[late2part]

There are a few things about this I don’t understand. How much money was it? Were they supposed to get a percentage of money raised, or did they get paid a fee and then get a percentage on top? Do I understand correctly that they’re having money problems so they kept your money to solve their money problems? The simple way to solve this is to take them to court. Is there anything more to the story than you trusted them with your money and they kept it?

[learc83]

According to the post, they paid Woodshed a retainer and were supposed to pay Woodshed a small percentage of the total if they hit their goal.

Court is the obvious way to handle it, but I see nothing wrong with going public to warn other people, or shame the company into paying up. The company is still apparently doing business. This goes a bit beyond not being able to pay your vendors, and depending on how exactly it went down, what Woodshed did could be outright illegal.

[pavel_lishin]

> The simple way to solve this is to take them to court. Is there anything more to the story than you trusted them with your money and they kept it?

It seems like the point of the post is to publicize what happened, and make sure other people are aware of the dangers of working with this agency:

> If we don’t tell people what happened, it could happen to someone else.

> We are cutting our losses and doing what we can on a legal front, but we need to warn the community.

The legal system moves slowly; this appears to be their way of holding them accountable for their actions, and for helping others avoid their fate.

[spelunker]

Or possibly damaging a reputation of a company unreasonably because we're only hearing one side of the story: https://twitter.com/Woodshedagency/status/943508162002513923

I mean there's a reason why the "court of public opinion" isn't the best way to resolve issues...

edit: well, looks like Woodshead Agency protected their twitter account so you can't see the tweet now. That's not great.

[valuearb]

If there is another side to the story, whats taking so long to tell it?

And if they have a good explanation, why have they been blocking people on twitter for asking for it?

[kjrose]

The blocking people asking about it on Twitter is what leads me to be concerned. While there may be an explanation, blocking third parties trying to get your side of the story seems to imply there’s something they feel they need to hide from.

[pavel_lishin]

> If there is another side to the story, whats taking so long to tell it?

To play devil's advocate, they need to be able to respond to the accusation well. They can't just jot something down and fire it off, right? They're starting off in a defensive position, and need to address the accusation in away that paints them as the good guys (which they might be).

[chrisbennet]

They had months to form a response. Instead they cut off communication.

[pavel_lishin]

To form a response to Upstart, yes - but not to form a response to this blog post. (Which, to be fair, as a PR company they should have known was coming, and should have had contingency planning to deal with this.)

[late2part]

seems like a reasonable explanation to me - noone's blameless but noone's twirling mustaches either...

https://medium.com/@jeff_52578/how-a-failed-kickstarter-camp...

[pavel_lishin]

That's absolutely true.

[otakucode]

It certainly should go to court... but that would be an international lawsuit, which is far from cheap. And the people who were wronged are the ones who would be ponying up the cash for a long, long time before they might see any restitution... I can't understand going public, and really I'm glad they did. I'm sure the other side will whine about 'libel', but in order for it to be libel you have to prove that it is false, and prove that the other party knew it was false and intended to do harm. I don't think Woodshed can even manage the first of that, let alone the other two.

[late2part]

I don't know what "international lawsuit" means. The plaintiff would sue the defendant local region.

It's implicitly an "international" transaction, so why would rectifying the problem be considered unfairly burdensome when they entered into the relationship.

[otakucode]

If I understood the article correctly, the PR company is in the United States and the Kickstarted company is in another country. If they tried to bring a suit in their country, the court might not have jurisdiction. Even if they did say they had jurisdiction, the likelihood of them being able to compel US citizens to suffer penalties levied by a court in another country is extremely slim. So most likely, they would need to hire a lawyer in the US to bring the suit in a US court. That requires finding a lawyer who is familiar with the intracacies of international contract law, the details involved in establishing jurisdiction, etc, and they would need to travel to the US many times (possibly very many if the opposition thinks they can drag the case out and make it too burdensome for the plaintiff to continue) for various hearings.

Then there's the issue of finding a lawyer who won't start off by asking 'and what is a kickstarter?' which is harder than you might expect. Also, I just thought, Kickstarter might have some kind of standing in this which might also require the case to occur in a US court. Not sure about that.

[sillysaurus3]

How much money was it?

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/rdacalos/upstart-the-bo...

Looks like $35k. No one would risk destroying their reputation over that small sum. I wonder what the other side of the story is?

Abuse is pretty common in gamedev, but this would be flagrant.

[gamblor956]

Looks like $35k. No one would risk destroying their reputation over that small sum. I wonder what the other side of the story is?

People have killed for far less...If they were in a bad enough financial position, they could have thought that they would borrow their client's money to pay immediate bills, and pay the account back with future client earnings. It happens quite frequently in the legal world--it's the number one reason lawyers get disbarred in CA after drug use.

[panglott]

Possibly even a single partner was defrauding the business.

If the other partners were not aware this was occurring until now, that might be a more benevolent explanation of why the agency has gone dark.

[ceejayoz]

> Looks like $35k. No one would risk destroying their reputation over that small sum.

People risk a lifetime in jail over $35k, on a regular basis.

[anthonybsd]

> No one would risk destroying their reputation over that small sum.

You really underestimate how bad some people's finances are right now in places like Michigan.

[Jotra7]

Must be nice to be so privileged as to think 35K is a "small sum."

[panglott]

They linked to the Kickstarter, which says the campaign raised about $35k.