The old "Take their money then give it back to them 11 months later" con. Great theory ya got there.

Well as is mentioned elsewhere, being a successful Kickstarter campaign is amazing P.R. You can take that kind of hype to VCs and get some very real Series A from that if the proposed product is good.

So what could be happening here is that a big company was the target audience all along. Raise a bunch of money with a "disruptive" piece of hardware, garner hype, get some venture money, return the Kickstarter cash.

That seems totally plausible to me. To the VCs these guys look like semi-sure bets to get gobbled by MS or Sony or Netflix or, hell, anyone looking to enter this space.

I recognize that Kickstarter funds are donations, but the product I donated to is not the product that was being developed.

I was baited with this: "The product is fully functional today, with the hardware design final, tooling complete, and manufacturing ready to ramp up in the next 30-60 days. We also have fully functional sender apps for Firefox, Chrome, iOS, and Android - you can Fling from any of these platforms on almost any laptop or mobile device." [1] And this: "Hardware is done! It was actually previewed in June-" [1]

That expectation was switched for this: "After struggling with the DRM development based on Firefox OS for most of this year, we realize continued development of DRM, though showing early signs of promise, will be a long and difficult road. We have come to the conclusion that we will not be able to reliably predict the completion date of the DRM development without significantly more research, development and integration." [2]

So I donated to a project that was 30-60 days away from start of manufacturing and instead found my donation being used to fund development of something else. Why is this not a bait-n-switch? If I'd known what they were going to build, I would have just bought a Chromecast back in October of 2014.

[1] https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/matchstick/matchstick-t...

[2] https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/matchstick/matchstick-t...

I'm pretty sure I could make money if I had $470K to hold on to for 11 months. Of course, I could just get a job, that would be easier.

Yeah, for sure. I remember once I bought tickets for a large stadium gig. The gig was postponed at a late stage, for a year, and the options were:

1) get a refund, lose the ticket you'd been lucky to get at face value back into the pool, probably never to be seen again for the same price. 2) hold onto your ticket, wait a year, go see the gig

It therefore resulted in $millions being held by the organisers for over a year - there are extremely low risk ways to gain a meaningful profit from a large amount of capital. Intentionally or not, and whether or not it was invested by them during that year, this situation turned out to be a great way to get a huge, zero-interest loan of said capital.

I'm not sure if there are laws that prevent this kind of thing from happening, but it's certainly easy money in theory.

If you're looking for something extremely low risk, you're only going to make a few percent. (I'd be thrilled to learn that I'm wrong on this.) So, may not be worth it if you have other costs or people you have to share the profit with. 3 percent of a million is only 30K.

Depends on your definition of meaningful but, I was thinking more along the lines of 10 million -> 200-300k, almost guaranteed.

Obviously if the starting capital is less, you could potentially notch up the risk of the investment etc, but that's a very meaningful profit for most companies I should think. At the least it's a very valuable individual's salary for a year.

I've never looked into treasury notes. Am I right in interpreting this graph as showing how much you would make holding treasury notes over a one year period? So roughly between . 05 and .4 percent? Point being that it's not necessarily that easy to make money holding $400k for a year?

If so, I agree with that---hence my point that it would be easier to work.

I am completely out of the loop and hove no idea what the project is about, but apparently every one on the KS page is basically saying that they couldn't care less about this feature. I'm curious now at what really happened and why they shut it down, if their biggest hurdle is something so few people want.

No, classic bait n switch doesn't involve refunding money...

I wrote up a response to this, but accidentally did it under the wrong comment (see my response to thieving_magpie).

In that reply I explain what I felt I was baited with and what it was switched for. Maybe you could explain how you feel the term should be used, since you feel my usage was incorrect?

Sigh, yes. "Bait and switch" is the "begging the question" of product forums. It has an actual meaning that nobody cares about and by now just means "I feel disappointed". This is one of the least unfair outcomes for what is a barely a purchase and it is still a "Classic bait-n-switch".

His point is that it was an attempted bait and switch. The fact that they failed and refunded the money doesn't change that. They purportedly promised one product and worked on a different one.

It's not even an attempted bait and switch. They thought that a certain feature was needed/wanted, so they tried implementing it. Extra features have killed projects before and will kill in the future.

Let's say I want to sell you shirt. You pre-order the shirt, then I decide that it's import that the same shirt has an additional pocket on the front. At that point, is it a bait-and-switch scam?

Like Sanddancer says, it's just feature-creep that scuttled the project, not a malicious misrepresentation of the product.

The project was billed as a DRM-free chromecast alternative.

It's more like you pre-order a pocketless shirt, I'm not able to retrofit a pocket onto it and so I refund your money.

They could have kept the money, right? If it was an attempted bait and switch, then what caused them to fail in that attempt? It doesn't make sense.

Agree! I even sent them e-mail telling them I didn't care about DRM, and, even though I got why, and I didn't wanted to oppose them, I DIDN'T WANTED THEM TO WASTE TIME ON DRM!

And I am sooo deceived now: they can't handle DRM? NO PROBLEM! They are running late? NO PROBLEM! Just get me what you promised me whenever you get there! I wish I was offered a choice, here, instead of being forced to take my money back.

Given a half million dollars doesn't fund a hardware company with a few dozen employees, it sounds like they have other investors, with deeper pockets, that do want DRM. At that point, the KS money becomes more a liability than an asset, and refunding the money is a wise business decision. This frees them to make potentially necessary design decisions that would upset their kickstarter backers, like migrating from Firefox OS and adding DRM features, that would please their other backers.

You are unfortunately so right... and that's also why I don't like this move:(