Crowdfunding the Internet of Shit

Lessons from backing more than 130 crowdfunding projects

Crowdfunding seemed like such a great idea back in 2011, when I backed my first project (a camera clip system) on Kickstarter. In the six years since backing that first project, I’ve backed more than 130 projects, the vast majority on Kickstarter and Indiegogo.

More than 50 of the projects I backed were technology projects, most of them hardware and software, some of them just software. Out of those technology projects, only a handful have added value to the world. By added value to the world I mean projects that resulted in:

a delivered product that has the features and functionality described by their creators, or at least is very similar to the description

a viable company that keeps supporting the product, and develops any apps required to operate said product

The first point should be pretty self-explanatory. It’s hard to feel satisfaction when the project creators promise something like this in the project description:

but when you get the product, it looks more like this:

User Pokon posted this photo on Reddit, saying that one of the kids at the birthday party it was for started crying because it was so ugly. I feel you, kid!

The second one is an extension of the first. Many technology products today rely on smartphone apps to work. If the company tanks, the app is bound to become obsolete as the operating systems of smartphones are updated, resulting in a non-working product.

Looking back at the technology projects I’ve backed, there are five rough categories that I can place them into:

Fails after funding

Delayed until obsolete

Hedgehog-cake [see photo above]

Yeah, but meh

Just as promised, just not on time

If you’re less interested in the categories and examples, feel free to scroll down to the conclusion at the end.

Fails after funding

Example projects in this category: Zano, Kraftwerk, Melon Headband

This category contains projects that received the funds from backers, but either failed to deliver a product, or delivered a product that got bricked as the company ceased to exist. Zano is a textbook example of the former; the creators received over 3 million dollars in funding to make a small selfie drone and failed so spectacularly that Kickstarter hired a freelance writer to investigate and tell the story. Kraftwerk was a decent idea: a portable power bank that uses butane gas to generate electricity. Unfortunately, Kraftwerk the power bank got sued by Kraftwerk the band, and at this point they are probably dead in the water. I doubt backers will see neither product nor refund, as the last update to backers about delivery was made in April 2016. That update promised a delivery in December same year, which would have meant a twelve month delay. As I’m writing this, it’s December 2017 and although the team sent a cryptic update in June about the lawsuit still going on, I am afraid that Half-Life 3 will be out before Kraftwerk ships a product.

The Melon Headband is different from the first two examples, as they managed to deliver a product. It worked for a while, but since neither company nor app exists any longer, the product is just a rather expensive prop for shitty futuristic Elrond cos-play.

“Melon Headband” or “Shitty Futuristic Elrond cos-play”?

During the time the Melon Headband “worked”, it was in the yeah, but meh category. I have a rather large head, and used one of the smallest sizes of the band. It would have made for a hilarious practical joke if it was called Melon Headband. Jokes aside, the biggest problem and most likely the reason the company doesn’t exist anymore, is that the function was rather mediocre. The photo above is from a conference I talked at, using the Melon so the audience could follow my brain during the lecture. It wasn’t as interesting as it could have been, had the app and hardware been more well designed. The Muse Headband, which also had a successful crowdfunding campaign with a similar delivery date, probably helped euthanize the Melon by delivering a working product.

Delayed until obsolete

Example projects in this category: popSLATE, Angel

This is the smallest category, but the projects in it deserve their own. Any project that involves technology made for a specific model of a smartphone — especially the iPhone — would most likely fit in here. Popslate, a smartphone case for the iPhone 5 promised to add an e-ink screen to the back of the phone. It was announced in 2012, a couple months after the iPhone 5 vas released. To the best of my knowledge, the Popslate shipped almost two generations of iPhone later, in May 2015. To be fair, it was made for the iPhone 6 at this point, but the reviews of the product tell of a very crude, unfinished product that adds a lot of bulk, has issues with battery life and lacks basic features like a charge/charging indicator.

The Angel Sensor was an attempt to create an open source health and activity tracker. The intentions were good and the product might have become something had it not been delayed by nearly two years. The delay meant that the Angel Sensor shipped almost a year after the first Apple Watch was released, into a market oversaturated with fitness trackers, many of which were solutions looking for a problem. A survey showed that 50% of users who owned one were no longer using it after 18 months. Two years is a long time in technology cycles, and many of the features that made the Angel Sensor unique during the crowdfunding period were common in activity trackers when Angel shipped.

