The amazing thing about Kickstarter knockoffs is that there's a huge market for simply stealing an idea and beating it to market. People have made hundreds of thousands of dollars doing this. It's completely absurd, Kickstarter product transparency is, in hindsight, almost ideal to steal products from.

Reminds me of this: "Your brilliant Kickstarter idea could be on sale in China before you’ve even finished funding it"

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12724096

That said, there's still vibrant opportunity in the other direction, i.e. finding items off of Alibaba, claiming to not only have made those items but that they are best-in-class/first-of-its-kind, and attracting people who don't bother double-checking on Google or Amazon, nevermind Alibaba.

That "other direction" is much more significant, at this point.

For every Kickstarter/Indiegogo project that's cloned by a Chinese manufacturer (e.g, Fidget Cube), there's probably at least 10 or 20 "projects" created to resell something that's already available. It's a huge issue for the credibility of both sites.

What's truly fascinating is all of these innovative products made in Asia which aren't officially marketed in the West (thus allowing people to market it in smalltime ways, like Kickstarter). If you go to the right parts of Asia now you will see a wild array of amazing, futuristic products that you can't find anywhere in the US.

A lot of them are kind of misleading junk though.

Yeah, I see a ton of these stand-alone VR headsets that--on the surface--look amazing. But if you really start to scrutinize the specs, you realize they are two-generation-old Android phone guts slapped inside a cheap plastic box. You're getting a glorified Google Cardboard with probably a janky OS, and not anything up to the standard of even the now-2.5-year-old Samsung Gear VR.

like what? selfie sticks?

(i live in asia)

I remember being on holiday in Thailand and seeing selfie sticks about 3 years before they hit the mainstream in the UK. I wish I'd started importing them myself.

Way more than that. A large portion of the Fulfilled By Amazon program is imports like this. If the subreddit is representative, nearly all of FBA is AliBaba imports.

Stupid question -- isn't that (usually) good? My model of Kickstarter projects is "I wish this product existed so I could buy it", not "I would like to personally profit from bringing this to market".

This is what it was originally intended to be, but Kickstarter long turned into a marketing platform for companies to get pre-orders for their new products.

Ah, that makes sense. But it still seems mostly benign to me: it accelerates the transition from non-obvious demand to purchasable product, thus doing better on the "I wish this product existed" metric.

I can see how it's effectively leeching off the efforts of those entrepreneurs who are trying to get pre-orders, but, as long as they haven't started building the product, it's a relatively small amount of work lost, in setting up a kickstarter page.

My main problem is that because it is billed as an "investment" (where your return is maybe a slight discount on the product), you have no recourse if the product is never delivered.

Many kickstarters are made by people with no experience in actually delivering product and are almost certainly doomed to fail from the start. Another large group are established companies that have investment already, and are using it purely as marketing because it is impossible to build their product at the funding levels kickstarters reach (outside of the big ones like Pebble). There are very few kickstarters that have non-obvious markets and are run by someone I would be willing to risk money on to have made, and zero where the return is worth my risk.

Yeah, what we need is a patent system that only gives 5 years, maybe some lower barriers in terms of how it's enforced. Maybe where a jury is asked 'does this feel like a knockoff of what the patent was generally describing or does it really do something new.' The risk of going afoul will be enough to keep people innovating.

I'd really love to see a common sense approach to patents.

Import tax from China would solve these issues.

Killing the UPU subsidies might be enough on its own.

So kickstarter is close to what could be the ideal platform when you primarily want the product to exist, with actually selling that product being a secondary goal at most. Unfortunately, only very successful kickstarters would be cloned and by that point one would be far too deeply invested to be content with the product existing.

Put a great idea on kickstarter, with the "rewards" orders at a high price point to make it more attractive for cloners, then if it succeeds fulfill rewards with rebadged knock-offs. What a gamble that could be!

Could a zero-cost kickstarter fully refund backers if the founder capitulates after finding formally succeeds? Can kickstarter fees be postponed until the funding is actually used? If that is possible, this charade could be a surprisingly light shade of grey, "we try to find manufacturing, otherwise you get your money back" would hardly qualify as a lie if the only omission is that you intend to look no further than alibaba.com .

Kickstarter for ideas, anyone, with the established crowdfunding model on the C side and open bidding for design and manufacture on the B side?

Yep, I found this with the Fidget Cube.

I heard about it after the Kickstarter closed, "aw chucks". A few months later I found the parent company was accepting purchases but wouldn't ship for months more, I bought one anyway (over $20!). Then a couple months later I came across knock-offs on Amazon. I forgot I ordered the authentic one, so I bought one on Amazon for $10. It arrived promptly. Then this week, I got the original cube in the mail--It took so long I totally forgot about it.

And honestly, I like the knock-off more... (granted, might just be a timing bias.)

I had a friend who had a similar experience but he feels the $30 one is better, the cheap knockoff is lighter and some parts have stopped working...

That's the business model of Zara, and there's nothing wrong with it. You can't "steal" something if it's public domain.

If you die off because some Chinese seller "stole" your idea which by the way you came up with first, then you deserve it because it means you didn't execute well enough.

