Hacker News Reader

Comment by Mithaldu | Hacker News Reader

The FAQ remains vague on that: https://www.kickstarter.com/help/faq/kickstarter+basics

However the rules state one thing clearly ( https://www.kickstarter.com/rules ):

    Projects must be honest and clearly presented.

So i suspect that, as long as it is made abundantly clear that the coupons might end up as neat, but otherwise worthless souvenirs, it'd be legit.

View on HN

It's easy enough to make the coupons exchangeable for more promo items (such as stickers, tshirts, hoodies, etc), so they're never worthless, exactly. You just might not be able to buy the project item, and only get really overpriced shirts instead.

(You could even make mod versions with "failed" on them after the fact, and use the coupons to buy those.)

Naturally, you should have giant, red, all caps letters explaining you're funding development, and might never accomplish the project successfully. Coupons only cover items posted for sale in the store, etc etc.

I'm mostly just curious about it as a legal method to give the reward at a tier without promising the exact reward.

(Side note: is this also an end-run around the multipack rule?)

This is just beating around the bush. If kickstarter wanted they could have just said that project owners are not required to provide the product since things may fail. But they don't say that because a lot fewer people would support projects.

The problem here is that as much as kickstarter wants project owners to be clear about the risks, they themselves don't want to do anything site-wide that may reduce overall revenue. At some point they'll realize they can't have the cake and eat it too.

This is the real disconnect with Kickstarter. It's not a preorder but, you are--in principle--on the hook to deliver the product (unless you don't include the product as a reward in which case you'll get a lot less interest). But, if you could actually afford to reimburse everyone if the project fails then why are you using Kickstarter anyway other than for marketing purposes.

The reality of course is that projects do fail and there may be breathless rhetoric about lawsuits and such on discussion boards but there's typically no money to be had and the online temper tantrums don't go anywhere. So the Kickstarter requirement doesn't have any real teeth.

Yeah presumably people doing kickstarters are at a minimum using an LLC, in which case if the project fails and the company goes bankrupt, nobody is getting anything from the dead entity.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com