Kickstarter

I think I have written about Kickstarter before, but today will be a small rant post about it.

If I remember correctly, in a post a few weeks back I have written about a timing device. Basically an hourglass.

They said they will be shipping the product by October the 30th and all backers will be receiving tracking numbers. Well, many didn’t. Including me.

I contacted them via the messaging service Kickstarter provides. No response. I started looking around the Campaign and found out I wasn’t the only person looking for information.

Since then more than a month has passed.

Interestingly it seems like some people did receive their reward, but with serious quality issues. Also, they are advertising their product on Social Media and their Store.

Sadly this isn’t the first campaign I see as a scam or rip off:

A movie I backed in 2014 still isn’t finished, but at least they post a regular update and it seems to be sent out to film festivals. 25$

A power bank operated by lighter fuel from a german company (2016). Because of a name violation (the name of the company is/was a normal German name, something you can’t protect in Germany but looks like you can in the US). The just varnished as they can’t talk about ongoing lawsuits. The page on Kickstarter isn’t available anymore, the only thing I see is under my “backed projects”.139$

An action camera where the stats were too good to be true, despite I backed. Website, gone. A guy researched it pretty heavily, looks like it was planned as a rip off from the beginning on. 89$

And now this timing thingy. Even though I think they will deliver sometime in the future, still I’m not satisfied. 94$

347$ in total. That’s almost one credit rate for the Apartment.

I think I’ll be using in the future only to search for new and interesting stuff and wait for it to finish the campaigns and more importantly deliver.

Kickstarter needs to do something about this. I get it that it is risk capital I’m giving those companies, but if they stop to communicate what’s going on its just bad behaviour and something that needs to be punished by the Platform.

I would be fine if they would post “Hey, we are still here and stuff is going on that’s delaying everything” or “Hey, we are sorry, we are broke”.

Communication is key.