4 ms·

The old "Take their money then give it back to them 11 months later" con. Great theory ya got there.

javert 11y ago
I'm pretty sure I could make money if I had $470K to hold on to for 11 months. Of course, I could just get a job, that would be easier.
- dsjoerg 11y ago
  https://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/series/DGS1/ https://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/series/DGS1/
  - javert 11y ago
    I've never looked into treasury notes. Am I right in interpreting this graph as showing how much you would make holding treasury notes over a one year period? So roughly between . 05 and .4 percent? Point being that it's not necessarily that easy to make money holding $400k for a year? If so, I agree with that---hence my point that it would be easier to work.
- davnicwil 11y ago
  Yeah, for sure. I remember once I bought tickets for a large stadium gig. The gig was postponed at a late stage, for a year, and the options were: 1) get a refund, lose the ticket you'd been lucky to get at face value back into the pool, probably never to be seen again for the same price. 2) hold onto your ticket, wait a year, go see the gig It therefore resulted in $millions being held by the organisers for over a year - there are extremely low risk ways to gain a meaningful profit from a large amount of capital. Intentionally or not, and whether or not it was invested by them during that year, this situation turned out to be a great way to get a huge, zero-interest loan of said capital. I'm not sure if there are laws that prevent this kind of thing from happening, but it's certainly easy money in theory.
  - javert 11y ago
    If you're looking for something extremely low risk, you're only going to make a few percent. (I'd be thrilled to learn that I'm wrong on this.) So, may not be worth it if you have other costs or people you have to share the profit with. 3 percent of a million is only 30K.
    - davnicwil 11y ago
      Depends on your definition of meaningful but, I was thinking more along the lines of 10 million -> 200-300k, almost guaranteed. Obviously if the starting capital is less, you could potentially notch up the risk of the investment etc, but that's a very meaningful profit for most companies I should think. At the least it's a very valuable individual's salary for a year.
nkozyra 11y ago
Well as is mentioned elsewhere, being a successful Kickstarter campaign is amazing P.R. You can take that kind of hype to VCs and get some very real Series A from that if the proposed product is good. So what could be happening here is that a big company was the target audience all along. Raise a bunch of money with a "disruptive" piece of hardware, garner hype, get some venture money, return the Kickstarter cash. That seems totally plausible to me. To the VCs these guys look like semi-sure bets to get gobbled by MS or Sony or Netflix or, hell, anyone looking to enter this space.
coderjames 11y ago
I recognize that Kickstarter funds are donations, but the product I donated to is not the product that was being developed. I was baited with this: "The product is fully functional today, with the hardware design final, tooling complete, and manufacturing ready to ramp up in the next 30-60 days. We also have fully functional sender apps for Firefox, Chrome, iOS, and Android - you can Fling from any of these platforms on almost any laptop or mobile device." [1] And this: "Hardware is done! It was actually previewed in June-" [1] That expectation was switched for this: "After struggling with the DRM development based on Firefox OS for most of this year, we realize continued development of DRM, though showing early signs of promise, will be a long and difficult road. We have come to the conclusion that we will not be able to reliably predict the completion date of the DRM development without significantly more research, development and integration." [2] So I donated to a project that was 30-60 days away from start of manufacturing and instead found my donation being used to fund development of something else. Why is this not a bait-n-switch? If I'd known what they were going to build, I would have just bought a Chromecast back in October of 2014. [1] https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/matchstick/matchstick-the-streaming-stick-built-on-firefox-os/description https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/matchstick/matchstick-t... [2] https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/matchstick/matchstick-the-streaming-stick-built-on-firefox-os/posts/1266549 https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/matchstick/matchstick-t...

I'm pretty sure I could make money if I had $470K to hold on to for 11 months. Of course, I could just get a job, that would be easier.

dsjoerg 11y ago
https://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/series/DGS1/ https://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/series/DGS1/
- javert 11y ago
  I've never looked into treasury notes. Am I right in interpreting this graph as showing how much you would make holding treasury notes over a one year period? So roughly between . 05 and .4 percent? Point being that it's not necessarily that easy to make money holding $400k for a year? If so, I agree with that---hence my point that it would be easier to work.
davnicwil 11y ago
Yeah, for sure. I remember once I bought tickets for a large stadium gig. The gig was postponed at a late stage, for a year, and the options were: 1) get a refund, lose the ticket you'd been lucky to get at face value back into the pool, probably never to be seen again for the same price. 2) hold onto your ticket, wait a year, go see the gig It therefore resulted in $millions being held by the organisers for over a year - there are extremely low risk ways to gain a meaningful profit from a large amount of capital. Intentionally or not, and whether or not it was invested by them during that year, this situation turned out to be a great way to get a huge, zero-interest loan of said capital. I'm not sure if there are laws that prevent this kind of thing from happening, but it's certainly easy money in theory.
- javert 11y ago
  If you're looking for something extremely low risk, you're only going to make a few percent. (I'd be thrilled to learn that I'm wrong on this.) So, may not be worth it if you have other costs or people you have to share the profit with. 3 percent of a million is only 30K.
  - davnicwil 11y ago
    Depends on your definition of meaningful but, I was thinking more along the lines of 10 million -> 200-300k, almost guaranteed. Obviously if the starting capital is less, you could potentially notch up the risk of the investment etc, but that's a very meaningful profit for most companies I should think. At the least it's a very valuable individual's salary for a year.

nkozyra 11y ago

Well as is mentioned elsewhere, being a successful Kickstarter campaign is amazing P.R. You can take that kind of hype to VCs and get some very real Series A from that if the proposed product is good. So what could be happening here is that a big company was the target audience all along. Raise a bunch of money with a "disruptive" piece of hardware, garner hype, get some venture money, return the Kickstarter cash. That seems totally plausible to me. To the VCs these guys look like semi-sure bets to get gobbled by MS or Sony or Netflix or, hell, anyone looking to enter this space.

coderjames 11y ago

I recognize that Kickstarter funds are donations, but the product I donated to is not the product that was being developed. I was baited with this: "The product is fully functional today, with the hardware design final, tooling complete, and manufacturing ready to ramp up in the next 30-60 days. We also have fully functional sender apps for Firefox, Chrome, iOS, and Android - you can Fling from any of these platforms on almost any laptop or mobile device." [1] And this: "Hardware is done! It was actually previewed in June-" [1] That expectation was switched for this: "After struggling with the DRM development based on Firefox OS for most of this year, we realize continued development of DRM, though showing early signs of promise, will be a long and difficult road. We have come to the conclusion that we will not be able to reliably predict the completion date of the DRM development without significantly more research, development and integration." [2] So I donated to a project that was 30-60 days away from start of manufacturing and instead found my donation being used to fund development of something else. Why is this not a bait-n-switch? If I'd known what they were going to build, I would have just bought a Chromecast back in October of 2014. [1] https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/matchstick/matchstick-the-streaming-stick-built-on-firefox-os/description https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/matchstick/matchstick-t... [2] https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/matchstick/matchstick-the-streaming-stick-built-on-firefox-os/posts/1266549 https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/matchstick/matchstick-t...