Kickstarter launches in the UK with hundreds of new projects ready for funding
thenextweb.com
thenextweb.com
They're not a shop, as the things are not ready yet (and may never be), and you're not really investing because you don't get any ownership of the company (however small). So selfishly I've started to wonder what's in it for me. It benefits me if I just wait to see if the thing comes to market, then I can buy it without the possibility of it never surfacing.
As it is I feel a bit torn about the idea of acting as a crowdsourced bank for a business but not getting the returns of an actual investor. I can see why it's appealing for the business though.
You get more for your pledge than you would just purchasing the product. e.g. the product is offered cheaper to pledgers or comes in a limited edition. Kickstarter will only continue to work if project creators offer something extra to pledgers. A lot of people seem to be using it as a pre-order service to help fund development. They need to offer more, realising that people are taking a risk by funding them.
I agree- a pledge is not a purchase. But you need to do the mental math for the project. e.g. I would get 20% more. But I think the project is only 80% likely to ship. And the project founder is cool so I'd give them a few bucks anyway.
They should make this their motto. The Kickstarter model is fine, they just need to better communicate just what that model is to their users.
It's also probably a bit less exciting than pledges and gifts.
The second is that in addition to the whole pre-order thing I'm using my money to send a message to the market at large. Basically its my way of saying I want these sort of products/companies to exist. Even if this group of people fail to deliver, hopefully other will see that there is a market there and someone else will pick up where this particular group failed.
Now if they were selling shares (as well, instead?) I might be more interested.
The only reason I don't use S3 is because, as a very small time user, I don't want my foreign transaction fees to be larger than the S3 fees.
However, brilliant news for people who weren't able to circumvent the system. Still surprised (and happy) it came to the UK before Canada.
I will admit I checked to see if they were using stripe.js but they're not.