[woody223]

"'No more Kickstarter for me. Willing to pay more after the product hits the shelves,' wrote another."

Despite several fairly high-profile Kickstarter's that did not deliver, this line still seems to come out after new failure. I wonder if Kickstarter needs to do more to explain what a donation is and is not. Or if, given the number of people backing Kickstarter projects, there are just always going to be backers who don't understand the funding model.

[TheCondor]

Part of it is the dream, that new startup type euphoria and adrenaline you get, despite previous failures it seems like anything is possible. The buyers get that too. I don't think more fine print would make a difference.

Now what might make a difference would be if Kickstarter had coaches that could coach the project teams up and then maybe give their own feedback. Perhaps less granular time lines unless they are coach assisted timelines.

There are some definite patterns, overly aggressive timelines to raise funds, underfunding, overly aggressive responses to over funding. When dates slip, the community of backers turns nasty pretty quickly, when things become challenging the communication drops which further increases the nastiness. If not a coach, perhaps a group of five independent consultants from that field could provide their opinions or something, there would be some challenges to keeping it fair.

It is insanely frustrating when you've given someone some money and you don't hear anything at all and the project is already 6 months to a year later than their initial projections, it doesn't seem that unusual on Kickstarter or indigogo

[AndrewDucker]

You hand the company money, you get stuff for it.

And for most kickstarters, that's exactly how it works, and it's fine. You're paying for something that's basically done, and just needs the cash up front to pay for production.

It's only really in tech that there's a problem.