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Ask HN: Our kickstarter is 38k of 100k funded, with little hope

17 points by eof ↗ HN
We thought we made the hottest vision sex of 2013+2014, but dev consumers mostly went meh. A lot of love, considering, but most of it came from businesses wanting some thing that can use what we built. We wanted these idiosyncracies to be filled by randoms, and already slightly pivoted to fill the overt demand. Do we kill it? Let it fail?

11 comments

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iamwithnail
I guess it's really unclear to me why I'd want to fund it. It seems kind of interesting, but it's not 'that's-fun-i-want-that-to-play-with' like Pi or Kano or Arduino, and it's not 'shit-that-solves-problem-x-i-have' like some other stuff. I used to work for a crowdfunding platform, and it's a key problem a lot of campaigns had (see: http://spacehive.com/Blog/Details/1042 ). Given you're on a tipping point campaign and haven't reached the 66% target (90% of projects that hit 66% WILL be funded) by now, I'd probably kill it and retarget it.
User8712
Agreed. Right now I think it's only catching the attention of hobbyists, that want to play around with the technology for fun in their spare time. The demos don't show any practical examples to get average consumer excited. It also doesn't have any examples of how businesses can apply this to save time or money. In the end I'm thinking this is interesting, but what can I do with it? Setting up an overhead webcam to count dice? Who is this for? Not game developers, because they don't want to eliminate 99.999% of the market that doesn't have an overhead webcam. Counting bananas? Can you give me a real world example of how this can be used to count objects, that's better than current methods? The demos just take you halfway there, they show the software is able to recognize objects, but they don't show any real advantages for using it in the first place.
bdfh42
I think the Kickstarter is clearly a bust - but that might be that the offering is more B2B than B2C.

People who wanted to play around with vision ideas probably funded the Pixy (CMUcam5) by Charmed Labs and Carnegie Mellon.

You need some serious funding so that you can develop demos that can be trialed against a whole range of use cases. As another poster here has said - we need to understand the problems your product solves before we can get excited about it.

adamredwoods
can you use this to identify firearms? repackage and sell it as a security system for schools.

can it be used to find bad products on an assembly line? can it be used to improve a golf swing? can it be used to help the vision impaired? can it be used to count cards at the casino?

blueskin_
Adding a 'local install' option was probably a good idea, but maybe too late.

The world is seriously scary when controlling your own data is an 'option'.

schappim
Or when the internet is out... Or your only internet connection is via 3G!
schappim
I had to look at your past submissions to work out what Kickstarter project you were talking about. To my surprise I had actually backed you guys (I wanted to use VMX w/ my Ninja Blocks).

My tips for you:

- Your video is way too long! 7 minutes! If your video is over 2-2.30mins it's too long!

- When you use a simple, coherent story, you make it more likely that people will make a decision or take an action.

- On that note, there was no really strong call to action at the end of the video.

- If you're selling to men (and sadly lets face it you mostly are), your call to action should be done by a woman.

- There is way too much text.

- Rewards tiers are too complex. There needs to be a clear "you should buy this one". Each reward tier description is itself a little essay!

- "VMX Project" isn't a good name. What does VMX mean? It's not memorable. I don't think that 'project' is a positive word. It's the kind of word you'd associate with a charity or shaky cause.

- You need to partner up more. There are other past kickstarter projects that could work really well with your offering.

- There aren't really any social proof points that I can pick up by skimming the page.

- There's no scarcity. Why should I convert?

- You need to show the novelty. How does it differ from other similar but different products like Simple/Open CV etc.

- Going back to social proof, you don't have any media or quotes!

Just my 2c :-)

Please repost your project. It's really quite awesome, it just needs to be marketed better!

schappim
Some more points:

- You should be dressing like the people who are buying your software. Ditch the collared shirts.

- Tomasz: "We're hear to talk about the ... project" should be "let me share with you some magical computer vision software we've been building". Then product, product, product... Whilst telling me what the product is doing.

- Answer the question "why should I buy this". I.e. Geoff: "Any Maker can add a video camera to a project, but getting your project to understand a video feed is much harder. VMX makes it trivially easy to add xyz to your next project."

- More hyperbole (it works for Apple). Eg. VMX is Amazing/Magical/the Smartest/easiest etc etc...

syberphunk
Your kickstarter was the VMX Project ?

What I needed to be able to back it, was a concise description of what it was and how I could use it.

I didn't see any of that in a form that I understood. I'm not an uneducated person and I consider myself highly technical (though what that means/is worth to most is debatable).

It didn't pull me in, unfortunately, because ultimately I didn't know what it was.