

Rejected by Kickstarter? 'Roll your own' with Selfstarter instead - Jarred
http://www.pcworld.com/article/2011744/rejected-by-kickstarter-roll-your-own-with-selfstarter-instead.html

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kami8845
I love what Lockitron did. I'm sure the dismay of getting rejected by
Kickstarter drove them to open-source their work, and they did a great job.
They put a lot more work into open-sourcing their efforts than I've seen from
many (any?) start-ups. It feels very polished.

Sucks for Kickstarter though, they picked the wrong couple of folks to reject
and now the barrier to just rolling your own has become infintely lower. If
you're launching a decent-size product Kickstarter is starting to look worse
and worse

Why even try to get them to accept you, having to worry about getting the rug
pulled out from under your project just a couple hours before you reach the
funding deadline to then pay a 8-10% fee? (5% + 3-5% to Amazon)

I'm sure the folks at Kickstarter HQ are worried about this development, maybe
their rigid product vision will wind up biting them in the ass.

~~~
citricsquid
Why would they be worried? Rolling your own Kickstarter has many issues that
Kickstarter deals with, scalability, payment processing, there's all manner of
things. Sure, if you really care so much about that 5% that you're willing to
dump all the advantages of Kickstarter then you'll get to save 5%, but do you
think kickstarter are surprised that people are cloning the idea for their own
usage?

If you're a project creator, let's say you're Lockitron and you _don't_ have
any web developers on staff, do you try and hire someone or get a friend on
board to try and manage a website that could, if the project blows up, suffer
from a metric fuckton of traffic, traffic that lots of websites cannot handle?
Or do you say "eh, we'll sacrifice the 5% for the stability and branding of
Kickstarter"?

If your website goes down for 24 hours because you can't cope with the traffic
and your developers are inexperienced you could lose a lot of money, it can be
make or break for projects that get media coverage. Who's going to put money
into a project that can't even keep a website online?

Then there's the fact that there are dozens of Kickstarter alternatives out
there already, with lower fees and other advantages, like no project limits.
Why aren't Kickstarter crying themselves to sleep over that?

I really doubt Kickstarter have anything other than "heh" to say about this.
Hell, they might even gain from this because people will develop new ideas
that Kickstarter can fold into their product.

~~~
makomk
Kickstarter dumps basically all of the costs of payment processing onto
whoever's launching the product, though. Amazon's payment processing fees,
chargeback costs, etc are all paid from the project's portion of the money,
and they also have to have a US bank account to deposit the money in.

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SwaroopH
How about Kickstarter as a service [1] (forked off Selfstarter or similar
code) itself? They could especially target Kickstarter rejects.

1\. Useful for those who cannot (or are too lazy to) code - instant setup.

2\. Cut out the middle man and save on the 5% (or $X) fee. Then again, you
will still be paying a bit for the service.

Thoughts?

[1] Transparency which means you are responsible for the project and the
provider has no legal obligation whatsoever.

~~~
Sambdala
<https://www.outcrowding.com>

~~~
SwaroopH
Neat, just what I had in mind - powered by Stripe. Fee looks a bit steep
though.

~~~
wwwtyro
It's lower than Kickstarter's (the 5% mentioned doesn't include the Amazon
processing fee, iirc).

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chacha102
One of the biggest things that Kickstarter wanted to avoid was customers
looking at projects and simply treating it like a store. So, they tried to
prevent those types of projects from being created.

However, for some experienced people, that's exactly the experience they are
trying to create, because it is what sells.

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kam
As a developer of a hardware project [1] that was funded on Kickstarter last
year, I have to say that the real value is not the easily-reproduced payment
infrastructure, but the eyeballs. A significant portion of our backers found
the project through Kickstarter -- that's where people browse looking for
something to spend money on.

I'm disappointed by Kickstarter's latest changes, however. What we did
wouldn't be possible under the new rules.

[1] <http://www.nonolithlabs.com/cee/>

~~~
ThomPete
First of all good luck with you project looks like a beaut.