Hedgehog-cake

Example projects in this category: Vigo, Sensoria, Ellipse (formerly known as Skylock)

It’s not necessarily the actual design that puts projects in this category. Except in Vigo’s case, where the design definitely is half of the reason. The main reason for the projects in this category is functionality, or rather lack thereof.

Vigo was supposed to be an energy gauge, using your eyelid motion to detect when you’re tired and vibrations to make you aware of it. The idea sounds great, especially for activities where falling asleep can lead to death (such as driving).

Image of Vigo from their Kickstarter campaign

Ironically, wearing it makes you look like you fell asleep on your telemarketing job, causing the Bluetooth headset from 2001 your employer supplied you to point towards your eye rather than towards the corner of your mouth. Apart from the built-in Google Glass-level social stigma, it’s constantly visible in your peripheral vision when you wear it. Had it worked, it still might have been worth both the stigma and the visual obstruction. Alas, the functionality made the design look good.

Sensoria Smart Sock Fitness Tracker promised to be “The Most Accurate Fitness Tracker”. The socks had textile sensors woven into them, and you hooked on an anklet with battery and the rest of the electronics onto each sock. They were supposed to measure cadence, stride and foot landing, among other things, visualising everything in the app. According to the Sensoria socks, I must have been literally flying, occasionally touching the ground with the ball of my big toe, on my runs. On the flip side, the connectors for the anklet on the socks are shaped like spikes, making them decent weapons. Kick someone in the shin with these babies and you’ll inflict some serious pain.

Ellipse, the “world’s first solar powered connected bike lock” was first launched as Skylock. The delivered design was actually very close to the prototype shown on Indiegogo, and the functionality was initially promising. The solar panels did charge the lock, and should you have forgotten where you locked your bike, the app remembered it for you. Yes, the capacitative touchpad was less user-friendly than you’d wish, and the app was oftentimes very slow to connect, but all that could be fixed in future software releases. Unfortunately, it was designed by people lacking fundamental knowledge about biking. You see, the Ellipse is not water resistant, let alone water proof. If you lock your bike outside in rain — and I’m talking rain here, not “downpour”, “cats-and-dogs” or “torrents” — the lock could stop working. During the research for this post, I came in contact with many frustrated customers and one happy one. The frustrated customers had either been waiting months or years for their Ellipse, or had an Ellipse that had stopped working.

It turns out that not only is the Ellipse not water resistant. Lattis, the company behind it, is also run by people with a Soup Nazi view of customers and customer service. It seems like instead of fulfilling backer shipments and pre-orders from their website, Lattis sold units to Amazon, REI and Best Buy. At this point some backers have been waiting close to three years. The latest post on Lattis’ Facebook page is from May 3, 2017 and the 44 comments are far from happy. Most are from angry customers who have yet to receive their product, or from frustrated customers whose locks have stopped working. They all have one thing in common: Lattis is not responding to their e-mails. Those with hardware issues who get responses get tips that I can only classify as stalling, like “charge the unit for 72 hours”. If those tips fail, and you’re lucky enough to get a response, they recommend using an angle grinder to get the lock off, something which several people had to do —some without getting a refund. Indeed, if you complain that the company isn’t responding to e-mails on Twitter, you get blocked. This project is obviously not a scam, as products have been shipped to some backers and at least Amazon has them in stock. I think Hanlon’s Razor is a good start to explain what happened: “Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.” The only reason I can think of for selling products to retailers or directly through Amazon (Lattis own Amazon seller account lists the Ellipse as “in stock”) instead of fulfilling pre-orders and promises to backers, is that Lattis’ is in a rather dire financial situation. Another sign of cash-flow trouble is that Lattis’ seems to have been more well-staffed until May this year, when their social media accounts got semi-frequent updates and customers at least got a reply from support. Taking cash from backers, and then selling the product wholesale to retailers instead of fulfilling backer promises is a desperate move that has been attempted before, by Coolest Cooler. If Lattis indeed is in financial trouble, there’s a risk they will tank — which soon would render the app unusable. If the amount of people with water damage I stumbled across during my quick investigation is any indication, a lot of Ellipses will be bricked by rain, their owners left with no other option than to use an angle grinder to get them off.

