The Million Dollar Kickstarter Idea No One Wants

There once was a time when crowd funding sites like Kickstarter didn’t allow every person and bad idea the chance to pan handle to the Internet masses, sadly those days are gone. This leaves us with a plethora of bad ideas seeking non traditional funding. Earlier this week we were given the opportunity to fund a motorized Freebord that promised to turn pavement into powder. Sadly, this isn’t the worst idea of the week on there as it now seems that the rotational binding companies, one of the most mocked ideas in snowboarding, have taken to the Internet in a vain attempt to fill their coughers.

On more than one occasion this bad idea has been written about on this very site. [Read more here, here, here, here, here, and oh yeah here.] At this point there isn’t much more we can say about this that hasn’t been said. Well, that was until we looked through their whole Kickstarter campaign.

Yes you read that right, they are looking for one million dollars in funding. But what is more astounding is this:

Now the Nitti Gritty, the fine print if you will: With all our Patents, Prototypes, Engineering Sample Runs, Costs of Molds, Cooler Plates and Specialized Machinery to the tune of 500,000.00 that we have successfully raised and expended for the project on our own dime because we know our market and its potential the sacrifices were well worth it.

Now if my math is correct with what they’re asking and what they’ve spent that means they would be 1.5 million dollars in on this. Yet, how big is their market share?

As stated above the worldwide market for the Quick Stance alone without subsequent product lines is significant. The possibility exists to move sales well beyond our 10% market dominance to a greater percentage.

10% market dominance? That’s miniscule compared to the millions of people that snowboard and if you take into account the number of rental shops that are using either a Rossignol or Burton LTR system that features quick adjust technology. Companies that already have established names and in roads to rental facilities, which is who the greatest percentage of Quick Stances users would be. Does anyone think this is a winning investment?

But that is all secondary to the final statement of their campaign which should raise huge red flags.

Lawsuits are not pretty and tie up a lot of financial capital. Essentially this statement should read, “We will use your generous donations to finance our legal team so we can claim to be the inventors of something no one will buy!” The good news is they’ve already lost in court against Burton. Thankfully the Internet hasn’t jumped on this craze like the guy with the Potato Salad and they currently only have one backer.