With regards to eyeballs. With eyeballs comes competition. I wonder if
Lockitron would have as much success had they used Kickstarter.

~~~
ccamrobertson
This is a fascinating question. We optimized our design to be a "simpler"
Kickstarter - however, I don't believe the changes were material enough to
really shift things more that 5-10% in either direction.

While we did lose out on the internal momentum that Kickstarter brings to
projects, most of the early press missed that fact that we weren't on
Kickstarter. Some actually reported us as a Kickstarter project.

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flyinglizard
It would be interesting to see how this landscape evolves. I'm very familiar
with the development, having consulted for multiple companies and I know that
even for industry veterans, a product is very rarely on time and on budget.
What does it mean for kickstarter projects, when the inventor is usually
approaching a whole new field?

I'm thinking that there will be a lot more friction between makers and backers
as time passes.

I'm sensing that KS is trying to sidestep the issue instead of confronting it.
They are in an enviable position now, but it will take little bad press to
dethrone them. I'm willing to bet that some major PR mess is approaching KS
like a freight train, with all their flattering press and hugely overbacked
projects. These will start slipping one by another, as most products do.

KS needs to preempt this by appointing governing/consulting entities to the
major projects, making sure things are on time and well communicated to the
backers. KS also has to find a milestone scheme where the money gets to the
makers on an agreeable schedule, and should consider alternate funding methods
like dollar matching with the project maker.

What they run now is a disaster waiting to happen.

~~~
eande
"KS also has to find a milestone scheme where the money gets to the makers on
an agreeable schedule"

not sure if KS wants to get into monitoring of project details and this idea
is a hard one, because as organization making physical products you have big
upfront expenses to pay like tooling and it requires the money early on.

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dchuk
It's important people realize that a lot of payment providers don't like
accepting payments up front for something that does not yet exist. Paypal for
instance clearly states that's not allowed.

While I think it's great that crowdfunding is very accessible as of lately, I
think there's a risk here of people half assing things, not following through
on their end with the product development, and it going south really quickly.

~~~
Firehed
It's against most networks' (Visa, etc) TOS to charge before the goods are
shipped, but you can usually word things in such a way to get around it, and
it's usually not enforced strictly until it becomes a real problem. It's
definitely higher risk than paid-on-shipment though.

However, you'll find that the Lockitron guys aren't charging cards until
shipment, just getting the preapproval to do so when they're ready to ship. I
suppose that means either they have some other funding or means to get it
(with nearly $2m in "pledges", it shouldn't be hard to secure a loan for the
first run if they need it if they don't want to go the VC route)

So this solves a slightly different problem than Kickstarter, since the people
doing preorders aren't providing working capital. Still, it shows that
Kickstarter got enough traction that continuing to fly under the radar wasn't
possible, or the chargeback rates on preorders was way too high.

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hkmurakami
I'm wondering what sorts of benefits (protections, legal boilerplate, etc.)
that kickstarter provides that selfstarter does not. I imagine that there must
be some benefits that having a company behind the platform brings to the
table.

~~~
sami36
Kickstarter brings a comments section that is not controlled by the project
creators. That's extremely important. You want a degree of scrutiny from
backers that are asking the tough questions. The Lockitron model dispenses
with that important distinction. EDIT : REPLY to the comment below. No, it's
not. 1- you can always back with 1 $, comment, remove your pledge.2- you can
back (conditionally) in good faith, ask questions lingering in your mind,
decide to rescind your support if the answers do not prove satisfactory.

~~~
bryanlarsen
Only backers can comment on kick starters, so the comment section on
kickstarter is pretty useless anyways.

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testepaginas
Hello all ,this is a very nice thread Its open oportunities for those who
wants to share new ideas

See in our website what we are doing to survive in the wild.We are offering
templates that is very easy to install and manage.here are some examples:

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dabit
Here's an alternative that I wrote after reading about Lockitron.

[http://blog.crowdint.com/2012/10/13/crowdfunding-your-
projec...](http://blog.crowdint.com/2012/10/13/crowdfunding-your-project-with-
rails.html)

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dreamdu5t
So weird to see people complaining about the risk of people half-assing
projects on kickstarter because of getting money up front with little
assurance. As if angel investing is much different.

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rdl
A professional angel (and certainly VC) is a lot less personally pissed off at
losing $25-200k in an investment than a purchaser of a product is at not
receiving a $25 product. Courts are also much more sympathetic (rightly) to
the individual consumer than to an investor in this case, so that $25 loss (x
1000 people) could turn into a huge judgment against Kickstarter, etc.

~~~
dreamdu5t
Kickstarter makes it clear they are not a "purchaser of a product." How much
money you make doesn't change being responsible for how you spend it.

~~~
rdl
That's not really true under US law. US consumers are legally privileged over
vendors or business to business transactions -- the only more privileged party
is the Government.

Morally/intellectually, sure.

