessity – they weren't allowed to use the Kickstarter platform.

But if people keep succeeding without being hosted on Kickstarter itself, that 5% fee might look more and more unattractive to people starting large projects. How much value does being on Kickstarter really add to your project, and how much is simply due to the brilliant fundraising model?

I am currently running a Kickstarter campaign and I must say that this is far from being a trend. The run away success campaigns have a track record and a following, which is leveraged to create the initial PR push. Without hitting 20% funding very early on the project has very little chance of succeeding (kickstarter stats).

A lot of our pledging happened from traffic coming directly from Kickstarter. My guess here is that people that come to Kickstarter have an intent to back and they become shoppers. User lands on one cool project, gets excited, browses, which leads to other projects being discovered and potentially backed as well.

At the end of the day, it's a funnel and your project has to be discovered in order for some users to convert to backers. It's also about connecting your project with the right audience. By cutting out Kickstarter you cut out a large portion of users that are more likely to convert, reducing chance of initial social sharing, crazy trends that create press stories, etc. This is why I don't think this is a trend.

I agree - I believe that hardware products that are accepted to Kickstarter should still leverage its inherent momentum. Based on reports from project creators, I have heard anywhere from 30-50% of traffic comes sources internal to Kickstarter.

Maybe the way around this with selfstarter is to have a simple directory page, anyone using the skeleton to create a project can submit their URL. That could be the agregator for those folks to browse through multiple projects. It would be another source of traffic for projects.

Like a Reddit for selfstarter projects, but the up votes are pledges.

Exactly. It's a reminder that Kickstarter does curate, and that nothing beats email. Getting featured in Kickstarter's weekly newsletter is probably the biggest boost, and then they'll feature you on the front page and/or category pages.

Considering all of the kickstarter things I have backed have come from my social graph, rather then kickstarter's discovery tools, I'm not sure it's discovery for the larger scale projects.

Curiously, I'm the reverse. I've found a lot more interesting kickstarters through the "your friend has kickstarted X" emails that kickstarter sends out than I have through normal social connections (e.g. twitter, IRC, etc).

Kickstarter has credibility though. I'm comfortable giving them my money, because I know I'll get it back if the project isn't funded.

Lockitron and App.net have their own credibility based on who they are and who has invested in them.

If I was to put up a SelfStarter page, there isn't anything to stop me from just taking everyone's money regardless of the funding status.

As someone with no particular experience other than backing a few Kickstarter projects, app.net, and Star Citizen, I like the uniform visual layout, structure (regular updates by email, money is always refunded if the project isn't funded), and regulation (no possibly misleading renderings of hardware) of Kickstarter: it increases my confidence in something inherently full of uncertainty. But I don't know how much of that is real benefit and how much is merely emotional. At least Kickstarter would have prevented robertsspaceindustries.com from falling over from load yesterday was harmful, and it wouldn't have allowed them to have "refund if not funded" unchecked by default...

As an insider, I'd be interested in talking to you more about that. Check my profile for contact info.

We're testing this now with our IgnitionDeck product. I'm not here to self-promote, but wanted to say that I do believe your assertion to be correct, at least in part.

I think eventually, people will raise money on as many sites as they can, similar to offering multiple payment methods.

I guess it depends on how viral and interesting your product offering is and how well you market it. Kickstarter has the benefit of a large user base with lots of traffic. Though as more projects are listed on KS it becomes harder to be found.

I've surveyed backers on Ouya (a runaway kickstarter game controller). They found out about it through precoverage on enthusiasts sites like gamitron. Very few of the backers came from Kickstarter itself. Lockitron did something very similar on techcrunch. That tells me that the key is promoting on enthusiast sites.

I'm curious to see what happens to Amazon FPS if these product based crowd-funding apps take off. We may be in for a bit of a Paypal style crackdown debacle.

I actually spoke with the Kickstarter guys back in 2009 when I was considering branching off their idea specifically for product based ideas, thinking that it could be "Amazon for stuff that doesn't exist yet".

We all agreed that the idea should happen, but Kickstarter didn't want to do it for two reasons:

1. Their goal is to help artists succeed. They're artists themselves, and the guy who started the site's been working on this for years. It means a lot to them to help the little one-man filmmakers.

