Rejected by Kickstarter? 'Roll your own' with Selfstarter instead | Hacker News Reader

Rejected by Kickstarter? 'Roll your own' with Selfstarter instead

pcworld.com

56 pointsJarred32 comments

I love what Lockitron did. I'm sure the dismay of getting rejected by Kickstarter drove them to open-source their work, and they did a great job. They put a lot more work into open-sourcing their efforts than I've seen from many (any?) start-ups. It feels very polished.

Sucks for Kickstarter though, they picked the wrong couple of folks to reject and now the barrier to just rolling your own has become infintely lower. If you're launching a decent-size product Kickstarter is starting to look worse and worse

Why even try to get them to accept you, having to worry about getting the rug pulled out from under your project just a couple hours before you reach the funding deadline to then pay a 8-10% fee? (5% + 3-5% to Amazon)

I'm sure the folks at Kickstarter HQ are worried about this development, maybe their rigid product vision will wind up biting them in the ass.

Why would they be worried? Rolling your own Kickstarter has many issues that Kickstarter deals with, scalability, payment processing, there's all manner of things. Sure, if you really care so much about that 5% that you're willing to dump all the advantages of Kickstarter then you'll get to save 5%, but do you think kickstarter are surprised that people are cloning the idea for their own usage?

If you're a project creator, let's say you're Lockitron and you don't have any web developers on staff, do you try and hire someone or get a friend on board to try and manage a website that could, if the project blows up, suffer from a metric fuckton of traffic, traffic that lots of websites cannot handle? Or do you say "eh, we'll sacrifice the 5% for the stability and branding of Kickstarter"?

If your website goes down for 24 hours because you can't cope with the traffic and your developers are inexperienced you could lose a lot of money, it can be make or break for projects that get media coverage. Who's going to put money into a project that can't even keep a website online?

Then there's the fact that there are dozens of Kickstarter alternatives out there already, with lower fees and other advantages, like no project limits. Why aren't Kickstarter crying themselves to sleep over that?

I really doubt Kickstarter have anything other than "heh" to say about this. Hell, they might even gain from this because people will develop new ideas that Kickstarter can fold into their product.

Kickstarter dumps basically all of the costs of payment processing onto whoever's launching the product, though. Amazon's payment processing fees, chargeback costs, etc are all paid from the project's portion of the money, and they also have to have a US bank account to deposit the money in.

I have no sympathy for Kickstarter. Their criteria for submissions can be very inconsistent.

couldn't agree more. I don't understand why mega productions (in the scheme of things) that are effectively pre-orders as Project Eternity are OK while other categories as home improvement or fitness gadgets are shunned upon. There is a complete lack of transparency & coherence to Kickstarter's red lines. I understand that they see themselves as more of a substitute to the national endowment of arts than what effectively they are becoming, a crowd-funding VC (minus ceding equity or IP, even better for the creators) , but they should just embrace where their backers are taking them. Whether it's funding arts or hardware projects, there is plenty of "Good" in removing friction from the entrepreneurial process. Both are noble missions & anything that enlarges the pool of backers to the site should be welcomed with both hands.

How about Kickstarter as a service [1] (forked off Selfstarter or similar code) itself? They could especially target Kickstarter rejects.

1. Useful for those who cannot (or are too lazy to) code - instant setup.

2. Cut out the middle man and save on the 5% (or $X) fee. Then again, you will still be paying a bit for the service.

Thoughts?

[1] Transparency which means you are responsible for the project and the provider has no legal obligation whatsoever.

https://www.outcrowding.com

Neat, just what I had in mind - powered by Stripe. Fee looks a bit steep though.

It's lower than Kickstarter's (the 5% mentioned doesn't include the Amazon processing fee, iirc).

As I mentioned in other thread, similar crowdfunding scripts are already there. For example http://labs.agriya.com/sfplatform

There is a very matured Ruby opensource project out there. https://github.com/danielweinmann/catarse and a support group https://groups.google.com/forum/?fromgroups#!forum/catarse-d...

AFAIK is has been the alternative solution for people who had very horrible experiences with Paypal's 2 month+ waiting period for transaction procession approvals or with paid scripts like Agriya SF where one has to pay no less than $1000 just to make subtle changes in code or wait for a month to get a response on their forum.

Then there is http://ignitiondeck.com/id/ and http://appstorm.com.br/wordpress-crowdfunding-template/ and http://siteorigin.com/wordpress-crowd-funding/ for wordpress

I don't know the recent progress in catarse, but when we checked last year, it was just a skeleton.

One company I know chose Agriya recently, as it's fairly easy to find programmers.. as it seems to be popular in this segment.. and money wasn't constraint for them as they planned to get big cut from campaign creators.

One of the biggest things that Kickstarter wanted to avoid was customers looking at projects and simply treating it like a store. So, they tried to prevent those types of projects from being created.

However, for some experienced people, that's exactly the experience they are trying to create, because it is what sells.

