“Prove me Wrong” Kickstarter Campaign
I just submitted a new campaign to Kickstarter where I ask backers to prove me wrong. The larger story is that I think the new Orison Power System Kickstarter is destined to crash and burn like way too many others have. My campaign is an experiment to see if anything can be done before everyone looses. My past efforts to intervene in crash and burn crowdfunded tech have been painfully ineffective, so I will keep trying new stuff until I get it right!
I tried to meticulously comply with all of Kickstarter’s rules in this campaign, so hopefully it will get approved. If not, at least the reject reasons should be interesting.
The ball is in your court, Kickstarter!
UPDATE (1/28/2016):
Your project, Help Prove Me Wrong about Orison!, has been declined.
:(
Not unexpected, but still disappointing and unsatisfying. The appeal was also summarily rejected with prejudice.
I got the iFind cancelled by Kickstarter a day or two before they got to run off with $500k of backer’s money. Strategy was to show it was impossible (battery-free energy-harvesting BLE locator tag) then email a bunch of popular sites (Slashdot, The Register,etc) with the info, they were happy to pick it up, and that in turn pressured KS (who were nice enough to send me a friendly email saying thanks). It can be done!
That’s a lot of work for each and every sour Kickstarter- and there are a lot of them! I was hoping to start a conversation about how to make this problem self-correcting by balancing incentives. Kickstarter would have nothing of it, a policy that I think will eventually start to really hurt the platform. I’ve already heard several non-tech people mention casually that they will never back another Kickstarter again because of a bad experience.
And and spring 2018 lands, so do the updates to the Orison web site…
Orison is
available for purchase. Orison isestimated to be commercially availableSummer 2018early 2019.Funny, the site now says “Orison is estimated to be commercially available Q1 2020.”
I’m surprised I don’t see a lot of bloggers or news sites talking about where all the money has gone and what is happening with their original target.
I’m SOOO waiting on someone to create and mass-produce Josh’s “Solar In A Box”!
…and, 4 years after their promised delivery date, we now see stuff that must be installed in the service panel…
So we still do not know if Orison will ever ship, or what they will ship; if they do – but we do know that it will not be plug and play.
5 long years have now passed since the ship date. Even assuming they shipped today what was promised back then, there is still the opportunity costs on $350,000 of backers’ money. But, of course, there is no way they will ever ship what was promised back then. I really tried to prevent this. Was there something different I could have done? :(