2. The risk in having products that aren't delivered on time, in the same form as envisioned, or aren't even completed was just too high. They were terrified of having a backlash of backers who thought they were purchasing a product when in fact the transaction is structured as a donation.

The second one is what makes me worried. What happens if, worst case scenario, Pebble goes bankrupt without producing any items? Who takes the hit there? Is it Amazon, Pebble, Kickstarter, or the backers? It isn't clear yet because we haven't had a high-profile failure yet. But it's only a matter of time.

I'm surprised that the idea that anyone other than the backers are going to lose money keeps coming up; it's always looked pretty clear to me (even though I've gotten rewards delivered from around 30 out of 45 projects, mostly hardware, and the remaining ones are still pretty visible and active - past success doesn't feel like a guarantee on anyone's part, it's just pretty cool.) It's helped that I'm pretty well-qualified to judge these projects, though the only ones that looked unlikely to actually deliver have been really obvious (the "projector" that was supposed to be something mini-maglite sized that plugged into an iPhone headphone jack comes to mind) so it's not like it's actually taken all that much effort :-)

It also seems like the small-donation structure should make it difficult for any individual to have cause for action; I see some of KickStarter's recent changes as not wanting to even get into that fight, but that's because even winning would be expensive (and as has been suggested elsewhere in the thread, they're actually in it for the indie films.)

Or do you mean just the popularity risk, if enough projects don't deliver?

Eichin,

I’ve also backed quite a few Kickstarter design projects. The biggest risk backers face from Kickstarter design projects is personal safety, not failure to deliver. I’ve spent many years in new product development and the items delivered to me wouldn’t come close meeting even the most basic consumer safety codes. Plus I have no expectation that the project creators have any sort of product liability insurance.

That being said, I think the Selfstarter model can directly address that risk. Backers are dealing directly with project creators. The liability is clear. I expect that in the future, project creators will need to demonstrate product liability insurance coverage and that they will meet safety regulations. I hope to see that option somehow added to the Selfstarter code so that project creators can show they have insurance coverage and that they will meet safety standards.

It seems to be understood that crowdfunding only guarantees an attempt at realizing an idea. Backlash will only be warranted when crowdfunding is used for anything other than an honest attempt. I think reasonable people agree that money can't buy success, so failure is and will continue to be an accepted outcome.

There is a subtle but critically important difference between the Kickstarter offer and the Lockitron offer. With Kickstarter, the backers’ money is transferred to the project creators at the end of a successful campaign. With Lockitron, the backers money isn’t transferred until the product is ready to ship. That completely changes the risks. Lockitron can get bridge funding based on the committed orders, but the financial risk of failure is born by the lender, not the backers. That strikes me as a much better model than Kickstarter for new product inventions.

Looks like Kickstarter is going to end up being known as the company that (kick)started a phenomenon but didn't own it. They should have become a marketplace for projects, not an arbiter of what gets a shot and what doesn't.

Interestingly they don't seem to want to own the whole phenomenon. Which could be a good thing for what they want to achieve. They want to focus on creative projects over being a platform to fund anything or a store with little accountability.

The attention and revenues they would generate from having bigger and more successful products (revenue size wise) would benefit the smaller creative projects IMHO.

I think they thought this through. They probably realized they couldn't own all of crowd funding. Wouldn't it be weird seeing a "Fund my new convenience store" on kickstarter. Instead they do own creative projects, which is brilliant because that's where innovation happens.

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1877926324/plenty-a-groc...

It's not the only one...

Kickstarter's new policy is about them not wanting to act as an online store, not about taking away the "fund my new convenience store" vs creative projects. Its more about them not wanting to be used by anyone (creative projects included) as if they are there to basically be a selling platform. At least thats how I viewed it.

You're right about the new policy.

A Better example would have been.. http://gofundme.com/

Noble projects but the company isn't as successful with general crowdfunding vs kickstarters creative market.

true talk. Their failure to do that and trying to be a gate keeper and dictating what gets a shot might be their bane.

A couple months ago, I had added "kickstarter widget for start-up websites" to my list of ideas that I never do, but think are cool. This is a really wonderful open-source contribution, so hat tip!

We also ordered a Lockitron for our office already. We have keypads on our house, and we love them, and imagine Lokcitron will be even more love.

RE: your "kickstarter widget" idea, you may want to check out invested.in - they have a white label crowdfunding platform with that feature.

