Why We Cancelled Our Kickstarter And Funded It Ourselves
needwant.comIt doesn't look like they were going to make their funding goal. I know that a lot of money comes in on the final 2-3 days, but unless they had a pile of friends and family ready to throw in, the projections don't look good.
They also say that they decided to cancel just 10 days into the campaign, but it looks like they actually cancelled on Nov 14th (day 24) with just 7 days remaining (and at less than 50% funded).
None of that invalidates what they've written and what they gained from running a Kickstarter, but it seems like they're spinning it that they killed what was going to be a successful campaign.
http://www.kicktraq.com/projects/marshallhaas/201552485/#cha...
Get all of the hype and exposure that a Kickstarter campaign gives without having to pay them their cut. Makes sense.
And even after using Kickstarter for promotion, they're milking the story for more promotion (how we used kickstarter, oh, btw, we have this cool product).
And I see they're still using the Kickstarter branded video. Is that hosted by Kickstarter too? Even if they made the video, they should revert to an unbranded (or self-branded) video in what is obviously a promotional article.
I agree with drakaal's comment below [1] that Kickstarter is going to need to protect themselves against such exploitation.
I don't think many people are worried about the 5% Kickstarter cut. Jon and Marshal were probably more interested in having users signed up with their service (which kickstarter wouldn't guarantee)
It depends what country you're in and there's also the credit card processing % fee.
Do you really think the cancellation was premeditated? That's what your comment seems to imply.
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!
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.
It doesn't matter whether it was premeditated if the end result is the same. They're still arguably screwing Kickstarter here (do Kickstarter get anything at all for their side of the work?)
Is that the only factor that matters (whether it was premeditated)? The ultimate effect is still that KS doesn't get a cut.
Either way, it's pretty genius in a flappy bird way.
Also, the article states that Fundizer did the PR work for a 7% cut of whatever funds where raised... Seems disingenuous to back out after Fundizer did their-work unless they paid them 7% of what they would have raised.
> Fundzinger had a clause in their contract that if you for any reason cancel the project before the end of the campaign, they would bill you at their hourly rate.
> For Fundzinger, we got on the phone with them and explained the situation in detail. They were more than understanding, and offered a deal that worked for us.
Well said. nothing to add. Perfect play.
For anyone that needs a DIY preorder site, there's the lockitron selfstarter project
Kickstarter takes a lot of money for basically delivering hype. I think KS really should have rules/terms that prevent you from canceling after certain things happen.
Press like covering KickStarter. It is a validation that the product is "obtainable" as opposed to a pie in the sky press release from a company that something might come out someday. KS takes a big cut for what they deliver, but they do deliver it, so they should protect that model more fiercely than they do.
That said... If I were shipping a physical thing I would just use Amazon and do Pre-orders instead. Doing a KickStarter can preclude you from many retail stores, and Home Shopping. If your product is awesome you'd likely be better to be in those places instead. If your product kind of sucks, making a splash on KS can get you easy money early. I can think of several products that this has happened with (a talking bear, a video game console...)
But what it all boils down to is you have to decide if hype is what you need, or distribution. If you have a solid product you don't need hype.
you can be sure KS team is discussing a policy change after this incident.
I use notebooks, notepads, blanks sheets of paper, Japanese A5 and A5 notepads, and Pilot Frixion erasable pens.
I do mostly writing, and also diagramming (I'm a software developer) with the odd doodle and 3-d house.
I'm very picky about pens, very picky about paper.
I also definitely want to keep my notebooks.
I do not want all this stuff digitized. At all.
What I do digitize, I convert carefully, taking care to craft it as well for pixels as I did for paper.
So, your not a potential customer for Mod Notebook, which is fine. But that doesn't really add anything to this discussion :)
Watching the video on the site, they seem to think that all geeks want their stuff digitized. I'm a geek (I even have pasty white skin) and I don't want some of my stuff digitized.
I am very sorry for down voting you, it was a complete accident, my mouse slipped, and now I can't undo my action.
No worries, I upvoted it for you.
I added an extra up vote just in case that's what he was attempting.
Also, I wanted to up vote the comment either way.
What about confidentiality and privacy?
Love it, but some of my notes are highly confidential. Obviously, I could use a separate notebook, but is there any thought towards privacy or assurance from these guys that no one is reading these notebooks when they're digitized? The video makes it look like a fairly manual process. Ordered one anyway to try it out.
Quite exactly what I thought. And even assuming they somehow managed to achieve a good/strong isolation from prying eyes/anonymization of the paper they have to handle inside their shop, there's still the fact that you're sending these notebooks through good knows what channels - one might suppose one must raised quite high suspicions so that your mail is intercepted; I wouldn't be so sure about that with recent revelations.
But even worse; mail can and a few times gets lost, be it of the electronic or physical nature. And you don't have a copy in your sent folder in this case, and you can't reorder nor have someone resend another item.
I really, really like the idea of a digitizing/digized notebook, and I do agree that something that beats paper and pen has yet to be invented (can it even?). I would however preferred a device or solution that I could set up or use at home.
