
Why We Cancelled Our Kickstarter And Funded It Ourselves - j0ncc
http://needwant.com/p/cancelled-kickstarter-campaign-funded-project-ourselves/
======
ja27
It doesn't look like they were going to make their funding goal. I know that a
lot of money comes in on the final 2-3 days, but unless they had a pile of
friends and family ready to throw in, the projections don't look good.

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...](http://www.kicktraq.com/projects/marshallhaas/201552485/#chart-
exp-projection)

------
herbig
Get all of the hype and exposure that a Kickstarter campaign gives without
having to pay them their cut. Makes sense.

~~~
tnorthcutt
Do you really think the cancellation was premeditated? That's what your
comment seems to imply.

~~~
unreal37
I don't think it was premeditated either, but after reading the article it
seems it worked out great for them being able to get Mashable and Verge
articles, collect 2,000 emails from Kickstarter backers, and then not have to
pay Kickstarter a dime.

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!

~~~
avalaunch
From the article it doesn't sound like the PR company completely let them off
the hook. It says Fundzinger "offered a deal that worked for us."

As an aside, has anyone else worked with Fundzinger? Sounds like an
interesting business model.

~~~
GFischer
I didn't know what Fudzinger was, so I looked it up and there are several
links saying they had a negative experience with them, for example:

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.

~~~
dasil003
> _Fudzinger_

Freudian slip?

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midas007
For anyone that needs a DIY preorder site, there's the lockitron selfstarter
project

[https://github.com/lockitron/selfstarter](https://github.com/lockitron/selfstarter)

------
drakaal
Kickstarter takes a lot of money for basically delivering hype. I think KS
really should have rules/terms that prevent you from canceling after certain
things happen.

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.

~~~
bigs204
you can be sure KS team is discussing a policy change after this incident.

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chris_mahan
I use notebooks, notepads, blanks sheets of paper, Japanese A5 and A5
notepads, and Pilot Frixion erasable pens.

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.

~~~
ErrantX
So, your not a potential customer for Mod Notebook, which is fine. But that
doesn't really add anything to this discussion :)

~~~
chris_mahan
Watching the video on the site, they seem to think that all geeks want their
stuff digitized. I'm a geek (I even have pasty white skin) and I don't want
some of my stuff digitized.

------
andzt
What about confidentiality and privacy?

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.

~~~
roeme
Quite exactly what I thought. And even assuming they somehow managed to
achieve a good/strong isolation from prying eyes/anonymization of the paper
they have to handle inside their shop, there's still the fact that you're
sending these notebooks through good knows what channels - one might suppose
one must raised quite high suspicions so that your mail is intercepted; I
wouldn't be so sure about that with recent revelations.

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.
      
      >_

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incision
_> "We’d kill the subscription model..."_

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.

~~~
protomyth
> I tend to be wary of any service with ongoing running costs sold as a one-
> time fee

Well, they aren't really charging a one time fee, they're charging per
notebook.

~~~
incision
_> "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.

~~~
wlesieutre
I think the closest analogy is pay-per-minute cell phones. No automatically
renewing bill, but they do get recurring income from people who keep using it.
Call it a one time fee per notebook if you want to, it's still a revenue
stream per user than can keep them in business as long as users are using and
replacing notebooks.

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.

------
davidcoronado
This is such an interesting experience, especially with canceling to what
seemed to be a promising kickstarted campaign. I am glad you killed the
subscription based model and are now selling it simply as a product.

~~~
Domenic_S
Agree 100%. The subscription model is nice for a business but for an
individual it's death by 1,000 cuts. Think about all the things you're paying
monthly subscription fees for... Netflix, Hulu, XM radio, Spotify, Gamefly,
Xbox live, your MMO of choice, cell phone, hosting your VPS, internet access,
cable/satellite, of course not to mention rent/mortgage, electricity,
water/sewer, etc.

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"?

~~~
hnriot
XM radio?? Is that still alive? I haven't heard anyone mention that in years.
I guess it still is.

~~~
Domenic_S
Yeah, it's "Sirius XM radio" now, and I got used to it when it came 90 days
free with my car. So now I pay something like $8/month to listen to it.

------
avenger123
I wonder if the notebooks are stripped to bare sheets, scanned and then re-
built as a new notebook with proper bindings for sending back.

I don't see any other way of doing this that would keep it efficient.

~~~
saraid216
The article does cover this.

~~~
avenger123
They mention that they realized users wanted the notebooks back, but I didn't
see any details on how they would do this. It's left as a problem to solve.

~~~
saraid216
They solved it. Mod Notebooks gives you the option to have your notebook back.

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.

~~~
justinsteele
You're addressing something avenger123 never asked. They are asking HOW the
process happens, considering removing the binding is the most efficient way to
accurately scan them as far as we are aware.

~~~
saraid216
It looks like he never asked it because he edited his original comment.

~~~
avenger123
I don't know what you mean. My original comment remains unchanged. I
understand Google used special machines to scan books and was wondering if its
the same sort of tech involved. I'm sure the size of the notebook has
something to do with the tech they are using to accomplish this.

------
klausjensen
Very interesting piece to read about their thought process - and a very
interesting product that I had not heard about before.

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.

------
revolly
Livescribe pen been on the market for years. It's good and you do not have to
wait for 5(!) days for digitized version - it's there automatically. Could you
please explain me, why would you want to use service like Modnotebooks? Am I
missing something?

~~~
egypturnash
Livescribe just picks up "you drew a line here". For an artist, this is not
enough. You need to pick up how hard the line was drawn, you need to pick up
pulling out colored pencils or markers or paint and poking at your sketchbook
that way.

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.

------
josefresco
Is there a HN thread where we can discuss this service and ask
questions/debate the merits? I'd do it here but it feels inappropriate as the
thread is more about Kickstarter and not the core product/service.

~~~
thehooplehead
Ditto. How about in this thread?

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.

~~~
zaroth
Why would an scanning service even get into the notebook business?

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 :-)

~~~
aestra
> Why would an scanning service even get into the notebook business?

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.

------
rdl
I'm personally interested in when Kickstarter makes sense, vs. one's own self-
hosted presales site. Does anyone have any thoughts on this?

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.

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ivan_ah
In case you missed it, there was a plug of a fulfillment company
www.monthlyboxer.com

Does anyone have experience to share about fulfilment companies in general?
What costs per shipment should one expect?

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MWil
I associate Draft with Nathan Kontny's wonderful stuff
[https://draftin.com/about](https://draftin.com/about)

(edit) I see it's been renamed! Should have gone past the banner image!

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verelo
I just tried to buy, but you don't ship to Canada :-( Any plans to change
that?

~~~
lxmorj
Hey! I run MonthlyBoxer.com and we're doing fulfillment for Mod. Would you be
willing to pay an extra $10 for shipping each way? If so, I can talk to Jon
and Marshall about it. It's not any harder on my end, and I think their shop
can handle variable pricing for different countries.

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futurist
Very eager to get one. When are you opening up orders to Canada?

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JetSpiegel
Do these people ever heard of screenshots?

Taking photos of your screen in oblique orientations introduces horrible
artifacts. Just don't do it!

~~~
evan_
If they'd put a full-bleed screenshot at the very top of the page, it would
have looked like part of the page and potentially made the page harder to
navigate and understand. In this case, the photo of the screen is used as an
illustration of their Kickstarter campaign, not something you're actually
meant to look at/understand.

