The interesting non-game Kickstarter thread.

The IRS thing can be 100% planned for. There's no good reason for it to be "unexpected." Note that "Too lazy to draft a comprehensive business plan" does not count as a good reason.

Unexpected demand in excess of one's ability to handle said demand is a legitimate issue. That said, Kickstarter already has a mechanism in place that allows project developers to limit the number of backers that they will accept, if they want to.

(I guess I should clarify that technically, it's a means of limiting the number of rewards that you will give out, not the amount of backing that you will accept. But it amounts to the same thing).

All those people have those problems for one reason: they asked for them.

People already have the ability to essentially stop their kickstarter when it gets funded. You want $10,000 and you are making a watch you plan to sell at $125 full retail? Set up a kickstarter that takes funding with no perks, then levels of funding with virtual perks ("thank you"s and such) and then a level where the perk is you get the watch for $100 limited to 100 backers. When you run out of watches, your backing will slow down, and most importantly you won't be required to make more than 100 watches.

But, the people running the kickstarters get swept up in the excitement, and start throwing out stretch goals, and - in my opinion - don't actually consider what it's going to take to fulfill those extra perks.

And yes, like Bahimiron said, if they go in without considering the slices they'll owe, that again is their own fault.

Just to clarify: I did, and every one of those problems is the fault of the project creator, not Kickstarter. The last one is arguably a mix of bad luck and bad planning, but still not a problem with Kickstarter, in any way whatsoever. Some of them, like the screenprinting guy, are examples of absurdly bad planning. That's one case where he should have known that he could only produce a finite number of hand-made screen prints in the time frame he promised, and he should have limited his rewards accordingly. The 3D printing one is also pretty odd. The IRS took $300K of $860K, and now there's "very little money left?" How does that math work?

Again, clearly a case of terri-bad planning.

Terribad is one word. That will be $330,000.

I did a Kickstarter earlier this year to fund the creation of a hyphenated version of the word. I'd let you in on it, but it's already funded.

I guess you didn't see their "view all" feature.

Not until later. Kinda non-obvious.

For all the problems of the OotS Kickstarter, I got my order in what I consider a reasonable amount of time. That's the difference between a professional (Rich Burlew) and the others, I guess.

There were problems with the OotS kickstarter? Went swimmingly from my end.

Tons of problems. Rich posted about them over and over again! Delays all over the place.

From his perspective, judged against his standards. Which are clearly very, very high. I imagine that Howard Taylor is one of the few other webcomics guys who would be at all displeased with how it went.

Yeah same for me, no issues with OotS - and I'm overseas and I backed it twice for two different lots of stuff. I'm even thinking of buying some other books (reprints of online comics) I didn't get when they hit the store again.

Rich Burlew has been very professional in keeping everyone up to date when stuff is happening, and being very careful not to overpromise. I got the distinct impression throughout he was very careful to plan and budget what he could offer as stretch goals, getting quotes from suppliers etc before putting the goal out there.

One thing most of the kickstarter people fail to do properly is actually realise how difficult procurement is - packaging, delivering several thousand articles is a big job. OotS / Rich Burlew already have an existing procurement partner (ookoodook.com) which probably helped

Most of the other just seem to get big truckfulls of shit delivered to their garage instead of just outsourcing the procurement stuff to a specialist mail house. Even in Australia (when I worked at a mailhosue) we could do some of the packages for something like $1- $2 per piece + postage/packaging. Mailhouses normally get packaging and postage WAY cheaper than schmoes off the street too (not that you necessarily pass on all those savings.. ;-)

That said, the Banner saga looked like one of those classic "OH MY GOD MY GARAGE IS FULL OF DIRTY REAL WORK BOXES, WTF THIS IS GOING TO TAKE DAYS" and I still got my poster in reasonable time. Although the mailing tube they used was WAY bigger than required, they could have saved a fair bit of coin there.

Pebble doesnt sound like a failure either. "The company went from three staffers to 10 and had to hire outside customer support." umm, so doing the right thing and manning up, including hiring outside support where it makes sense is bad because?

The guy complaining about having to customer support all the time should do the same - hire outside support.

This really does sound like kick starter enabling those who fail to plan properly to , well fail. I hope guys like Rich Burlew manage to keep 10- 15% at least of the pledged totals in profits, they deserve it.

All my other recently kickstarted stuff is digitial - Shadow run, banner saga, xenonauts, dead state and Wasteland. When one of the "big" kickstarted games fails, it will be huge news everywhere!

Although I am looking at the reaper minis....

I read all those updates as they came through to me (as a backer) and didn't see them as "problems". I more read it as Rich doing good customer service and keeping us all updated on how things were going, instead of just being silent for weeks.

Looking forward to all the digital PDF stuff as it comes out as well.

Budgeting for KS is kinda hard - well, hard for me.

