Kickstarter Lessons

Philipp Schneider7/2/2024

Reminder to my future self: Re-read the following hard-learned lessons ¹ before backing whatever is the latest Kickstart craze:

• You’re buying the delusional hopes and promises of the project owners, not a finished product.
  • There’s two types of Kickstarter campaigns: innovative new products by people who haven’t created (such) products (at such scale), or companies (ab)using Kickstarter for marketing launches. Skepticism about the realism of promises is warranted in both cases, albeit for different reasons.
  • There’s cliché standard sentence along the lines of “We already figured everything out, we just need a bit of money to pay the manufacturing partner”. Suuuure. Mass production (done by companies at the other end of the world) is so easy to do. Risk is not downplayed at all because the campaign wants my money *sarcasm off*.
• Communication during the project is “meh” more often than not. Updates are rare and only share convenient parts. Things that go wrong are shared late and without proper explanation. You can never be sure what the actual progress is until you receive a tracking code. Live with the uncertainty in the meantime. It helps if the campaing is “play money” that is easy to mentally write off after having done the backing.
• If everything goes well, you are going to get something just a few months too late. That’s when the true test of patiency comes: shipping delays. At the end of which you’ll deal with inconvenient import duties more often than not.
• Delivered products are usually not better than what you’d rate with 3 stars on Amazon. Knowing the result, you’ll rarely buy again.

Instead of baking: Just. Wait. If a product is as great as promised, it will reach regular sales channels. The product might be more expensive (until Black Friday sales), but that’s more than offset by the reduction in risk, shipping costs, duties, not to speak of quality improvements of later production runs. Better yet: Wait for the 2nd generation.