Disclaimer: it's my brother's company.

I still believe there is room for a proper platform to manage crowdfunding for hardware - maybe with a distributed option as well.

I agree - integrated design coordination, manufacturing and fulfillment is just waiting to happen.. and explode.

Maybe Amazon would be in the best position to do it.

Given the new Amazon Lending program, I'm guessing they're starting to move in that direction. It's for sellers buying inventory now, but Amazon has a lot of data about what sells that can help it determine what's a good risk for investment.

Cam, you rock.

Amazon has a "lending program"? Can you point to it. That's the magic that holds this together. Get prefunding that's only available when you are ready to ship. Secure a loan with the prefunding to go into production.

Amazon Lending through Amazon Capital Services

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000087239639044349330457803... (google "Small Businesses are Finding An Unlikely Banker: Amazon" to get around paywall)

Excellent. Thank you.

Spent the better part of an afternoon cloning the lockitron site a few days ago... you guys are fucking awesome. And I'm impatient. I'll share a python version when I have a chance to clean it up.

Thanks for being awesome.

Did you make any progress with python? I'm not much of a ruby guy.

Keep me posted. I have patent clients that will need it.

Many thanks for that!

i'm guessing this is in response to this: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4625371 in other words, OP delivered!

Something funny happened when I tried to share this on G+ (screenshot - http://goo.gl/VK404). Suggest the creators remove that hidden Latin div.

Is the "Fork Now" button supposed to go to a Lockitron preorder page?

EDIT>> Apparently only the second fork button does this...the one I clicked after reading the page content :)

Good catch!

I just pushed a fix.

Was working on something similar when this came out. https://github.com/crowdint/fundraiser

Great job by the Lockitron team.

Thanks for releasing this. The design works well for single-product offerings, though would need to be modified for pledge-reward setups.. not too hard to do though.

Thank you for this. This will be so helpful for my and many other startups. Interesting to note that Kickstarter has an Amazon FlexPay gem on their github.

It's very lean at this point, but hopefully it's a good starting point. Kickstarter was amazing for doing the heavy lifting and open sourcing it with their amazon_flex_pay gem.

Number of tests(Unit,Integration etc) is 0!

So submit a pull request. ;)

Damn it! You just ruined my startup weekend idea!

There's plenty left to do:

"We've kept Selfstarter really simple, but that also means that you should beef it up with your own authentication, administration and product management code."

I've had this idea for a while but lacked the skills to actually create it.

Glad someone went ahead and made it happen.

This is so awesome -- have the Kickstarter guys contacted you? I wonder how they take this, and what this means for the entire crowd-funding space for that matter, especially the smaller ones that don't have the network effects of Kickstarter.

I just did a project on Fundrazr last month. If only this was available then.. kudos!

This is really nice! If a project got accepted into Kickstarter, would it be better to stay with them or use this instead? The benefit of exposure to a large community as a Kickstarter project is pitted against the extra 5% that they take... How do you turn exposure into a monetary value for comparison? Pricing of ads maybe?

Can anybody share how it is different from other crowdfunding scripts like Agriya?

This is absolutely fantastic of you, guys to share an app like that. Most hardware makers cant make self-serving software like that, and you rock! I am sending the link to all of my engineering friends.

Thanks for open sourcing this. We are probably going to launch a crowdfunding campaign soon, and I am excited to check this out as an option.

Excellent! I was just about to look your site up again and see how you put your own crowdfunding project together.

This is perfect! Thanks!

It looks this way without flash installed — http://imgur.com/zcPSG

I am a hardcore rails guy, but for some reason using sinatra for this app, would be a better option.

Awesome work, guys! Thanks for sharing. I wish you went with my suggestion for bootstarter.js...

Best idea ever! Great job to all involved - wonder how Kickstarter is going to take this?

This is how it should be. Most of the kickstarter projects get funded after doing lot of promotions and leveraging founders's own social network. Kickstarter taking % cut of the fund is completely unnecessary in many situations. They do provide some kind of project validation which is important in high-risk projects.

Nicely done guys. Someone fucked with the wrong hackers.

This is awesome thanks for making this open source.

Nice job guys! This is pretty awesome stuff.

Thanks for sharing this with the community!

i'm loving it

Really admire it! keep up sharing

Reply on news.ycombinator.com