This brings up some ideas.
You are in a room that resembles an office. In front of you, there is a screen displaying some orange toned website with a lot of text. To your right, there is a shiny apple product. It might be a computer mouse. To your left, there is a scanner, a notebook and a pen. >_You should never release highly confidential documents to unapproved entities, even if they pinky swear they won't read them. Almost certainly violates your NDA if you signed one.
>"We’d kill the subscription model..."
I tend to be wary of any service with ongoing running costs sold as a one-time fee.
As long as new sales exceed the cost of servicing the existing population everything is fine. Once that relationship reverses all bets are off.
That said, I like this idea and $25 is a better price point that I would have expected.
> I tend to be wary of any service with ongoing running costs sold as a one-time fee
Well, they aren't really charging a one time fee, they're charging per notebook.
>"Well, they aren't really charging a one time fee, they're charging per notebook."
Sure, a one time fee per notebook. The "per" doesn't make it a different model.
I think the closest analogy is pay-per-minute cell phones. No automatically renewing bill, but they do get recurring income from people who keep using it. Call it a one time fee per notebook if you want to, it's still a revenue stream per user than can keep them in business as long as users are using and replacing notebooks.
So the important nuance regarding your previous comment is that "new sales" doesn't mean "new users." You could run a stable business off of this with a steady user base, unlike a pay once use forever model.
This feels like a better bet for them than subscriptions. I certainly wouldn't have been interested in their previous model, but now I am.
The solution is obviously to have 2 tiers, a subscription model for heavy users and a per book model for light users.
What are the ongoing running costs though? Serving the scanned images? Sure, but if the only way to add more data to that bucket is to keep buying notebooks, that should be fairly safe. The hosting costs should be very low compared to the price of the notebook. And if you continue accessing your files, you're likely to want to buy more notebooks.
Are they hosting the images? I assumed it was relying on Dropbox/Evernote/OneNote, or at most a limited time drop.
They have their own app which integrates with dropbox/evernote/onenote for user conveneince
This is such an interesting experience, especially with canceling to what seemed to be a promising kickstarted campaign. I am glad you killed the subscription based model and are now selling it simply as a product.
Agree 100%. The subscription model is nice for a business but for an individual it's death by 1,000 cuts. Think about all the things you're paying monthly subscription fees for... Netflix, Hulu, XM radio, Spotify, Gamefly, Xbox live, your MMO of choice, cell phone, hosting your VPS, internet access, cable/satellite, of course not to mention rent/mortgage, electricity, water/sewer, etc.
So many services are competing for your $10-$100/month these days it's ridiculous. Let me own something. Let me pay you one time and be done (hello, Amazon Prime!).
Once I gather my thoughts I'm going to write about the end of the monthly subscription. Personally I think much harder about a $10/month subscription than a $25 "one"-time purchase; I wonder if we've reached an inflection point where most people do, or if most still see it as "only a couple bucks a month"?
That's because a $10/month subscription is likely $60 at a minimum. $3/month like Pandora or $1/month like WhatsApp are better comparisons for a 1-time $25 charge.
XM radio?? Is that still alive? I haven't heard anyone mention that in years. I guess it still is.
Yeah, it's "Sirius XM radio" now, and I got used to it when it came 90 days free with my car. So now I pay something like $8/month to listen to it.
I wonder if the notebooks are stripped to bare sheets, scanned and then re-built as a new notebook with proper bindings for sending back.
I don't see any other way of doing this that would keep it efficient.
Maybe we should go back to scrolls. In the future, users will simply feed their Draft scroll into their printer, like how punch-tapes were fed into the mainframes of old.
We've yet to train any adorable animals to do the scanning for us :(
The article does cover this.
They mention that they realized users wanted the notebooks back, but I didn't see any details on how they would do this. It's left as a problem to solve.
They solved it. Mod Notebooks gives you the option to have your notebook back.
The reason they couldn't do it was because the company doing the scanning could not scan it non-destructively. Very likely, they just switched to another company.
You're addressing something avenger123 never asked. They are asking HOW the process happens, considering removing the binding is the most efficient way to accurately scan them as far as we are aware.
It looks like he never asked it because he edited his original comment.
I don't know what you mean. My original comment remains unchanged. I understand Google used special machines to scan books and was wondering if its the same sort of tech involved. I'm sure the size of the notebook has something to do with the tech they are using to accomplish this.
Very interesting piece to read about their thought process - and a very interesting product that I had not heard about before.
If I was in the US, I would buy it.
If they get international shipping (EU) at say an extra 10 bucks and no return shipping, I would still consider it, but I fear the cost of shipping + added turnaround time would make it a much less attractive value proposition.
Livescribe pen been on the market for years. It's good and you do not have to wait for 5(!) days for digitized version - it's there automatically. Could you please explain me, why would you want to use service like Modnotebooks? Am I missing something?
