
The ugly afterlife of crowdfunding projects that never ship and never end - chris-at
http://arstechnica.com/business/2014/10/the-ugly-afterlife-of-crowdfunding-projects-that-never-ship-and-never-end/
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ChuckMcM
Ouch! Not entirely unexpected of course, there are many inexperienced people
who try to get something going, and get experienced the hard way. I wonder
sometimes if Kickstarter and Indiegogo are training a new breed of
entrepreneur or con artists.

What I haven't seen too much of yet, but expect to, is something that is a
cross between Quirky and Kickstarter where a company with product development
expertise runs 'kickstarters' as essentially a way to schedule excess factory
capacity. Given a couple of designers you could have them throw out ideas and
if they get funded, then make those. A bit harder to forecast than the current
process but it seems like an interesting way to monetize excess capacity.

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upofadown
A huge red flag for a crowdfunded project is any sort of new technology that
needs to be developed before the project can be successful. Something that has
never been done before might simply not be possible or might turn out to be
impossible to resolve before everyone loses interest. The amount of money
available makes no difference past a certain point.

These hard/impossible problems can sometimes be hidden inside other apparently
easy problems. This is particularly true if there is a significant software
component.

