4 ms·

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

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.

colmvp 14y ago
I have no sympathy for Kickstarter. Their criteria for submissions can be very inconsistent.
- sami36 14y ago
  couldn't agree more. I don't understand why mega productions (in the scheme of things) that are effectively pre-orders as Project Eternity are OK while other categories as home improvement or fitness gadgets are shunned upon. There is a complete lack of transparency & coherence to Kickstarter's red lines. I understand that they see themselves as more of a substitute to the national endowment of arts than what effectively they are becoming, a crowd-funding VC (minus ceding equity or IP, even better for the creators) , but they should just embrace where their backers are taking them. Whether it's funding arts or hardware projects, there is plenty of "Good" in removing friction from the entrepreneurial process. Both are noble missions & anything that enlarges the pool of backers to the site should be welcomed with both hands.
citricsquid 14y ago
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 14y ago
  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.

colmvp 14y ago

I have no sympathy for Kickstarter. Their criteria for submissions can be very inconsistent.

sami36 14y ago
couldn't agree more. I don't understand why mega productions (in the scheme of things) that are effectively pre-orders as Project Eternity are OK while other categories as home improvement or fitness gadgets are shunned upon. There is a complete lack of transparency & coherence to Kickstarter's red lines. I understand that they see themselves as more of a substitute to the national endowment of arts than what effectively they are becoming, a crowd-funding VC (minus ceding equity or IP, even better for the creators) , but they should just embrace where their backers are taking them. Whether it's funding arts or hardware projects, there is plenty of "Good" in removing friction from the entrepreneurial process. Both are noble missions & anything that enlarges the pool of backers to the site should be welcomed with both hands.

citricsquid 14y ago

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 14y ago
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.