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When Europe's biggest Kickstarter project, the Zano mini-drone, crashed to earth last November
there was plenty of blame to go round. But many of the 12,000 backers -
who had put in £2.3m and ended up with nothing - had angry words for
the crowdfunding platform.
Kickstarter responded in a creative way - by commissioning an investigative journalist to find out what went wrong. Now his report has been published.
Mark
Harris, a technology writer based in Seattle, travelled to South Wales,
spent six weeks speaking to as many people as he could reach and
produced an epic account of the history of the Zano.
In more than 13,000 words
he describes the origins of the Torquing Group, a business that was
essentially the personal mission of self-taught engineer Ivan Reedman to
build a marketable drone; how clever - though misleading - marketing
turned the Zano into a Kickstarter sensation, galloping past its
original funding target; and then the disaster which unfolded as Reedman
and his colleagues discovered they just did not have the skills or the
experience to mass produce the mini-drone.
It is the backers for
whom this work was designed and many of them will be hoping for a
smoking gun to reinforce their belief that the whole project was just a
scam to get them to part with their money. They will be disappointed. Mr
Harris concludes that this was case of foul-up, not foul play.
"Torquing's
directors managed their business poorly and spent the Kickstarter money
too freely, but I've found no evidence that any of them ended up rich
on the backs of the crowd," concluded Harris.
He does raise serious questions about the video which excited so much interest in the project.
Reedman denies that CGI, other drones or even selfie sticks were used
to create a misleading picture of what the Zano could do but admits that
the video shows features that were not operational at the time it was
shot.
In fact, as I found when I came to shoot a demo of the
project last August, the Zano never delivered what was promised in the
video.
But it was not only potential backers who swallowed
exaggerations in the marketing campaign. Kickstarter chose Zano as a
"staff pick" and the tech news site Engadget shortlisted it for its best
of CES 2015 award, even though the Torquing team could not demonstrate
the drone flying at the show. As late as October, Popular Science chose
it as one of its 100 most amazing innovations of 2015.
The writer
does not accuse the Torquing team of dishonesty but says that as
production problems mounted and the money began to run out they showed
"a dangerous lack of self-awareness of the problems the company was
making for itself".
Harris has only managed to speak on the record to
Reedman, but he concludes that neither he or the other members of the
team "possessed the technical or commercial competencies necessary to
deliver the Zano as specified in the original campaign".
But the
most significant lessons to be drawn from his account are for
Kickstarter. The crowdfunding platform, which paid for his work, was
allowed to look at the finished article before publication but not to
change anything. He says all crowdfunding platforms need to reconsider
the way they deal with projects involving complex hardware, massive
overfunding, or large sums of money.
He wants them to look at
bringing in mentors to advise projects like Zano which suddenly find
themselves taking on far more than they had planned. He also wants
Kickstarter to be far more explicit about the nature of the risk backers
are taking - and more active in weeding out weak projects before they
are funded.
Harris interviewed Kickstarter's co-founder Yancey
Strickler and though he appears to find a few of the suggestions
helpful, he is robust in rejecting most of the criticisms. He says that
while the platform does have rules about realistic videos showing a
genuine prototype, they are hard to enforce.
Tightening up the
rules can only go so far, he argues, and it is essential for backers to
understand that it is up to them to evaluate a project. "If you want
100% success with hardware and new products, I think the only solution
is that you just shop on Amazon," he adds.
And in the end, Harris
seems to agree. If we want an alternative to banks and venture capital
as a funding source for high-risk tech start-ups, he says, we may have
to accept the occasional Zano alongside the Pebbles and Oculus Rifts.
Now,
some of the thousands of people who lost money backing this doomed
project will look cynically at a piece of journalism funded by the very
organisation they see as partly responsible for their losses.
But
what Harris - and Kickstarter - have produced is a valuable
contribution to our understanding of the risky nature of any technology
hardware start-up.
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