Discussed last year:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2976139

I was going to say that they have nothing to show for it but this is clearly not true. The concept seems to have proved itself. Now the question is how to get the users.

http://podupti.me/

It's pretty awesome that they opened this up and told the world where the money went. I'd love to see this kind of openness for other companies that become acquahired or get shut down.

Interesting but not surprising that roughly 25% of the kickstarter money went back to kickstarter and their funders. Of course if they really wanted to make the money stretch they could have cut out salaries, maybe I can find our year 1 financial statements :-)

And live on what? 28.8k/year is not much money to live as it is. They were college students if I recall correctly, can't imagine they were sitting on a lot of cash they had saved up.

Depends where in the US you live, obviously. Somehow I survived 6 years of grad school on a lot less, and I'm hardly alone there!

They were NYU students. if you don't know NYU, that means they were overwhelmingly likely to be fucking loaded. But I don't know them so one can't say for sure.

Or they were drowning in student loans. It's hilariously inaccurate to say that NYU students are loaded.

> It's hilariously inaccurate to say that NYU students are loaded.

First of all, I said "overwhelmingly likely" to be loaded. And I guess we're at an impasse until one of us takes the time to get the raw data. Because I know you're dead wrong, and you know I'm dead wrong.

I do know that nearly half the students these days don't need any help AT ALL. And just being able to drop the over $60,000/year to the school alone for four consecutive years would imply "loaded" to me, and well, every sane American. And not all the rest of the other half are drowning in student loans - the distribution doesn't break down into "drowning" and "loaded". Also, keep in mind the ridiculous cost of living in Manhattan. NYU students, relative to the rest of the colleges and universities in America, are rich as shit. Compare NYU to Harvard and say they're broke. Don't compare NYU to nearly any state school and say that.

Of course plenty of students get financial aid there. I never said they don't. But do you really think it's more likely that 4 college buddies who can drop everything they're doing with a cool pipe dream idea but no talent (source: the code they themselves produced) - you think those guys were in the bottom quintile that are drowning, not the upper half that can pay full tuition with no assistance? From my view, you're kidding yourself, likely because of the attractiveness of the "scrappy startup" image.

It is sad that with that much money they largely didn't deliver anything and then left the project to be maintained by the community.

They (and other collaborators of course) delivered a lot of working code. Was there something in particular you wanted that didn't get implemented?

I think the feature most folks miss is a userbase.

$26K for kickstarter prize fulfillment, really? Why so high?

If you've got a lot of donors I can imagine it adding up. Everyone who chucked in $50 or whatever for a sticker or t-shirt wants the thing, plus there's mailing, plus getting people to pack the things into the envelopes/parcels, getting the addresses on them, all that stuff.

Prepared by a college freshman, as it seems.

Being a total financial layman, I can't understand most profit and loss documents, finding them far too overcomplicated. This was perfect for me to understand exactly what was happening.

Not unlike their code before they got the community to audit and fix it for them.

I'm guessing they paid SendGrid $1470, not Sengrid.