For example. Imagine a book. You can get 1,000 copies printed and shipped to the US for 4,000. Art will cost 5,000. Shippjng, $3 an item. How many book-level rewards will you sell? How many "book + art in book" rewards (at a much higher cost) will you sell (the rest will eventually sell through Amazon, but will see a cut removed by publisher, which is ok since if the KS is funded they are kinda pure profit)? How many ebook only copies will you sell? How much should you KS for?

It can be tricky.... And I am fishing for tips!

I think I priced it out and Rich was charging more than retail for at least some of the packs. And he pretty explicitly stated that the purpose of the kickstarter was not just as a pre order but also to get the books in print for other stores. I think he will be doing okay on the money side.

The only real roadblock he hit was that ookoodook could only pack about 300 packages a day and he had around 10000.

I don't know why Rich is on that list. He's done an awesome job of meeting demand and he set expectations upfront perfectly. I knew that based on the success, I wasn't going to be getting my books for a few months. And that was OK by me.

Holy shit, the ostrich pillow got funded.

Really needs a pic:

This EEG-controlled helicopter looks really cool, and I want to send them money. But I thought this sort of technology was at least five years away, and that makes me a little nervous. Like I remember the stuff for locked in syndrome was using electrodes directly implanted into the brain, and sleep researchers basically cover people's heads with monitoring devices to measure brain wave activity.

Has anyone ever tried the NeuroSky EEG hardware they're using?

I've just backed Star Trek Renegades \O/

May the Force be with you.

- Malcolm Reynolds

'Well, this space man is going home. Lock up the women and hide the fried chicken!'

To Be Or Not To Be: That Is The Adventure

Would you want Hamlet in the form of a chooseable-path adventure adapted by the creator of Dinosaur Comics?

What if I told you it would have illustrations like this?

I realize that by getting a ton of popular webcomic artists he makes it a BIG PROJECT FOR THE COMMUNITY and he gets LOTS OF NAMES so that EVERYONE WILL RECOGNIZE LIKE ONE OR TWO PEOPLE and also HE DOESN'T HAVE TO PAY ANYONE ALL THAT MUCH and also it will GET FREE ADVERTISING FUCKING EVERYWHERE, but man, I'd be more interested if it was really Kate Beaton all the way through. Or even KC Green. But hearing that the XKCD guy is doing a page or two? Might as well change the above post to...

Anyway, I love Ryan North so I'll probably eventually check it out. Lord knows they don't need my money right now, though.

The abundance of Kate Beaton art does seem to be misleading but I'll support it still. It would be awesome though if it was just Kate Beaton.

GRAVITY LIGHT.
This is wonderful.



http://www.indiegogo.com/projects/282006

So it's just stealing centuries old technology from the cuckoo clock and using it to power an LED. What I don't get is how a cuckoo clock can run for hours without needing to be wound but this only runs for 30 minutes?

A cuckoo clock (or even a grandfather clock) is completely mechanical whereas the LED light has some electronic bits? I imagine that part of the energy is lost from converting from mechanical energy to electricity.

And from electrical energy to light.

This is one of those things that seems like an easy and flip thing to say from someone who didn't come up with the idea. I think that the idea of a portable light source for areas of the world where electricity is hard to come by is pretty amazing.

I wasn't trying to down play it or its ingenuity, I didn't mean for the comment come off that way.

This is totally fucking awesome.

Cups and straws that change color if a rufie is added to the drink.

http://www.indiegogo.com/DrinkSavvy

While impressive, it makes me so fucking sad that this is even necessary.

This thing has been plagued with delays but they think they will be shipping in January. :( I guess I'll get to use it for a few months before I'm due for an upgrade.

I'm sure you're all relieved that Larry Elmore's coffee table book is now funded. This means awesome stretch goals like buying his unsold art at exorbitant prices (including the choice King Author painting not my typo) and going on motorcycle ride with him (BYOM!) through the scenic foothills of Kentucky.

I think we all remember how much we enjoyed the bonus social marginalization that only ludicrously terrible art can incite as we tried to read the books with his covers with all the subtlety of a dirty old man at church with a Hustler. It's time to begin the cycle again with your own offspring!

Someone pledged $10k to that. Oh my.

The Drive may only interest the Canadians here, mire specifically the Vancouver peeps. A series chronicalling the lives of a bunch of 30 somethings on Vancouvers Commercial Drive. It's about $600 away from being funded with 5 days to go.

In the interests of full disclosure, the guy doing the music for this is a friend of mine.

Me and Dan go waaaaaaay back, so I gatta pimp his NNN hardcover project. Angie will back me on this, ya?

This is new, and pretty cool:
http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/dwighthouser/gekko-stand-universal-and-adjustable-nanosuction-s

A phone/tablet holder that isn't just a wildly overpriced plate stand.

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/unfetteredent/misfit-heights

A Zombie Puppet Musical, I saw it at GenCon 2012 and enjoyed it quite a bit.

I want one. I want one at $20, not $30. That's more than I payed for my case on my phone.