Why We Cancelled Our Kickstarter And Funded It Ourselves
needwant.com
needwant.com
They also say that they decided to cancel just 10 days into the campaign, but it looks like they actually cancelled on Nov 14th (day 24) with just 7 days remaining (and at less than 50% funded).
None of that invalidates what they've written and what they gained from running a Kickstarter, but it seems like they're spinning it that they killed what was going to be a successful campaign.
http://www.kicktraq.com/projects/marshallhaas/201552485/#cha...
I'm sure the PR company wasn't too thrilled at losing their 7% cut of the proceeds either.
But on the whole, it seems they have a really cool product and will do well. Good luck guys!
As an aside, has anyone else worked with Fundzinger? Sounds like an interesting business model.
boardgamegeek.com/thread/1119213/fundzinger-do-not-use
They apparently did do their bit (write a Press Release), but not to the campaign creators' satisfaction, and he was very annoyed about their using him as a success story.
Freudian slip?
It shows up near the top of the google results for fundzinger, and a fishy sock puppet "Tim Koteke" showed up in thread and did some damage control for fundzinger. No google or linkedin hits for his name or his projects. Then once people started asking for some evidence that he wasn't just making shit up, he (or somebody) deleted the post (which is still quoted in the thread) and he disappeared.
That discussion inspired them to start this thread: http://boardgamegeek.com/thread/1126569/kickstarter-boost-co...
If that's the kind of "pr" fundzinger does for themselves, I doubt they do any better for their customers.
So why would they recommend fundzinger so highly? Are they just grateful they didn't have to pay them for the hours they worked (or pretended to work)? Or was there some kind of tit-for-tat: you say nice things about us and we don't charge you for canceling the project. That wouldn't surprise me much, after seeing their lame attempt at sock puppeteering.
...Maybe they should have tried to be hip and cool by calling themselves "Fundzingr", then I would have immediately known they were charlatans.
> For Fundzinger, we got on the phone with them and explained the situation in detail. They were more than understanding, and offered a deal that worked for us.
And I see they're still using the Kickstarter branded video. Is that hosted by Kickstarter too? Even if they made the video, they should revert to an unbranded (or self-branded) video in what is obviously a promotional article.
I agree with drakaal's comment below [1] that Kickstarter is going to need to protect themselves against such exploitation.
Press like covering KickStarter. It is a validation that the product is "obtainable" as opposed to a pie in the sky press release from a company that something might come out someday. KS takes a big cut for what they deliver, but they do deliver it, so they should protect that model more fiercely than they do.
That said... If I were shipping a physical thing I would just use Amazon and do Pre-orders instead. Doing a KickStarter can preclude you from many retail stores, and Home Shopping. If your product is awesome you'd likely be better to be in those places instead. If your product kind of sucks, making a splash on KS can get you easy money early. I can think of several products that this has happened with (a talking bear, a video game console...)
But what it all boils down to is you have to decide if hype is what you need, or distribution. If you have a solid product you don't need hype.
I do mostly writing, and also diagramming (I'm a software developer) with the odd doodle and 3-d house.
I'm very picky about pens, very picky about paper.
I also definitely want to keep my notebooks.
I do not want all this stuff digitized. At all.
What I do digitize, I convert carefully, taking care to craft it as well for pixels as I did for paper.
Also, I wanted to up vote the comment either way.
Love it, but some of my notes are highly confidential. Obviously, I could use a separate notebook, but is there any thought towards privacy or assurance from these guys that no one is reading these notebooks when they're digitized? The video makes it look like a fairly manual process. Ordered one anyway to try it out.
But even worse; mail can and a few times gets lost, be it of the electronic or physical nature. And you don't have a copy in your sent folder in this case, and you can't reorder nor have someone resend another item.
I really, really like the idea of a digitizing/digized notebook, and I do agree that something that beats paper and pen has yet to be invented (can it even?). I would however preferred a device or solution that I could set up or use at home.
This brings up some ideas.
You are in a room that resembles an office.
In front of you, there is a screen displaying some orange toned website with a lot of text.
To your right, there is a shiny apple product. It might be a computer mouse.
