Comment by antr | Hacker News Reader

Comment by antr | Hacker News Reader

This is a great example of a startup not running their numbers due to the lack of a business plan, running the numbers post-Kickstarter campaign after thousands of people have pledged and millions of dollars raised, and finding out that their economics do not add up.

Now they are backpedalling on their promise, leaving 95% of their current/future customers with a really bad experience. Had it been a SaaS business, I don't think this issue would have escalated as much, but given a sense of "ownership" is involved, users are not that happy; and it's understandable. Add to that that users don't have their encryption keys, but SpaceMonkey, a US company, has them... both issues mixed make a great backlash cocktail.

I personally see this business opportunity as one BitTorrent Inc. should make the most of it. They know the protocol, they have the distribution, surely there must be an off-the-shelf a la RPi solution, with great reliability/redundancy that could be taken mainstream.

We haven't backpedalled on anything. The original rewards offered on Kickstarter stand. We will honor all backer rewards as originally offered.

We simply believe that the offering we are now giving to new customers is better in most ways than the one we gave to Kickstarter backers, so we wanted to let them in on the sweet action too, at their choice.

And to say thanks for backing us early, we threw in an extra 6 months of service ($60 value under their current plan), free, if they took us up on the offer.

We thought we were being cool about this, and the vast majority of our Kickstarter backers do think we are being cool about it, voting in support of this offer with their very real dollars by upgrading.

Those who are upset by this offer are very few in number, and we've offered refunds to all of them.

What else do you think we should do?

Not mentioning on the campaign that the device is a lease, rental, etc., and now saying it is, to me, is backpedalling. Add to that the fact that SpaceMonkey never mentioned the cost of the plan post-1 year during the entire campaign, and months after. From the outside that comes across as if the entire cost structure was to be determined, and it sure seems to me that that was the case.

The very first sentence of the Kickstarter page says, "Space Monkey is the next generation cloud. For $10 per month, you get a full Terabyte (1000 Gigabytes) of storage you can use anywhere, any time."

Having a $/month service on top of hardware does not change the nature of ownership. Mixing hardware and network seems to be a constant with SpaceMonkey's communication strategy. I'm sure that a law student could show how none of the KS campaign qualifies as a rental/lease offer.

I know the Space Monkey guys from working together at Mozy and I can vouch that they wouldn't be deliberately misleading about this.

Yes but that doesn't clear up the ownership vs lease issue.

Your argument is that the lease is implied, @emil10001's is that ownership is implied - I can read the page both ways.

The whole problem seems to stem from the lack of an explicit statement on this - perhaps it should have been in the FAQs?

Yep, at this point, I'm wondering about my ability to wipe the device before I send it back for a refund.

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