Late last year, Kickstarter hired a journalist to figure out what happened to the failed Zano Kickstarter project. Today, said journalist has published his findings, and it turns out that the Zano’s failure was attributed more to inexperience rather than actual malice.
Mark Harris, a technology writer from Seattle, has spent 6 weeks in South Wales talking to as many people as he could regarding the Zano Kickstarter. What Harris found out from his interviews is that the Zano was never a scam to begin with, but rather a case of Ivan Reedman and his team biting off more than they could chew.
The report goes into detail as to how the Reedman exaggerated the capabilities of the Zano in its promotional video, which caused a surge of backers for the project as well as winning various tech sites’ “Staff Picks” awards. This promo video was shot despite the team being aware that some of the Zano’s features that they’ve highlighted in the video were not operational yet.
Harris did not accuse the Torquing team of dishonesty as the team truly believed that they could deliver a finished product that was fully functional and feature complete, but he did note that as production problems mounted and money began to run out, the team showed “a dangerous lack of self-awareness of the problems the company was making for itself”. Harris concluded that the team does not possess the technical or commercial competencies necessary to deliver the product that was specified in the original campaign.
Kickstarter was not completely blame-free though, as Harris notes that the website could take a much more proactive approach to projects hosted on its website. Harris suggests that Kickstarter needs to come clean with the nature of the risks backers are taking as well as being more active in weeding out weak projects. Kickstarter, of course, rejected some of these criticisms, saying that tightening the rules can only go so far and that at the end of the day, backers are the one that ultimately decide whether or not a project gets funded.
