April 21 marked an amazing milestone for Jon Ramaci and his Cambridge start-up, iCache. He’d set out to raise $50,000 on the crowdfunding site Kickstarter for an iPhone accessory that would let users carry digital copies of all those credit, debit, and loyalty cards that jam their wallets, all secured by a fingerprint recognition system. But Ramaci blew past his initial goal, collecting $352,000 from more than 1,500 people eager to have one of the devices for their own. ICache promised to start delivering its accessory, the Geode, by June.
But by late fall, disappointed iCache backers were calling police detectives and the Internet Crime Complaint Center, and posting Ramaci’s last known address on the very same Web page where they had pre-ordered their $159 Geodes earlier in the year. Ramaci had left the company he founded, as had several other senior executives. Ramaci and iCache were being sued by the former president of iCache for nonpayment of salary and bonuses.
Comments
When it comes to consumer products, you have to think of Kickstarter is simply a place to get a limited production run done, or even just a short pre-production run. The projects are generally being pursued by a total novice and the results are going to be all over the map. Nabeel is doing really well if he is seeing 50% of the projects come to fruition. It's great for us at Daily Grommet because we have the chops to evaluate which ones are ready for primetime and we have launched a few. But in consumer products a run of a few hundred or even 5,000 (like the Pebble) is just chicken scratch. The real challenge is not in building the new mousetrap (hard though it is), it's building a sustainable company around a truly scaled product. That is going to look more like 100's of thousands of units, if not millions. (A far cry from a film or art project, in other words.) The really interesting Kickstarter-related story is around what happens after Kickstarter, where, for the most part, consumer products companies are pretty much left high and dry. (Jules Pieri, Daily Grommet CEO)