This 3D Printer Raised $1,438,765 and Failed. Crowdfunding Warning.

this video is my personal opinion on a very complex topic the year is 2013 and 3d printing is exploding in popularity due to the expiration of several key patents and a fervent interest by the media despite be around since the 80s people are convinced that 3d printing will bring forth the next technological revolution industry 4.0 from spare parts and household items to entire houses will be 3d printing everything in just a few short years there's just one problem they currently look like this wouldn't laser cut boxes you assemble yourself and they cost over two thousand dollars to boot they barely function requiring hours of calibration and constant tweaking the RepRap movement brought around a renewed interest in 3d printing and made it accessible through open source designs but it was more about the experience the learning the movement itself you had to be pretty dedicated to build a 3d printer from scratch using open source plans clearly then there was a fantastic opportunity to create a 3d printer for the masses for the consumer a product that was both easy to use and easy on the eyes and affordable the team behind pirate 3d certainly thought so so in May 2013 they released this The Buccaneer a sleek easy to use 3d printer with its own ecosystem of ready to print models and it was only three hundred and ninety seven dollars the pirates ready Buccaneer took the tech community by storm and raised almost one and a half million dollars except this wasn't a pre-order this product didn't exist this was a Kickstarter and it failed crowdfunding has a diverse history with the most well known platform being Kickstarter launched in 2009 it was founded as a way for creators to fund their ideas by going straight to the source their fans look at the homepage in 2009 shows us mission working well funding a new documentary reuniting a band even rehousing a collection of vinyl records the funding goals are modest and no a ball is hard where there's no new cutting-edge products or promises in fact it doesn't appear that hardware projects really started taking off until 2013 with well-known campaigns such as the 3doodler and our pirate 3d Buccaneer here crowdfunding was a new and exciting way to get access to cutting-edge products for cheap the catch at least on the surface was that you just had to wait a little while to get it will you be part of the journey on the way and while this approach works fantastically for projects with a low or at least known overhead like events and documentaries it turned out to be seriously flawed for funding hardware projects let me explain I used an Australian crowdfunding website possible to fund several combat robot events these events had an overhead cost which needed to be covered for the event to go ahead things like venue hire arena transport insurance all well-known amounts and I could set a campaign goal to reflect that making sure to add the extra 10% of sewed fee on top of using the platform and then a little bit extra for misc the unknowns now these were tiny campaigns compared to most but they delivered all the same people came to the event and had fun and we were done now imagine instead of a combat robot event it was a campaign to sell a robot a new physical tech product you've built your prototype required by Kickstarter but not all crowdfunding platforms recorded a swish and probably expensive video to sell it and you're off it's a runaway success and you've raised millions of dollars towards your campaign congratulations you now get to mass-produce that product and send it to thousands of backers all around the world problem is many creators of crowdfunding campaigns are enthusiastic and usually quite entrepreneurial but tend to lack the industry experience to properly budget for and plan the production of mass-produced technologically complex products but you can't even start planning your next step until you give that juicy cut to Kickstarter IndieGoGo or whatever as far as they're concerned their job is done then you have your bank fees for moving that much money around and then just maybe if you don't completely fail you have to pay tax yes they do say that in general in the u.s. funds raised on Kickstarter are considered income this is of course assuming your campaign will be left with a profit and not in in ruin going back to the Buccaneer there's no question that concept was successful people clearly wanted it however sadly the team quickly discovered they're bringing a product like this to market just isn't the same as producing a few prototypes and making a flashy video with so much promise from a complex electromechanical project to a fully fledged cloud app that money drained fast the promise delivery date of February 2014 quickly came and went and things went south quickly and people were furious after countless updates a final 2015 message seals the fate of the doomed ship roughly 40 percent of so of machines were supposedly delivered and a side effort of selling machines direct to the public and not those who had already pledged here failed Disney as well go figure actually that's how I got hold of this machine it was sent to an Aussie reseller in an attempt to butter them up to stock them but they obviously said no because they hadn't