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Gareth Everard has an interesting article on TechCrunch discussing what he believes crowdfunding will look like in the near future.
The golden age of irrational exuberance on Kickstarter has ended — Pebble is shutting down, marking the fall of crowdfunding's white knight after a string of other high-profile closures and failures.
Originally positioned as a medium for (especially arts-related) projects to garner modest seed funding from a diverse group of supporters, crowdfunding platforms like Kickstarter and Indiegogo have obviously evolved since their respective launches in 2009 and 2008. Yes, crowdfunding has produced some inspiring success stories that have grown into innovative businesses, like Peak Design and Flow Hive.
However, it also has facilitated the transfer of significant sums of money to teams that ultimately proved themselves to be incompetent, leaving backers with nothing. Recent headlines have been chock full of projects that have declared bankruptcy or otherwise betrayed their early backers, exposing cases where founders' and companies' egos have simply overtaken their ability to reason, plan and communicate logically or truthfully.
Have the high profile failures doomed crowdfunding?
(Score: 3, Informative) by mr_mischief on Monday January 23 2017, @04:51PM
I've backed several things on Kickstarter. I consider risking a little on being an early adopter of a product that may be really great a non-equity investment. If I get a lot of value out of the products for the money I invest, that's a win. If the price is lower than the post-campaign retail price, that's a bigger win. If it's something that takes off and has network effects but I get an early start developing code or making accessories for it, then it's a wonderful thing.
Here's the thing. I've backed a number of project that delivered on time and met or exceeded my expectations. I've backed a couple that ran into unexpected issues and delivered later than they originally thought. I'm still waiting on one project that I have over $500 tied up in after months of waiting, but I still have high hopes for the quality and utility of the products once I get them based on who's involved and how well they've kept their backers informed the whole time.
There's one project I backed that the founders of the project determined was overly ambitious and never delivered the final product. I'd bought the developer kit. They offered publicly to refund everyone who backed the initial release product. I contacted them to ask what good the developer kit was for a product that never launched. They soon refunded my money and told me to have fun with the hardware anyway.
Perhaps being careful who you back and having some idea what they might realistically be able to accomplish is the key.