As a developer of a hardware project [1] that was funded on Kickstarter last year, I have to say that the real value is not the easily-reproduced payment infrastructure, but the eyeballs. A significant portion of our backers found the project through Kickstarter -- that's where people browse looking for something to spend money on.

I'm disappointed by Kickstarter's latest changes, however. What we did wouldn't be possible under the new rules.

[1] http://www.nonolithlabs.com/cee/

First of all good luck with you project looks like a beaut.

With regards to eyeballs. With eyeballs comes competition. I wonder if Lockitron would have as much success had they used Kickstarter.

This is a fascinating question. We optimized our design to be a "simpler" Kickstarter - however, I don't believe the changes were material enough to really shift things more that 5-10% in either direction.

While we did lose out on the internal momentum that Kickstarter brings to projects, most of the early press missed that fact that we weren't on Kickstarter. Some actually reported us as a Kickstarter project.

They totally would have. It's an exciting idea, well pitched. If they made it OFF kickstarter, they could have done at least as well ON kickstarter.

It would be interesting to see how this landscape evolves. I'm very familiar with the development, having consulted for multiple companies and I know that even for industry veterans, a product is very rarely on time and on budget. What does it mean for kickstarter projects, when the inventor is usually approaching a whole new field?

I'm thinking that there will be a lot more friction between makers and backers as time passes.

I'm sensing that KS is trying to sidestep the issue instead of confronting it. They are in an enviable position now, but it will take little bad press to dethrone them. I'm willing to bet that some major PR mess is approaching KS like a freight train, with all their flattering press and hugely overbacked projects. These will start slipping one by another, as most products do.

KS needs to preempt this by appointing governing/consulting entities to the major projects, making sure things are on time and well communicated to the backers. KS also has to find a milestone scheme where the money gets to the makers on an agreeable schedule, and should consider alternate funding methods like dollar matching with the project maker.

What they run now is a disaster waiting to happen.

"KS also has to find a milestone scheme where the money gets to the makers on an agreeable schedule"

not sure if KS wants to get into monitoring of project details and this idea is a hard one, because as organization making physical products you have big upfront expenses to pay like tooling and it requires the money early on.

It's important people realize that a lot of payment providers don't like accepting payments up front for something that does not yet exist. Paypal for instance clearly states that's not allowed.

While I think it's great that crowdfunding is very accessible as of lately, I think there's a risk here of people half assing things, not following through on their end with the product development, and it going south really quickly.

It's against most networks' (Visa, etc) TOS to charge before the goods are shipped, but you can usually word things in such a way to get around it, and it's usually not enforced strictly until it becomes a real problem. It's definitely higher risk than paid-on-shipment though.

However, you'll find that the Lockitron guys aren't charging cards until shipment, just getting the preapproval to do so when they're ready to ship. I suppose that means either they have some other funding or means to get it (with nearly $2m in "pledges", it shouldn't be hard to secure a loan for the first run if they need it if they don't want to go the VC route)

So this solves a slightly different problem than Kickstarter, since the people doing preorders aren't providing working capital. Still, it shows that Kickstarter got enough traction that continuing to fly under the radar wasn't possible, or the chargeback rates on preorders was way too high.

I'm wondering what sorts of benefits (protections, legal boilerplate, etc.) that kickstarter provides that selfstarter does not. I imagine that there must be some benefits that having a company behind the platform brings to the table.

Kickstarter brings a comments section that is not controlled by the project creators. That's extremely important. You want a degree of scrutiny from backers that are asking the tough questions. The Lockitron model dispenses with that important distinction. EDIT : REPLY to the comment below. No, it's not. 1- you can always back with 1 $, comment, remove your pledge.2- you can back (conditionally) in good faith, ask questions lingering in your mind, decide to rescind your support if the answers do not prove satisfactory.

Only backers can comment on kick starters, so the comment section on kickstarter is pretty useless anyways.

Fraud, mostly.

Hello all ,this is a very nice thread Its open oportunities for those who wants to share new ideas

See in our website what we are doing to survive in the wild.We are offering templates that is very easy to install and manage.here are some examples:

Here's an alternative that I wrote after reading about Lockitron.

http://blog.crowdint.com/2012/10/13/crowdfunding-your-projec...

So weird to see people complaining about the risk of people half-assing projects on kickstarter because of getting money up front with little assurance. As if angel investing is much different.

A professional angel (and certainly VC) is a lot less personally pissed off at losing $25-200k in an investment than a purchaser of a product is at not receiving a $25 product. Courts are also much more sympathetic (rightly) to the individual consumer than to an investor in this case, so that $25 loss (x 1000 people) could turn into a huge judgment against Kickstarter, etc.

Kickstarter makes it clear they are not a "purchaser of a product." How much money you make doesn't change being responsible for how you spend it.

That's not really true under US law. US consumers are legally privileged over vendors or business to business transactions -- the only more privileged party is the Government.

Morally/intellectually, sure.

Kickstarter was/is shooting for the investor-style model.

The problem is that people were viewing it as a store. People were getting pissed off when they gave money to a scam, to an individual who couldn't handle the explosive demand, et cetera.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com