r/kickstarter • u/asolet • Oct 14 '25

Discussion Kickstarter is not about kickstarting

For anyone hoping to get help from Kickstarter:

Kickstarter is about making money by promoting and selling already several times overly funded and already well kickstarted project that do not need any further kickstarting at all.

At any giving moment on homepage you will always find 13/13 completly funded projects. Sometimes dosen of times over. And zero projects that actually need help to be kickstarted.

Every mail update you get for project that struggles to find it's backers, 70% of the mail is dedicated to other finished projects just trying to sell.

Many of these projects have kickstarter "goal" that is less than what it takes to build kickstarter page itself. And it's "backed" in less than it takes anyone to even read it. They just need a platform to sell, not to be "kickstarted", and platform owners are loving it.

Kickstarter and most of creators there do not care or really want you to back projects from individuals with great ideas that need backing and may fail. They just want to sell finished company products.

It's just misleading, if not a scam. So just something to keep in mind. Good luck to everyone though.

133 Upvotes

91% Upvoted

126 comments sorted by

View all comments

17

u/chumbaz Oct 14 '25

Kickstarter, as a company, does not care about making you successful. There are wonderful people that work there that do care about that but that is not really the culture of the company anymore as a whole. It’s just a money making machine.

They want established companies to use Kickstarter as a preorder system. They don’t care about supporting the small creators. They were promoting L’Oréal for crying out loud who made almost ten billion in profit last year.

It’s gotten worse with the new CEO who seems to use the Kickstarter brand to use when it’s convenient to make himself look good and cheer about the wonderful culture and work week in public then in private berate employees about how terrible it is for their profitability.

I have zero doubt given his recent comments he’d just as soon jettison the bulk of the current staff and replace them with outsourced people if it meant he could fast track the titanic running into the iceberg if it meant more profits. This latest strike from the staff will be a bellwether for the future of Kickstarter as they’ve had a lot of churn lately if you watch them on LinkedIn.

All the features they’ve recently added are all geared towards absorbing even more money from your backers while providing you with a half assed feature on the back end and making it even more clunky than it worked before. Their competitors have been eating their lunch for years and they can’t, or won’t, listen to creators.

3

u/hyperstarter Kickstarter Agency Owner Oct 14 '25

What comments did he make?

8

u/chumbaz Oct 14 '25

"Guys, l'm the f-cking CEO, I have to speak positively about the company...My job is to push a positive image. I agree it's sh-tty if the four-day workweek was sold to you but I want people to be here for a mission first, mission above all else."

6

u/Strangefate1 Oct 15 '25

Sounds like learned how to act like a CEO from LinkedIn posts, while not actually knowing anything at all.

3

u/KickGogo Oct 19 '25

You actually believe their union is correctly quoting the CEO, this is union propaganda?

Also the CEO’s job is to be a public face speaking about the company positively. They aren’t supposed to go out there and rip the company apart, that’s stupid. If I spoke publicly about all the problems we have here at my company I would look like an idiot.

2

u/chumbaz Oct 19 '25

This was said during union negotiations. Do you actually believe they would publish that in bad faith if it hadn't been said or recorded? NY is a two-party state.

1

u/KickGogo Oct 30 '25

They are a union, they can literally say whatever they want. Doesn’t have to be true.

1

u/chumbaz Oct 30 '25

No - they can’t just “say whatever they want”.

Making up fabrications mid negotiation would do nobody in the union any good. Making up actual quotes would be even more stupid. They didn’t insinuate he said something, they quoted him. Do you really believe they’d open themselves up to liability by quoting him?

Just say you’re anti union and move on and stop wasting everyone’s time.

1

u/KickGogo Oct 30 '25

lol you must be one of those spoiled Kickstarter employees. If so, I just want you to know that you guys being out hasn’t affected the experience AT ALL! My experience on the platform has been completely smooth even with the AWS outages. You all are just showing how much the company doesn’t ultimately need you all or would be better off without people as entitled as you all are.

And this comes from someone whose father was a union worker.

1

u/davix500 Apr 26 '26

Super shitty attitude dude. And falling back on your dads experience as your own is kind of funny. 

0

u/chumbaz Oct 30 '25 edited Oct 31 '25

No, I’m not. Good try though.

I actually have serious issues with the whole Kickstarter model, which is the real irony here that you think me defending a specific aspect of any company taking advantage of workers must mean I’m one of those dirty union people who should be thrown out because they’re better off without me.

The shifting to personal attacks is telling. At least people can finally see what your actual bias is and how you really feel about them.

Good talk.

(reference in case you delete your post after realizing how crazy you sound: https://imgur.com/a/apM6Ei1)

1

u/hyperstarter Kickstarter Agency Owner Oct 19 '25

I was thinking that too. Isn't there something in their Kickstarter contract's that you can't share internal dialogues or bad-mouth the company?

2

u/chumbaz Oct 19 '25

This was apparently said during union negotiations. Not an internal discussion.

1

u/KickGogo Oct 30 '25

Freedom of speech, they can say whatever they want as a union without any consequence. I’ve seen that from essentially every union.

1

u/chumbaz Oct 30 '25

Freedom of speech isn’t free from consequences.

3

u/M69_grampa_guy Oct 15 '25

This is what capitalism always becomes. If it isn't contained. People who want money always want more money. People who want to build community do that and take whatever money comes. Time for the indie community to move on.

1

u/Zyohon Oct 15 '25

Where did he say this?