Livescribe just picks up "you drew a line here". For an artist, this is not enough. You need to pick up how hard the line was drawn, you need to pick up pulling out colored pencils or markers or paint and poking at your sketchbook that way.
I personally don't do much finished work in my sketchbook - I'm all about Illustrator - but a lot of my friends still love traditional media, and will casually whip out something amazing in their sketchbook because it's what they have to work on when the urge strikes.
Artists are an extreme example, a non-artist still might be using multiple colors for their notes and whatnot.
At least for me, my Livescribe has a learning curve to it. Plus it doesn't feel as natural to write in and with compared to a plain notebook. Again, this is just how I feel, but the Mod notebooks seem to place more emphasis on the design and quality of notebook compated to livescribe.
Is there a HN thread where we can discuss this service and ask questions/debate the merits? I'd do it here but it feels inappropriate as the thread is more about Kickstarter and not the core product/service.
Ditto. How about in this thread?
I was watched the video waiting for some big reveal, but was sort of let down by the offering. The site says more about the notebook's quality than the OCR/digitization, which is what I was more interested in.
Why would an scanning service even get into the notebook business?
There are a LOT of different notebooks to choose from out there, and for anyone who cares enough to use this service in the first place, it's probably a pretty personal decision what notebook to use.
I checked out their webapp. "Try it out. No registration required." Then you click and it brings you to a login page. It took me a second to realize that login and password were actually pre-filled, but for a second I was pissed off that they lied to me :-)
The webapp is very pretty but slow. The thumbnails are nice, but scrolling through full-screen images is painfully slow. There doesn't appear to be any OCR going on, so no way to search, and no way to do post-scan annotations.... Isn't that the whole product?
Maybe they really just wanted to make notebook :-)
> Why would an scanning service even get into the notebook business?
Because they are producing special notebooks that work with their business model, that have the proper bindings so they can easily get the pages out of them. For example, They probably even have a machine that does it for them, or special tools. Furthermore, it allows the cost to be consistent, otherwise they would have to charge per page and the user might not be aware of how many pages are in their notebook, so they might not know the cost ahead of time. I have a notebook at home and I can't even fathom a guess as to how many pages it is, I am sure that the sticker or whatever was on it when I bought it told me, but that is long gone. It also allows them to only process orders that are cost effective for them - minimum page requirements, consistent cost, pages that are optimal for their scanners, they know exactly what is going to come in, known cost of shipping so they can know exactly the amount of postage they have to pay, etc.
It's probably pretty difficult to do OCR/digitization for a bunch of different types of notebooks efficiently, but I totally agree. I personally use Field Notes because of their soft backs and small form factor, but I would love to get them digitized and put in my Dropbox.
Instead they're just sitting in a drawer. I don't want to have to use Mod Notebooks just to keep paper notes forever.
I was hoping for a pen that simultaneously puts ink on the page and also tracks exactly what you write/draw and uploads it every minute or so. It'd probably be too difficult to do that with a tactile sensor, so perhaps a tiny camera could be used instead?
I assume neither of those are very practical at the moment, otherwise a company would've tried it already.
They do exist ( http://www.livescribe.com/en-us/smartpen/ ) but I have no idea if they're any good. You have to use their pen and their paper… I like my Field Notes and Lamy.
Do they bother to inform us how many pages each notebook contains? 10? 100? Seems pretty fundamental to me.
Had a dig around their twitter account, apparently 60 pages
I agree, pretty fundamental bit of info to omit
I'm personally interested in when Kickstarter makes sense, vs. one's own self-hosted presales site. Does anyone have any thoughts on this?
It seems like Kickstarter makes more sense for smaller projects, but the 15% cut and inflexibility (no bitcoins, no bulk sales, etc.) might be a bigger issue for larger projects.
The "virality" part of KS is nice, but it doesn't seem like a huge percentage of orders. The "all or nothing" part reassures people, but for a YC company or other respected entity, you could just make the same promise.
The "artificial deadline" part is nice, though.
In case you missed it, there was a plug of a fulfillment company www.monthlyboxer.com
Does anyone have experience to share about fulfilment companies in general? What costs per shipment should one expect?
I associate Draft with Nathan Kontny's wonderful stuff https://draftin.com/about
(edit) I see it's been renamed! Should have gone past the banner image!
I just tried to buy, but you don't ship to Canada :-( Any plans to change that?
Hey! I run MonthlyBoxer.com and we're doing fulfillment for Mod. Would you be willing to pay an extra $10 for shipping each way? If so, I can talk to Jon and Marshall about it. It's not any harder on my end, and I think their shop can handle variable pricing for different countries.
Very eager to get one. When are you opening up orders to Canada?
Do these people ever heard of screenshots?
Taking photos of your screen in oblique orientations introduces horrible artifacts. Just don't do it!
If they'd put a full-bleed screenshot at the very top of the page, it would have looked like part of the page and potentially made the page harder to navigate and understand. In this case, the photo of the screen is used as an illustration of their Kickstarter campaign, not something you're actually meant to look at/understand.