As we’re in a climate where there are more and more kickstarters and indieGoGo campaigns crashing and burning without shipping a product, i.e. Plastic. We think it’s time that you’re warned ahead of time when you could be investing in a high-risk kickstarter, currently the company Funded.Today, we wrote about here, takes up to 35% of the overall kickstarter funding raised.
Here’s a little about their founders that we were able to dig up, Samsara, which is created by Atara Dzikowski and David Dahan, seeks to win the ugliest suitcase design contest. Atara or David’s profiles don’t list any engineering experience, app experience, technical creation experience according to their linkedIn profiles, Atara is currently the founder of Design Boxes, which has not updated their Facebook page or instagram page since 2014.
David’s Company, Mindset Mobile, which lacks a website by the way, lists his qualifications listed as:
Mindset is focused on reducing the risk of revenue loss by preserving employee business knowledge in enterprise level knowledge base. Making enterprise business knowledge base reusable and understandable will dramatically reduce recovery time and risk exposure.
Mindset key technologies are:
1. Seamlessly created contextually mapped knowledge base
2. Knowledge visualization.
Uh huh.
At the bottom is another clue, “Samsara Lead Designer: Or Shachar”, who honestly is very hard to track down, in our experience it’s very weird for a designer to not to have a portfolio online. Are they actually a designer?
Look at their poor image quality as an example of their quality control, they couldn’t even white balance the camera.
Now this is when we ask you to use your own judgement, do we believe that a group of people with what appears to have 0 experience in luggage, design, manufacturing, app development, product sourcing, are able to put this together?
Did we mention they hired FundedToday to partner with? And based on the following information we can only assume they are also going to loose 35%-40% of their overall campaign to their marketing department.
If they hit their goal of $30,000 that would equal 50 x $445 = $22,250 & 14 Sold at x $535 = $7,750.
$30,000 – [Funded Today’s 35% ($10, 500) + FundedToday $3,500 signing fee & IndieGoGo’s 10% ($3,000)] = $13,000.
Are you kidding?
This is how $30,000 turns into $13,000, that’s $13,000 to build 64 suitcases, to develop a custom app for 64 suitcases, to build LED lighting inside of the suitcase, to include a powerbrick that will charge your mobile device 10 times?
There is no room for manufacturing errors, for free shipping worldwide, to build test & test & test this product.
We’re not saying you shouldn’t fund this, we’re saying based on our research above, we’d recommend performing your own research before investing $400+ into a single indieGoGo campaign. If this actually ships, we would be more than happy to post a review and add it to the top of this post. But this seems beyond poorly planned, we don’t have high hopes for this being executed.
Also, check out their demo video which they filmed at the Tel Aviv We Work, features a whole new cast of characters they failed to mention on their campaign page, Peter, Adam, Alex, Elish, & Joey. This leads us to another question, if everyones LinkedIn profiles, and shooting locations come back as Tel Aviv, their indieGoGo page says they are based in New York, NY, odd.
We reached out to FundedToday for a previous post, however since they aren’t replying we don’t have much hope that they will comment on this one either.
Funded Today […] is an advertising agency for Kickstarter campaigns. This company works on a commission basis, meaning they use their own money on advertising but take 35% of everything raised. [Source: HuffingtonPost ]
Funded Today has a pretty aggressive pricing model. Projects must go through a “Validation” process in which Funded Today decides whether your project is worth their time. This process takes 1-7 days and costs $3500 and comes with no guarantees of any sort. They’ll run some ads, see if they can get traction, and then decide whether or not they want to work with you. By paying the $3500 to start validation, you agreed to paying them 35% of all of the pledges made from the day you start validation IF you pass validation and they accept you as a client. [Source: JulianHartline]
Once and only after your campaign has concluded “successfully”; then will you have to pay a 35% service charge of the campaigns total earnings. [Trunkster]
Our standard cut is 35% because lower percentages increasingly impair our ability to identify profitable ads. [Source: David Garber, Funded.Today]
[IndieGoGo / Screenshot of IndieGoGo Campaign as of 5/8/2017 11:46EST]
