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Thanks for the amusing breakdown. Here's a counter-breakdown: 1) Point taken, but you're assuming I have a cost overhead and I care about income. Perhaps I j

by seiji 14y ago

Thanks for the amusing breakdown. Here's a counter-breakdown: 1) Point taken, but you're assuming I have a cost overhead and I care about income. Perhaps I just want to destroy something beautiful? 2) (fuzzy) I don't feel most people sit around kickstarter.com looking for ways to spend money. They get led in through media, websites, friends, viral virulence, etc. Kickstarter is basically the world's most expensive webhost at this point. 3) The fun projects may drift over if we shift the narrative towards "Would you rather give Kickstarter $10k for having a pretty website or do you want it in your pocket?" (Based on the Light Table raised amount and a kickstarter fee of $25k-$28k versus a $13k fee for my pricing model. I have spreadsheets and everything -- you can't argue with spreadsheets. Up and to the right, baby.)

mechanical_fish 14y ago
Laugh while you can about Kickstarter's brand. Donors are going to be happier sending money via an entity they've actually heard of, that has a track record of delivering millions of dollars as promised. Vendors are going to ask themselves how their use of a cut-rate bootstrapping vendor reflects on the quality of their own brands. These problems will all get worse once the first Kickstarter clone goes under and a bunch of people with Twitter feeds get burned. That will happen. Meanwhile, consider this excerpt from Founders At Work, chapter one: MAX LEVCHIN: It was pretty funny because [at the time of PayPal's launch] we met with all these people in the banking and credit card processing industry, and they said "Fraud is going to eat you for lunch." We said, "What fraud?" They said "You'll see, you'll see." I actually had an advisor or two from the financial industry, and they said, "Get ready for chargebacks. You need to have some processing in place." We said "Uh huh." They said "You don't know what a chargeback is, do you?" If Levchin had done nothing else for the world than dictate these words, it would have been sufficient. Every time I hear someone, often myself, utter a phrase like "that business is so simple; it's just a glorified Perl script and some JPEGs" I try to envision Levchin, reading these words to me.

by seiji 14y ago

mechanical_fish 14y ago

Laugh while you can about Kickstarter's brand. Donors are going to be happier sending money via an entity they've actually heard of, that has a track record of delivering millions of dollars as promised. Vendors are going to ask themselves how their use of a cut-rate bootstrapping vendor reflects on the quality of their own brands. These problems will all get worse once the first Kickstarter clone goes under and a bunch of people with Twitter feeds get burned. That will happen. Meanwhile, consider this excerpt from Founders At Work, chapter one: MAX LEVCHIN: It was pretty funny because [at the time of PayPal's launch] we met with all these people in the banking and credit card processing industry, and they said "Fraud is going to eat you for lunch." We said, "What fraud?" They said "You'll see, you'll see." I actually had an advisor or two from the financial industry, and they said, "Get ready for chargebacks. You need to have some processing in place." We said "Uh huh." They said "You don't know what a chargeback is, do you?" If Levchin had done nothing else for the world than dictate these words, it would have been sufficient. Every time I hear someone, often myself, utter a phrase like "that business is so simple; it's just a glorified Perl script and some JPEGs" I try to envision Levchin, reading these words to me.