Design To Matter’s crowdfunding campaign for the Instacube stands as a cautionary tale for would-be crowdfunding backers. After a successful $620,000+ raise on Kickstarter, the campaign has been mired with turnover, internal strife, delivery issues and refund requests. I also proposed that D2M’s involvement in another crowdfunding campaign shortly thereafter raised some ethical questions for crowdfunding.
An article in the Austin Chronicle features an interview with Savannah Peterson, who ran PR efforts during the campaign for the Instacube. As an aside, the article shares the revelation that Peterson closed the campaign from a hospital bed. She was suffering from kidney failure said to be a byproduct of working ridiculously hard during the campaign. No, crowdfunding isn’t easy.
Read the full interview at The Austin Chronicle
She’s going to be the center focus of a panel at SXSW entitled “I Ran an Extremely Successful Crowdfunding Scam.”
At no point was it ever intended to be a scam, but when you’ve put money behind a project and the communication has been ambiguous, it makes it hard not to feel like you’ve been scammed
In the interview, Peterson is a bit hampered by a confidentiality agreement. However, she does allude to a bit of frivolity being a part of the Instacube’s woes. “The money was used for development; it went where they claimed,” she said. “But if the company was run in true start-up fashion, an eating-ramen-style situation, the Instacube would’ve made it.”
Expect it to shed light on what happened during the campaign and after it ended. Don’t expect it to offer much comfort to backers still waiting on their products over a year later.
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