Part 3: Postmortem of a Kickstarter campaign; Camsformer
By: Date: March 13, 2016 Categories: Other

This is part three!

In Part 1, we looked at the campaign, its press coverage, what the project promised, and why it interested me..  In part 2 we moved onto the first seeds of doubt… Then a silence descended on the project.

… Twenty two days later …

And fifteen pissed off messages from people chasing updates, plus a few expressing concern over the Android (lack of) progress, and other things. Several saying PMs had not been answered. The next update (not to the Updates section but again to the Comments section) :

aug26This felt like a “bet hedging” update; warning people that the app would be crap. The main issue I felt upon reading this was that 22 days and zero response to anybody was beyond a joke. What else was the guy doing? The $78,000 dollars was impossible not to visualise in ways other than “productively employed on the Camsformer“.

Finally Clive posted mentioning that everyone needed to update their addresses in Kickstarter as this would be the source of the postal addresses for shipping. Half a dozen backers chirped in that he needed to do a survey, and that every other project they’d backed had done it this way. Again, the feeling of “clueless” rather than “scam” came to the fore.

And then there was the update that properly caused me to lose my shit :

aug31-1Excuses, excuses. Oh dear we’ve now gone into a Chinese holiday that isn’t our fault. Maybe if it hadn’t been so badly delayed this wouldn’t have happened. That part wasn’t the bit that caused me to lose my shit though… This part was :

aug31-2This part, above, was the part that caused me to lose my shit. After all this bullshit about making the board perfect, testing it etc, otherwise we’d have 400 useless boards, there appears to be a major change proposed. Again, my feeling honestly was, “we’re being set up for a failure; this behaviour is so inept and stupid as to not be credible as ineptitude or stupidity. It has to be deliberately set up to fail.

aug31-3As I say, I lost my shit at this point.

bloorloseshisshit1and, being in a “bailing out” mindset :

bloorloseshisshit2The lack of any kind of evidence was my main concern. I am a bit disappointed that it took me such a long time to come to this conclusion. I am a skeptic. But I think I really wanted to believe in it. It’s an odd psychological effect; once you have “money in”, you really want to believe in something. I guess that is how almost all monetary scams work. Jumping forwards in time, to today, March 2016, I’m now nearly convinced it wasn’t exactly a scam, or at least not one that was as efficient as it could have been.

Others agreed with my sentiments :

agreewithbloorThe same guy also pointed out (with a web link too) that China’s holiday period was over, so that this was a pretty poor excuse.

… And having not lost my shit enough, I went on a losing my shit rampage :

shitrampage1and, putting my Scooby-doo hat on :

shitrampage2and… I’m still not finished …

shitrampage3… I can only conclude that I had more free time in the evenings back in those heady days of September 2015…

shitrampage4shitrampage5Again, perhaps I’d either misunderstood or misread this from way back. I was asking him to deny his connection, where he had already tacitly admitted it, albeit a long time before.

Anyway… I was still going …

shitrampage6and, I can only guess that something broke my flow …

shitrampage7Perhaps dinner arrived?

Several members echoed my comments, and commiserated with one another, over the next day or two. One pasted his report to Kickstarter, warning them that we all thought this project was a scam.

End of part three! Part four is next!

4 thoughts on “Part 3: Postmortem of a Kickstarter campaign; Camsformer

  1. Do you still follow the discussion at the comment page there, Bro? Can’t wait the 4th part of these articles 🙂

    1. Yes I do! But been very busy. Part four will be along soon hopefully 🙂

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