Why 84% of Kickstarter's top projects shipped late
money.cnn.com
money.cnn.com
An interesting comparison would be to know how many projects in general are shipped late. Otherwise it will be another case of "1/4 of all crimes in London are committed by foreigners!" where 24% of Londoners are foreigners.
> Why are so many crowdfunded projects blowing their deadlines?
>Over and over in our interviews, the same pattern emerged. A team of ambitious but inexperienced creators launched a project that they expected would attract a few hundred backers. It took off, raising vastly more money than they anticipated -- and obliterating the original production plans and timeline
The nature of successful Kickstarter projects is that they are are solving hard problems. Hard problems are very difficult to estimate and the cost of being wrong on your time estimate is very low. So why would anyone not just provide an optimistic delivery date?
Delivery on time (by providing realistic estimates) can help make sure that people don't turn on the project and start generating negative publicity about the project.
Not sure I agree with that.
That was my first experience with a manufacturer where I got to see what it was that making 100 changed vs making 20. In our case it was mostly all of the various parts that came from different places, so you needed to stage a bunch of things and that difference in delivery times meant that to build a 100 reliably for some components you were holding on to stock of like 500 of other things. That tied up a tremendous amount of money, and the risk was if something went wrong you might have parts to make 80% of 500 things but not the same 80%! It was maddening, and very complex. We had a gal whose job it was was to talk to suppliers basically all day every day and help get things 'kitted'.
It's the same reason I didn't fund Ouya - I didn't see anyone on the team who has actually successfully shipped a hardware product. It's the same reason I did fund Pebble, because they have, albeit on a much smaller scale.
This shit is hard, and people need to realize this.
People think it's easy because it's simple on the small scale. There's nothing I know of that's harder to scale than manufacturing operations.
You are completely right, it is hard, sure the part is only worth $1, but you still have put in months going back and forth with vendors getting that part because they cut a corner or misunderstood what you wanted regardless of how clear you tried to be. Then you need to deal with them on a production scale.
How true. Inefficiencies add up quickly when you multiply many times.
Think about stuffing envelopes by hand. If you need to do 10 no big deal you can fit it into any open time period. If you need to do 10,000 you need a machine or much more labor. (Same with scanning by the way try to do volume scanning with a scan snap you'll get burried).
I wonder if Kickstarter allowed projects to set a maximum number of backers (or a funding cap), if projects would take advantage of it.
Honestly, such a move wouldn't help Kickstarter (fewer fees to collect), so I'd have my doubts that such an option would be offered. Even if it were, I wonder how many teams are aware enough of their limits to take advantage of such an option.
I think picking the "top 50" projects is just asking for trouble. Those are victims of their success, and have to scale from 0 to mass production on a tight schedule.
Going from zero to a few hundred early adopters is much more feasible.
"I wonder if Kickstarter allowed projects to set a maximum number of backers (or a funding cap), if projects would take advantage of it"
If the tier involves a tangible product, then there should always be a cap. And most of the software projects I've seen should at least triple their estimated project completion time if they haven't started yet or aren't at least "50%" complete.
[1] http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/rocknail/filabot-plastic... [2] http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/printrbot/printrbot-your...
At a guess, funding will go up inversely with the estimated wait for shipping, and that relationship will be counteracted by some believability factor that is directly related to the apparent complexity of the project/apparent expertise of the project leaders i.e. people will not believe that you are shipping a flying car a week after the funding date, esp. if you don't have any pictures or graphs and you're three art students.
Unfortunately, the apparent complexity of the project/apparent expertise of the project leaders is going to be consistently way wrong, due to the credulity of the general public.
If you only plan to do one Kickstarter, fancy renders and other graphics + the earliest physically possible estimated ship date is the rational choice. Then just blow the date. There's absolutely no consequences. If what you get to the backers (late) turns out to be awesome, you'll still end up getting nothing but positive press.
The only time I've seen people get really irate about Kickstarter shipping late (but shipping) is when the backers' "exclusive" promos were also sold in other venues, or when retailers got a hold of stuff before backers did.
If I managed to finish 68% of my projects, I'd die a happy person.
I don't know that Kickstarter can be any more clear to backers than they are that when you back a project you are not buying an item and you are not guaranteed a successful result.
I think this is one of those cases where he got so overwhelmed with the support he decided to do something completely different and better than what he was originally asking for backing to do, and it looks like it's turning into a full-fledged company. I'm pleased--I just want my programmable flashlight. :)
With VC, they're a small, tight-knit group and can ruin your reputation if you waste their money or fail in bad faith (or if you fail in good faith and they're upset about it). However, this capability is abused all over the place. One of the reasons why extortions like multiple liquidation preferences and participating preferred exist is that the VC can pick up a phone and turn off other interest in firms that should be competitors.
On the other hand, with Kickstarter, average donors on the scale of $100 don't have the "teeth" or incentive to fairly punish those who fail them in bad faith, and in the absence of such punishments, you either get a scammer problem (bad-faith failure is unpunished and recurs) or an overreactive "lynch mob" behavior (good-faith failure is punished).
What's right for a growing business and artistic projects is between those two points, I would think.
That said, if anywhere close to half of all Kickstarter projects succeed eventually, then it's doing way better than corporate software. I'd bet that what is completed is of high quality, as well.
Also, the reason I really want to see Kickstarter succeed has less to do with the funding model and more with the making of cool stuff. Kickstarter means more people can work on useful, meaningful projects rather than serving The Man, and that's a great thing there should be more of.
Here's an idea, more oriented toward software but applicable to hardware as well. Every project has a hard deadline that is some multiplier (maybe 5-20x) on the expected time-to-completion (i.e. the soft deadline). That's mainly intended for work that is abandoned, not regular shit-happens lateness. If you're within the deadline, you own the IP outright. If you miss it, or abandon the project, the code is open source and the work is in the public domain, so anyone who wants to pick it up can.
Maybe this is why they thought it hadn't shipped yet?
[0] http://www.sauropodstudio.com/dev-diary-number-thirty-five/
If the final product has not shipped yet, though, it does belong in the "Where is it" bucket. Everything else on the table has delivered.
A mistake in one field in the table hardly invalidates the whole article, which I think you should probably read rather than jumping to invalidate the whole thing.
The tentative plan is to release a full beta around the turn of the year and have an official launch May of next year. As it stands currently, it will include all the things I've shown in the video for both JavaScript and Clojure, but should we continue to get more funding we can add even more.