Kickstarter website is a scam!
I recently checked out a website called Kickstarter. The entire premise implied by this site seems quite bogus to me. They claim to be a website that attracts funding to help people with creative projects. They claim the site is meant to help artists, writers, designers (of all kinds!), filmmakers, musicians, journalists, athletes, adventurers, inventors, bloggers, illustrators, explorers, curators, promoters, performers, and others.
The idea is that a person wants to do something (make a movie, produce a music cd, publish a book… whatever. You come up with a project plan to attract donations, funding, pledges. You provide rewards to contributors based on how much they pledge. Lets say you want to create a line of products (calendars, t-shirts, bumper stickers) for a specific theme (nature, politics…). What you do is offer rewards to people who contribute to your project. Maybe they give $10, and you reward with a bumper sticker, $25 and they get the t-shirt… and so on.
Nice idea right? Sure, if they actually had an environment that provided an audience of potential donors…. but they don’t. Absolutely no where on their website do they say “bring your own donors”, but that is exactly what they will tell you to do. They want you to have a healthy size list of contacts. This includes social networking sites like facebook, friendster, myspace, message forums… you get the idea. Then…. they want you to encourage dozens or even hundreds of your contacts to join kickstarter to view, and (you guessed it) fund your project.
What do they provide you ask? They will accept your pledges (through Amazon’s payment system), but they will not charge anyone until you reach your goal amount. If you don’t reach your goal, no one gets charged. If you DO reach your goal (or exceed it), everyone’s pledge is processed on Amazon, and THEN…
Kickstarter takes 5% of all donations as a fee!
If you raise $5000, they get $250… $10,000, they get $500…
My question is, what did they do to deserve that fee? Nothing! You join the site, you plan and organize your own project, you create a reward system for donors, you bring your own donors, and if you beg enough of your own contacts for money to reach your goal, kickstarter will take 5% of it just for processing the charges (which is actually handled by Amazon).
So… I bet you are wondering… “couldn’t I just have my contacts, friends, and family write me checks, or use a free basic paypal account (without fees) to collect money for my wonderful project?” Yes you could! You could even promise the same rewards/gifts to people.
So what does kickstarter actually provide? They offer a website for you to show off your idea to everyone you already know, with video or pictures. You could accomplish the exact same thing with a blog, and a basic paypal account. If some of your contacts are local to you, they could just hand you checks.
Is the 5% fee worth it? Only if you are really lazy, which doesn’t make sense if you have a great idea, plan, or project in mind. That in itself takes a lot of effort, so do the work and collect the money yourself.
I have a great idea for a project, so when I found Kickstarter I got excited. I don’t know a lot of people that I would be willing to ask for money from, and the information on Kickstarter.com made me think that their site already had followers willing to donate to good projects. I even had a great set of rewards figured out. I put a lot of thought and planning into my idea, just to use their site. Could you imagine how disappointed I was when they responded to my idea by asking me if I had a good size audience, or list of contacts that I could get to donate to my idea? They even flat out admitted in correspondence to me that they do not provide any audience, donors, or followers.
So I say again, what do they really offer? Nothing!
You do all the work, you bring all the people, they collect all the money and they keep some of it. That is what Kickstarter is all about.
What the internet needs is a site similar to this, but marketed better to truly attract random and anonymous donors to well thought out projects that offer decent rewards to contributors. This would work for anyone, including non-profits. All that would be needed is basic verification of projects seeking larger donation goals. A little fraud prevention, and some simple follow up (to make sure people get their rewards), and THEN I could see charging a fee for the service.
So… before you get excited about kickstarter, or any site like it… if it sounds too good to be true, it probably is. Be optimistic, but be careful too. Trust but verify!
blog bugs…
I recently added a plugin to allow smiles to be used in posts/comments. I modified part of it to use yahoo smilies, but recently discovered a problem. Some of the characters used as the code for the smiley conflict with the actual php/html code in the script. I have started to change the ‘code’ for the smilies, and I believe it’s mostly working now. I will continue to update it.
What I find kind of funny about this, is that I explained the issue to Shin and she instantly geeked-out, and suggested the same solution I was thinking of (changing the codes). She understood the idea that certain characters (like ” or >) might conflict with wordpress if used inside the actual script. SMART GIRL! 
So as I gradually knock out bugs and glitches, hopefully this site will become more fun to visit and use.
OUCH!!
I’m not sure how to say this… but I got shot in the ass this week. Now before you get all freaked out thinking about blood, hospitals, and things like that… it wasn’t ‘that’ kind of a gun. Allow me to explain.
I decided to stop by work at the pizza place this weekend. A couple of teenage co-workers were there as well. I greeted everyone, and was talking when Shin sent me a text message. I grabbed my phone, read the message, and decided to respond. So I turned around, and started to walk away while tapping out a reply on my phone when I heard a *SNAP*!!! The next thing I know, my right butt cheek REALLY FU**ING HURT!
I didn’t know it yet, but I had been shot in the ass with a bb-gun. I quickly turned around, in pain, and everyone was just standing there (the punk teenager managed to stash the bb-gun in his backpack before I looked). Then they all started laughing. It took a minute, but the pain slowly went away, and the twit showed me his bb-gun. It wasn’t the old styled copper metal 2mm projectile bb-gun, this one shot a slightly larger, very HARD plastic bb-ball, that left a very nice red mark on my ass cheek!
The average bb-gun that shot 2mm round copper metal bb’s could fly at about 450fps (feet per second). This is actually enough to kill birds, and other small creatures. His bb-gun can shoot at about 400fps, but thankfully the ‘bb’ itself was plastic, and larger, or I could have ended up with an extra useless HOLE in my ass!
Revenge is wonderful thing…
He apologized several times, but that didn’t stop me from describing all the ways I could get even with him. This included ideas like stun-gunning him (look up taser or stun-gun online). After a while, he was terrified what I would do to get even with him. He even offered to let me throw a pizza dough-ball at his head or punch him in the stomach… anything to settle the score right away. It was priceless.
I really don’t have any plan to get even, at least not in a specific way. I just want to freak him out for a while. I’m gonna have fun with this for weeks
open for business…
Well…. it took less time than I thought it would, but the blog is up and running, and I will soon begin to ramble on about all kinds of things. I may be funny, I may get serious, and I might not make any sense at all. That, my friends, is the joy of blogging
design progress…
Well… I have picked a wordpress theme (for now), and have modified the hell out of it. I am not a theme expert, but I am learning. Its not as freaky as I thought it would be, just a little confusing. The next step is to add ’stuff’ to the side bars, and customize the sidebar content. Maybe a few more color tweaks, and I should be ready to torture anyone willing to read this thing.
So, that’s about it for the moment….
schizophrenic theme hopping…
I realize I have been changing themes more often than some people change underwear, but lets face it… the only theme that will seem right, is the one we design ourselves. However, I don’t know how to design wordpress themes, so that is not gonna happen. My best bet, find one that looks ok… and modify the hell out of it.
Which theme am I talking about?…. who the heck knows… but feel free to come back often and marvel at the total lack of reasonable progress.
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