Following the success of Little Riot’s Pillow Talk Kickstarter campaign, consumer technology start-up’s Joanna Montgomery sat down with the Telegraph, to discuss her experience with the crowdfunding giant’s platform.
The Pillow Talk reportedly enables two people to experience each other’s presence. It sends the sound of the user’s real-time heartbeat to a speaker under your partner’s pillow. By sharing something so intimate with each other, you can feel connected in a unique and special way. During its time on Kickstarter, the project secured £82,019. Unfortunately,the company had some issues with the crowdfunding platform.
Sharing her thoughts about Kickstarter, Montgomery stated:
“No one ever talks about their bad experiences on Kickstarter. “It’s seen as the Holy Grail and you never hear the other side.”
She also remarked about some of the issues she has dealt with on the platform:
“Emails came flooding in from people panicking that their payments hadn’t processed. People were cancelling their debit cards and reporting fraud to their banks. Every customer of one bank had their payments to us frozen.
“People had deleted their details from the system. Kickstarter told us to chase those payments manually and that we had seven days to fix the pledges. We contacted as many people as we could but by that time it was really close to Christmas, which was a real mental barrier; people felt like they were paying for it again.”
She then noted:
“We lost 40pc of our orders but Kickstarter wouldn’t help us beyond their standard customer support for our customers. We had to commit a full seven days to chasing that money ourselves – and Kickstarter still took a cut of everything.”
Sharing an insight about the situation, a Kickstarter spokesman added:
“The technological glitch that affected Pillowtalk was fixed very quickly, and we’re sorry for the stress it caused the creators and backers of this project. Since fixing the glitch, we’ve worked closely with the creators to make sure they receive their funds, and we’re excited to see their project come to life.”
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