To your left, there is a scanner, a notebook and a pen.
>_I tend to be wary of any service with ongoing running costs sold as a one-time fee.
As long as new sales exceed the cost of servicing the existing population everything is fine. Once that relationship reverses all bets are off.
That said, I like this idea and $25 is a better price point that I would have expected.
Well, they aren't really charging a one time fee, they're charging per notebook.
Sure, a one time fee per notebook. The "per" doesn't make it a different model.
So the important nuance regarding your previous comment is that "new sales" doesn't mean "new users." You could run a stable business off of this with a steady user base, unlike a pay once use forever model.
This feels like a better bet for them than subscriptions. I certainly wouldn't have been interested in their previous model, but now I am.
So many services are competing for your $10-$100/month these days it's ridiculous. Let me own something. Let me pay you one time and be done (hello, Amazon Prime!).
Once I gather my thoughts I'm going to write about the end of the monthly subscription. Personally I think much harder about a $10/month subscription than a $25 "one"-time purchase; I wonder if we've reached an inflection point where most people do, or if most still see it as "only a couple bucks a month"?
I don't see any other way of doing this that would keep it efficient.
The reason they couldn't do it was because the company doing the scanning could not scan it non-destructively. Very likely, they just switched to another company.
If I was in the US, I would buy it.
If they get international shipping (EU) at say an extra 10 bucks and no return shipping, I would still consider it, but I fear the cost of shipping + added turnaround time would make it a much less attractive value proposition.
I personally don't do much finished work in my sketchbook - I'm all about Illustrator - but a lot of my friends still love traditional media, and will casually whip out something amazing in their sketchbook because it's what they have to work on when the urge strikes.
Artists are an extreme example, a non-artist still might be using multiple colors for their notes and whatnot.
I was watched the video waiting for some big reveal, but was sort of let down by the offering. The site says more about the notebook's quality than the OCR/digitization, which is what I was more interested in.
There are a LOT of different notebooks to choose from out there, and for anyone who cares enough to use this service in the first place, it's probably a pretty personal decision what notebook to use.
I checked out their webapp. "Try it out. No registration required." Then you click and it brings you to a login page. It took me a second to realize that login and password were actually pre-filled, but for a second I was pissed off that they lied to me :-)
The webapp is very pretty but slow. The thumbnails are nice, but scrolling through full-screen images is painfully slow. There doesn't appear to be any OCR going on, so no way to search, and no way to do post-scan annotations.... Isn't that the whole product?
Maybe they really just wanted to make notebook :-)
Because they are producing special notebooks that work with their business model, that have the proper bindings so they can easily get the pages out of them. For example, They probably even have a machine that does it for them, or special tools. Furthermore, it allows the cost to be consistent, otherwise they would have to charge per page and the user might not be aware of how many pages are in their notebook, so they might not know the cost ahead of time. I have a notebook at home and I can't even fathom a guess as to how many pages it is, I am sure that the sticker or whatever was on it when I bought it told me, but that is long gone. It also allows them to only process orders that are cost effective for them - minimum page requirements, consistent cost, pages that are optimal for their scanners, they know exactly what is going to come in, known cost of shipping so they can know exactly the amount of postage they have to pay, etc.
Instead they're just sitting in a drawer. I don't want to have to use Mod Notebooks just to keep paper notes forever.
I agree, pretty fundamental bit of info to omit
I assume neither of those are very practical at the moment, otherwise a company would've tried it already.
It seems like Kickstarter makes more sense for smaller projects, but the 15% cut and inflexibility (no bitcoins, no bulk sales, etc.) might be a bigger issue for larger projects.
The "virality" part of KS is nice, but it doesn't seem like a huge percentage of orders. The "all or nothing" part reassures people, but for a YC company or other respected entity, you could just make the same promise.
The "artificial deadline" part is nice, though.
Does anyone have experience to share about fulfilment companies in general? What costs per shipment should one expect?
(edit) I see it's been renamed! Should have gone past the banner image!
Taking photos of your screen in oblique orientations introduces horrible artifacts. Just don't do it!