Funding Plans A & B
I was frankly surprised (and upset, and disappointed, and angry) that Kickstarter rejected my proposal, so I did a little digging to see if I could figure out why.
On their start page, they say:
We’re not screening for taste at all, we only take this step to ensure that no one violates our guidelines
The rejection message I got did indeed make it sound like they were filtering for “taste”, or at least some criteria as subjective and ill-defined as aesthetic taste. But, supposedly, they don’t filter. Which means, if my proposal was rejected, it was because it violated the guidelines.
At the surface level, my proposal seemed to be in compliance. But I dug around their documentation more, and found that one of the rewards I suggested in the proposal was prohibited. In my proposal, among other rewards (like the final product, custom gifts, etc) that were in compliance, I said that I might offer discounts and coupons as rewards, and apparently that’s a no-no. I’m not sure I get it, since I don’t consider coupons and discounts to be “financial incentives” (especially since I planned on offering discounts worth less than the pledge amount) and Amazon Payments doesn’t prohibit them either. In fact, I thought of discounts as fractions of the final product, which I personally would rather get if I were supporting a project.
But, whatever. Their site, their rules. Nonetheless, since the rewards section in the proposal is just that, a proposal, it seems harsh to reject a project just because one of the many suggested items wasn’t allowed. A simple “you can’t do that, revise the proposal” would’ve sufficed, but maybe they’re just overwhelmed, or the person looking at my proposal was having a bad day. Or maybe they’re lying when they say they don’t filter for taste.
So, I thought I’d revise my proposal so that it was in compliance, and try again. Except, I can’t edit the proposal, and I can’t submit a new one because the site says it’s still pending (and they only allow one proposal at a time). I’m not sure what to make of that either. The message I got seemed pretty clear and final. So maybe it’s a bug. Or maybe it’s a way to keep me from submitting any more proposals (it’s not unheard of for sites that handle user generated content to moderate the first piece of content submitted by a user to categorize them as “good” or “bad”).
I sent them a message asking if it was possible to submit a new proposal, but if that doesn’t work, I’ll just create a new account and submit a slightly modified proposal and see if I have any better luck. So, that’s Plan A.
Plan B is a little more drastic: I’ll re-implement Kickstarter myself. At its core, it’s a UI on top of the Amazon Payments API, and the basic functionality won’t be hard to implement. Hell, I’ll probably even make it Open Source, and/or launch a competing service for everybody else who gets rejected by Kickstarter. It’s more work, but I won’t have to play by their rules, and it might even be possible to build an entirely new business out of it. While the Kickstarter model seems like a great idea, they don’t support a lot of common types of fund raising, so I’m pretty sure there are a lot of people who would be interested in using a competing service. And if it were me, I’d just charge a small up-front fee (like $5) to start a campaign, and let anybody use it for any purpose they want (at least, within the Amazon Payments terms of use).
Either way, it’d be great to start the fund raising campaign by Maker Faire next weekend, so that I can tell folks who are interested that they can help make the project reach production by chipping in.
