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Comment by axx | Hacker News Reader

I've never liked Kickstarter. It's a nice idea and all, but there is so much room for failure and scam.

I'm sure they're motivated as hell to bring great products and on kickstarters site, they're motivated too to support those projects. But more often than not, there are people, without any knowledge on how to develop products, that i'm way to scared to give them any money.

Oh, and since a few big projects, it's only one piece of the marketing bullshit-bubble. Everyone tries to use Kickstarter as a marketing channel and people that want to solve real problems aren't mentioned anywhere.

I mean, why the fuck to rich people need to use kickstarter? There are enough examples, where people with huge piles of money try to finance their projects on kickstarter. Use your own money, damn it.

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> I've never liked Kickstarter. It's a nice idea and all, but there is so much room for failure and scam.

It depends how you use it. If you use it as a store, yes (though the risk can be minimized by due diligence).

> and people that want to solve real problems aren't mentioned anywhere.

What are real problems? For me a real problem was (or rather will hopefully) be solved by the Hot Smartwatch.

> why the fuck to rich people need to use kickstarter?

It's a great tool to test the waters. If you don't get funded, you probably would have thrown your money down the drain. Also I don't see a problem with using KS as a marketing tool, though the extra attention KS gets in media will probably die down in another year or two (It's already not as effective as it was at the beginning).

Can't you sell shares in the company to achieve the same thing?

I'd split the thing into Kickstarter for art, and Kickstarter for products for a start

I'd imagine selling shares would be way more complicated.

Plus, you completely lose the gauge consumer interest part. Buying shares you have to think about if other people want it. Right now you only have to think about if YOU want it.

This was a project I supported - http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/796177777/tony. He's a talented, established artist so I trusted him from the get-go. $25 and I got a signed DVD and CD. I thought this was a fun way to produce a product that connects the artist to the fan and vice versa.

Have you actually tried it? I've discovered a number of cool products on it, Flint & Tinder for example that I've ordered from multiple times since.

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