I'm kinda-sorta starting to go off the kickstarter model.
They're not a shop, as the things are not ready yet (and may never be), and you're not really investing because you don't get any ownership of the company (however small). So selfishly I've started to wonder what's in it for me. It benefits me if I just wait to see if the thing comes to market, then I can buy it without the possibility of it never surfacing.
As it is I feel a bit torn about the idea of acting as a crowdsourced bank for a business but not getting the returns of an actual investor. I can see why it's appealing for the business though.
You get more for your pledge than you would just purchasing the product. e.g. the product is offered cheaper to pledgers or comes in a limited edition. Kickstarter will only continue to work if project creators offer something extra to pledgers. A lot of people seem to be using it as a pre-order service to help fund development. They need to offer more, realising that people are taking a risk by funding them.
I don't know why you've been downvoted - this is a completely reasonable comment and something I agree with. I've backed a few projects on Kickstarter which have both been successful and provided the given "rewards" but I agree that it's a very one sided risk/reward profile stacked in favour of the project and not the backers.
I've got two rather fluffy justification to myself that I use. The first is rather simply that I want to support someone doing something that's cool, but of such a nature that it is not financial viable in a free market setting. Straight up patronage basically.
The second is that in addition to the whole pre-order thing I'm using my money to send a message to the market at large. Basically its my way of saying I want these sort of products/companies to exist. Even if this group of people fail to deliver, hopefully other will see that there is a market there and someone else will pick up where this particular group failed.
[+] [-] Nursie|13 years ago|reply
They're not a shop, as the things are not ready yet (and may never be), and you're not really investing because you don't get any ownership of the company (however small). So selfishly I've started to wonder what's in it for me. It benefits me if I just wait to see if the thing comes to market, then I can buy it without the possibility of it never surfacing.
As it is I feel a bit torn about the idea of acting as a crowdsourced bank for a business but not getting the returns of an actual investor. I can see why it's appealing for the business though.
[+] [-] k-mcgrady|13 years ago|reply
You get more for your pledge than you would just purchasing the product. e.g. the product is offered cheaper to pledgers or comes in a limited edition. Kickstarter will only continue to work if project creators offer something extra to pledgers. A lot of people seem to be using it as a pre-order service to help fund development. They need to offer more, realising that people are taking a risk by funding them.
[+] [-] mikecsh|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dagw|13 years ago|reply
The second is that in addition to the whole pre-order thing I'm using my money to send a message to the market at large. Basically its my way of saying I want these sort of products/companies to exist. Even if this group of people fail to deliver, hopefully other will see that there is a market there and someone else will pick up where this particular group failed.
[+] [-] groktor|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] thisone|13 years ago|reply
The only reason I don't use S3 is because, as a very small time user, I don't want my foreign transaction fees to be larger than the S3 fees.
However, brilliant news for people who weren't able to circumvent the system. Still surprised (and happy) it came to the UK before Canada.
[+] [-] citricsquid|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] samwillis|13 years ago|reply
I will admit I checked to see if they were using stripe.js but they're not.