I think this kickstarter culture has done more harm than good for makers because it made them chase instant gratification instead of substance. If you look at what happened to all the ambitious Kickstarter hardware companies, there is not a single one I'm aware of that's on their track to wild success.

People used to actually pour in their time and money (not just a slick youtube video) and risk all their reputation to build something that matters to them. I think at some point people decided to believe that you can take the shortcut via Kickstarter, but it's increasingly becoming clear that there is no such thing as shortcut.

It still sucks for them that these inventors are not rewarded for their brilliant ideas, but then again, I think if you are really serious about your product, you should invest more into it and make sure things like this don't happen.

> If you die off because some Chinese seller "stole" your idea which by the way you came up with first, then you deserve it because it means you didn't execute well enough.

Okay, I think I understand this idea. If somebody else can cut corners by cheaping out on materials, or skipping testing, or relaxing tolerances, and their product still sells, then clearly your own standards were simply too high.

> I think this kickstarter culture has done more harm than good for makers because it made them chase instant gratification instead of substance.

This seems in contradiction to the first statement. If you take instant gratification, you're a symptom of more harm than good. If you take your time and do it right, you deserve to die because you're not going as fast as your competitors. ?

> If you die off because some Chinese seller "stole" your idea which by the way you came up with first, then you deserve it because it means you didn't execute well enough.

I won't argue that copying ideas and reimplementing them cheaper/faster doesn't have upsides. But one worry is that the immediate downsides are felt by the original inventors. Sure, cheap copying is nice for the consumer and reseller, but they're dependent on original inventors being incentivized. It's not impossible for inventors to go the slow, substantive route, in which they come up with a business plan and an idea, but that limits the work of creation to those who can manage that kind of timeline.

There are very few original ideas, and you'll just drive yourself and everyone around you crazy by fretting over originality. Don't fool yourself into believing that only Chinese companies are interested in ripping off ideas; this has been a major function of large companies for a very long time.

We have to pop the fairytale bubble that some of us live in. Marketing and sales will win the day. No matter how fancy your technology is, there will be competitors and rivals, and it won't really matter who was "first". Being first can, in fact, be a substantial disadvantage, since you don't have the response/feedback from a competitor's prior attempt to gauge and reference.

I don't know about "wild success" but the 3doodler is now sold in ToysRUs, so that seems like a reasonable metric for entering the mainstream given their area.

MicroPython seems to have acquired a reasonable level of traction in the community too.

If you look at how hard it is to pitch products like these and raise capital, then kickstarter is certainly living up to its name.

Formlabs seems to be on its way there. (I'm biased though, since I did once work there.)

That's a rather harsh and Darwinistic view of things. Remember, the main purpose of Kickstarter is to raise funds to be able to bring this thing to market. If I have the idea, but no money, I deserve to have my idea stolen because I wasn't able to execute on having more money well enough?

> If I have the idea, but no money, I deserve to have my idea stolen because I wasn't able to execute on having more money well enough?

Nope you totally missed my point if that's your takeaway.

No, that's precisely what you said. If I have not the money to execute, then I deserve to have my idea taken from me. That is what supporting the idea of knockoffs taking a kickstarter product means.

Indiegogo doesn't mind? That's way too funny, I emailed Indiegogo a few weeks ago before starting a group buy from taobao. I still can't find a platform to organize something like that.

Since, this is HN it might interest you all: the top six on https://shop57714512.world.taobao.com/ . Tripod mountable 10"-17" travel monitors.

Why not MassDrop? They are optimized for group buys of things that already exist. Sometimes it is short production runs of niche goods, but I have also seen (and bought) goods available elsewhere.

Massdrop is branded around group buys of premium goods, not batches of random crap off Alibaba. I think they would see high quantities of listings as spam/polluting their listings/damaging their brand.

Traditionally that sort of stuff just happens in a thread on a forum somewhere - but I have to imagine that there's a pretty significant incidence of non-paying users or organizers who get in over their heads, so perhaps there is a niche there for basically organizing private group buys as well, that are advertised through another medium apart from Massdrop's storefront.

Hot take here but since you brought them up: I think Massdrop has their own branding problems. I used to do them quite a bit but have stopped at this point because the discounts are just not good enough to justify waiting 6 weeks to get my item (and I've had some items that were delayed out to more than 3 months from drop completion to delivery). I now make it a policy to compare against Amazon or the retailer directly - and since you have to wait a month through Massdrop you might as well compare against Seeedstudio and the other source vendors directly.

Usually the discount is pretty insignificant ($5-10) so I don't do it unless they are truly unique items that just can't be had elsewhere. And often those unique drops are limited to ridiculously low unit quantities and they're sold out before I can even order.

Not sure how quantity limits make sense on pre-orders, which is supposedly what Massdrop is doing. Is there only enough plastic left in China for 20 sets of crappy vacuum-formed keycaps or something?

It's a really nice model for Massdrop since they don't have to worry about fronting the money for inventory and waiting a month for the items to show up - their customers will gladly do that. But they're still very much taking the profit regardless of the fact that the customer is the one fronting the money - so it ends up being a terrible deal for the customer.