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by unreal37 4473 days ago
I don't think it was premeditated either, but after reading the article it seems it worked out great for them being able to get Mashable and Verge articles, collect 2,000 emails from Kickstarter backers, and then not have to pay Kickstarter a dime.

I'm sure the PR company wasn't too thrilled at losing their 7% cut of the proceeds either.

But on the whole, it seems they have a really cool product and will do well. Good luck guys!

1 comments

From the article it doesn't sound like the PR company completely let them off the hook. It says Fundzinger "offered a deal that worked for us."

As an aside, has anyone else worked with Fundzinger? Sounds like an interesting business model.

I didn't know what Fudzinger was, so I looked it up and there are several links saying they had a negative experience with them, for example:

boardgamegeek.com/thread/1119213/fundzinger-do-not-use

They apparently did do their bit (write a Press Release), but not to the campaign creators' satisfaction, and he was very annoyed about their using him as a success story.

> Fudzinger

Freudian slip?

They highly endorsed "fundzinger" -- but that's not what some people have been saying: http://boardgamegeek.com/thread/1119213/fundzinger-do-not-us...

It shows up near the top of the google results for fundzinger, and a fishy sock puppet "Tim Koteke" showed up in thread and did some damage control for fundzinger. No google or linkedin hits for his name or his projects. Then once people started asking for some evidence that he wasn't just making shit up, he (or somebody) deleted the post (which is still quoted in the thread) and he disappeared.

That discussion inspired them to start this thread: http://boardgamegeek.com/thread/1126569/kickstarter-boost-co...

If that's the kind of "pr" fundzinger does for themselves, I doubt they do any better for their customers.

So why would they recommend fundzinger so highly? Are they just grateful they didn't have to pay them for the hours they worked (or pretended to work)? Or was there some kind of tit-for-tat: you say nice things about us and we don't charge you for canceling the project. That wouldn't surprise me much, after seeing their lame attempt at sock puppeteering.

...Maybe they should have tried to be hip and cool by calling themselves "Fundzingr", then I would have immediately known they were charlatans.