Comment by Adaptive | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Adaptive | Hacker News Reader

I'm an original backer. I backed at the machine level, so would have received a unit.

My full take away from the situation was simply that they had bad business sense and burned through cash on a several bad decisions, then hoped to pull success from the jaws (or more realistically, the stomach) of defeat, so made ridiculously upbeat postings in an attempt to hand wave over the cracks in the project.

It was a risk; I took it on. Not my most expensive bad investment by far. I checked out of monitoring the Kickstarter feed once it became clear that it was going no where. That was well before the final gasps from the ZPM people.

I'm glad that Kickstarter has pushed projects to post risks, avoid renders, etc. None of that would have mitigated the bad-businesspeople issue, however.

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Edit: To make things clear, I really don't hold a grudge on this. I threw money at some clever ideas, but we all know making them happen at scale can be hard. They didn't handle things well but I felt that the hugely negative response was largely an overreaction.

I am an original backer at the machine level as well.

I don't really hold a grudge on this project but I can understand (to a certain extend) the people who do. If my memory serves me well, throughout the project they never mentioned that the founding engineer had left the company or any other of their most serious issues. The last status update was that they only needed UL certification and would be ready to ship the machines and then suddenly they reveal that the project is pure vaporware. Even after that, they promised an update 'in the next month' on fulfillment possibilities and it never came. The failure is excusable and was always a risk but the dishonesty and almost total lack of transparence makes the rancor of some backers very understandable.

Very vocal minority makes all backers seem mad and aggressive, basically a couple of trolls set the tone. maybe if everyone who felt the other way would be as proactive in expressing their opinions to founders it would change at least the emotional outcome. It would silence the trolls, and it would also be more democratic.

The problem is people with more balanced views also have other things to focus on in their lives, so here you have it - even if most backers understood the risk they were taking and have no hard feelings, years later we only hear about that other small subset

It seems Kickstarter should allow people to set a maximum number of donations and cut it off after that. It they could have handled building/wanted to build 50 machines, but not 5000, they should be able to set an upper limit on the number of backers to their project to prevent runaways like this.

Kickstarter does allow this. Rewards such as physical hardware are associated with specific reward tiers, and individual reward tiers are allowed to (and frequently do) have hard limits.

Kickstarter allows this (and allowed it when the campaign was created). They should definitely have limited the scope to what they had envisioned first. They would have still mismanaged the project, but problems would probably not have snowballed so far.

So did you end up buying a Crossland CC1 in the end?

I bought an aeropress :)

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