Yeah But Meh

Example projects in this category: Scanadu Scout, Grid.io, Noke

A category right in between Hedgehog-cake and Just as promised, just not on time. These are products I would not recommend to a friend, even if the friend was an unlikeable acquaintance who was flush with cash and desperate. They deserve their own category because they overpromise and underdeliver, often trying to make up for the inevitable delays most, if not all, crowdfunded tech projects encounter, by promising an even better product. However, the projects in this category did deliver.

Scanadu Scout is dangerously close to being Hedgehog-cake, because the Scout is no longer working. During their crowdfunding campaign on Indiegogo, the promise was:

The Scanadu Scout is designed to be a medical grade Tricorder® using your smartphone and Bluetooth LE to emulate an Emergency Room in your pocket.

To be fair, they did add the following caveat:

Our first iteration of the Scanadu Scout does not perform all the actions necessary for the Tricorder X-prize, but we are well on our way.

What pushed the Scout into this category rather than Hedgehog-cake was the fact that they did deliver, and it did work. Kind of. It is very unclear how accurate it was, or how the data helped Scanadu considering they never asked owners of the Scout to verify the numbers in any way. Nor did they care much for users, not even supplying a user driven forum. Based on the sentiments of the members of the Facebook Group Scanadu Scout Users the device was not accurate. For some it was way over values, for some it was way under. What’s worse is that it wasn’t consistent in its errors. I’m not sure in which way the data gathered was valuable to Scanadu, but the fact that they moved the goalposts for the campaign and ended up shutting down and bricking all the units although the company still exists, is a bad sign for future endeavors. The impression I have of Scanadu is that of that friend who only calls you when they need to borrow money, help with moving or a couch to sleep on — and when you call them to ask for a small return favor, they don’t even bother to respond.

Grid.io made very bold promises:

“AI websites that design themselves”

“The layout will adapt and change based on [your goal, whether it is gaining followers, getting clicks, video views, crowdfunding, or a handful of other options]”

“Colors are picked out of the images that you upload, algorithmically ordered, and matched together. Shapes are added around certain types of content and images are cropped perfectly.”

They had a goal of 3,000 founding members and blew way past it, getting 11,000. The inevitable delays were blamed on ambitions to deliver something slightly more astonishing and outstanding than originally promised. The result? Here’s a screenshot of a couple sites designed using Grid.io, and I’ll let them speak for themselves:

Noke promised to be “the world’s smartest padlock”. It’s a low bar compared to traditional padlocks, but the unfortunate thing for Noke is that it barely passes it. I paired my with my phone, and didn’t use it for a while when I brought it to the gym. As I stood there in my work out clothes, with all my stuff in my locker, I realized that the app for some reason or other required a data connection to unlock the Noke. Unfortunately, there was no cell coverage in the locker room. I had to run out and get the wifi password, but even then, the shackle turned out to be too thick to fit in the doors at the gym. Neither did the Noke fit the lock in my storage unit in my apartment building. Perhaps it is that the standards in the US are different than those in Sweden, where I live, but that only explains it — it doesn’t excuse it.

The shackle of the Noke, that doesn’t fit in Assa’s locks, compared to a regular padlock.

Just as promised, just not on time

Example projects in this category: G-RO, Avegant Glyph, Cubetto

These projects delivered more or less what they promised, even if most of them didn’t deliver on time. Except for Cubetto, which perhaps is the most well-run Kickstarter tech project I’ve backed. Not only did they deliver on time, they also delivered a very solid product that fulfilled, if not exceeded, all expectations. It’s a toy built for kids’ play, it’s educational and it’s fun. One key ingredient here is that it’s wasn’t cheap.

The Glyph from Avegant also deserves a mention. It is “a mobile personal theater with built in premium audio”. It looks like over-ear headphones, where the shackle is worn over your eyes. Using an array of mirrors, a low-powered LED and optics, it creates the illusion of a large display at a comfortable distance. It connects to any source with an HDMI out, and if you combine it with an iPhone, a lightning-to-HDMI-adapter and Netflix’ offline mode you have a system that you can use pretty much anywhere. I’ve also successfully used the Glyph during many gaming hours on my Xbox without having to hog the TV or having to get a second one for the few times my wanting to play collides with my boyfriend’s wanting to watch a series or a movie.