Image Source: Agency 2.0
Kickstarter and the whole crowdfunding movement has had quite some time to sink in now, and while the initial fever has definitely died down, there are still plenty of projects and campaigns being started every day to pitch their ideas. Obviously the allure of backing a crowdfunded project is the uniqueness of the product in question and how it otherwise might not have made it into the public eye, however, the harsh reality of business and manufacturing that some projects struggle along the way, causing delays in the process, sometimes fatally so.
For those who haven’t been caught up in the whole crowdfunding ordeal, essentially what Kickstarter and other crowdsourcing bodies, like Indiegogo, provide is a platform for inventors, entrepreneurs and mad scientists to bypass all the red tape and pitch their ideas directly to the end user, who in turn invests money for what they believe is a good idea. If enough investors, or backers, are on board and the project reaches (or exceeds) its monetary target, the people in charge of the project must now use that money to complete their project and provide the backers with the product that they invested their money in the hopes of receiving. That’s the idea anyway…
The reality is that this isn’t always the case. Several high profile projects have simple fizzled out right after the money did, and have left their backers high and dry and usually quite angry. This has created quite an intriguing stigma that is now associated with Kickstarter and crowdfunding as people have begun to shy away or question the merits of backing projects.
A subset of the projects that run out of money are the projects that delay their launch long enough for people to become significantly disillusioned with the project. The first project that comes to mind is inevitably the darling of Kickstarter, the Pebble Watch, which raised over $10 million in its short campaign to create its e-ink smartwatch. This single Kickstarter project managed to be the springboard for both the Kickstarter fever as we know it now, as well as the wearables explosion that we were witness to at CES 2014 a few weeks ago. While we can say that in hindsight now, the road to this point for Pebble, and countless other crowdfunded projects, is not quite as smooth…
To give a little background on Pebble for those who don’t know about it, the Pebble Watch Kickstarter was launched in April of 2012 and initially aimed for a target of $100,000 to complete their dream of creating the smartwatch. After reaching that target in only 2 hours of the project going live, it was clear the Pebble team had stumbled onto something special. Stretch goals that promised bonuses to the backers were made and subsequently smashed, eventually netting the Pebble team $10 million, over 100 times what they had originally requested for, easily making them the most successful Kickstarter campaign to date.
At this point, in May 2012, the Pebble Watch was ‘scheduled’, according to the campaign page, to make its appearance to its backers later that year in September, however, the Pebble team never really set any concrete schedules for when the smartwatch would appear, instead adopting a mantra of “It will be finished when it’s finished”. Fulfilling its promises to 68,929 backers as well as its retail preorders was no tall order; it was going to be a mammoth one. Over the next few months, the Pebble team kept its backers (myself included) well informed with regular updates, decorated with informative photos of the current status of the project.
But all of a sudden it was September. And then it was 2013.
Understandably, many of the backers started to ask questions, ranging from “When can we expect our Pebbles?” to much more profane variations of that question. After all, in the consumer world, who isn’t used to paying money for something and expecting to receive and be able to use it in the immediate future? January rolled in and the Pebble team announced that backers could expect their Pebbles to start shipping out, except with 68,929 smartwatches to ship out, that was no small task either. From my own experience, I was almost bang in the middle of the pack and ended up receiving my Pebble in April 2013. There are infamous stories around this time of people who had preordered Pebbles after the Kickstarter campaign receiving their Pebbles before backers; as you can probably understand at this point, it was a logistical nightmare for the Pebble team to coordinate all this, particularly taking into account shipping time and the like.
My aim in writing this isn’t to vilify the Pebble team; in fact, I have nothing but praise to speak of the Pebble team. My aim in using Pebble as an example is because they are the most visible of the crowdfunding projects, but the same concepts can be applied to any crowdfunding project. Neither you nor I would have been able to do a better job than the Pebble team did in getting all those Pebbles to their backers. Of course, there are little things they could have done better, but one of the things they did do right was adopt the credo of “It will be finished when it’s finished”. This part of this discussion is by far the most difficult to swallow because as consumers, we are so used to getting what we want, when we want; the consumer world has grown to the point where we can basically be instantly gratified. So when we saw delays in Pebble, and all the other crowdfunded projects that have seen delays, we instinctively sensed weakness and were quick to jump to anger and outrage.
In reality, the Pebble team was doing exactly what they were supposed to do. As a company creating a product, and this goes for all crowdfunding projects, their responsibility is to give their backers the best possible product in the best possible timeframe. This means that if there is something wrong somewhere along the line, it is their responsibility to make sure it is right, even if it means redoing that process; this is usually the main source of delays and the fact of the matter is that they can’t do anything about it. If they had just gone ahead with a sub-standard part, the backlash of thousands upon thousands of unhappy backers would far outweigh a delay to make it right.
The beauty of the Kickstarter and crowdfunding model in general is that they lay out the whole project process for all to see, guts and all. Don’t think for one second that these kind of things don’t happen in giant manufacturers either; any time that you hear a product won’t be arriving in time due to lack of supply or parts, this is exactly the same situation, except you don’t normally hear about it because the whole process is behind closed doors. The difference with crowdfunded projects is that as backers, you have unprecedented access to what is going on behind these closed doors. In fact, knowing more about the situation should make us more understanding, however, this isn’t, and probably never will be, the case as we’re almost all hard-wired to be consumers.
All the same, I implore you: the next time you back or consider backing a project, understand that the team behind the project is trying to fulfill their dream just as much as you want to get your hands on their product. All they want is to get what is in their head into your hands, so when there is a delay, you better believe it was because they want to give you the best possible outcome to your backer experience.