delivered to the backers their website is now dead as is their app and considering that there's no way to physically connect to the machine you have to use the app that means that this printer is dead - so did pirate 3d and countless other campaigns set out intentionally to swashbuckle backers for millions of dollars for some possibly but not in this case at least I don't believe so for all its faults you can see that serious money has gone into the research and development of this machine remember this is at a time when almost nothing was standardized in the 3d printing community you couldn't just buy mass-produced control boards from China for cheap almost everything else the machine is in-house designed the housing would have been injection molded it's plastic not metal the internals ride on linear slide bolted to laser-cut sheet metal even the spool has pirate 3d injection molded into it I think this is with a son as the partner but still that would have cost a lot of money that's not what someone does when they're trying to just scam someone with all that considered it's no surprise they failed to deliver this machine for under $400 their backers the Bill of Materials alone would have been more so it sits here and I've removed all the useless internal electronics so it's just a bare-bones system and maybe one day I'll get it up and running again as a monument to crowdfunded failure I would also love to say this is the only spectacular failure in the 3d printing crowdfunding space but alas it's not the PG printer raised Canadians six hundred fifty thousand dollars had much of its funds embezzled to build a house for the co-founder and it never shipped then in 2015 t code a one hundred and seventy nine dollar machine promised raise almost three million dollars from over sixteen thousand backers only to run out of money a few short years later and fail to deliver more than a few buggy beta testing units and just like pirate 3d they only worked using a now non-existent cloud slicer so those are all dead as well oh dear but let's step back for a minute it's not all failures not at all these are just some of the crowd funded 3d printed projects that went on to not only deliver but evolve into fully fledged companies now not all survived long term unfortunately they did still deliver and they still deserve serious praise for holding their promise when so many others failed to do so without in 2019 and crowdfunded hardware projects are still pretty dang popular that's within my interest that you don't lose your money in my experience it's the low-priced campaigns that attract thousands of backers that are the ones that tend to collapse oh no and Obsidian I have my eyes on you please don't make me add you to this list similarly well a new revolutionary idea from a bright individual might sound amazing and promising there are so many roadblocks when it comes to getting that cutting-edge idea into production that almost always the money isn't enough and the time frames are woefully optimistic crowdfunding is not a pre-order it never was and while they can be incredibly cool things on it I will always be sure to stress that should you back a project it's little more than a donation there is no promise you'll get anything and Kickstarter has made it clear in the terms that their hands are clean should a project go south if you're still ok with that risk go for it I have several times just please stop trying to make Kickstarter refund you it's not happening guys just walk away to end on a positive note crowdfunding tech isn't dead in fact there's a vibrant community of crowd-sourced open hardware over on crowd supply which has really established itself as a viable platform for funding the creation of really neat products full disclaimer though I've never backed anything on crowd supply personally and I certainly didn't have anything to do with making this video but I think it's neat that you have to actually apply to have your project launched in their platform and they ask you all the hard questions up front to make sure it's viable and you actually can deliver I don't believe they've ever had any projects fail to deliver I could be wrong but still it's worth checking out as always I'll keep my eye out for new products coming up and I will do my best to keep the 3d printing community informed if you enjoy this little look back in history of crowdfunding failure and maybe consider subscribing it's my aim on makers Muse to empower your creativity through technology and I'd love to have you on board thanks for watching guys bye

Channel: Maker's Muse

Views: 502,288

Keywords: 3d, printing, kickstarter, crowdfunding fails, pirate3D buccaneer, peachy printer, tiko, maker's muse, makersmuse, angus deveson, australia

Id: rOvbrF8qaBc

Length: 10min 32sec (632 seconds)

Published: Sat Jul 20 2019

Reddit Comments

[u/TheLysdexicGentleman]

I mean they did name it "the Pirate3D" so kind of self prophetic.

[u/ReactorCritical]

I expect to see the Migo 3D printer on this subreddit at some point.

Fuckers are 13 months behind and haven’t posted an update since February.

A handful have claimed to receiving theirs but said that some parts were rusted, the software sucks, and the print quality is mediocre at best.

[u/noyart]

I think im one of the lucky few who got one from the kickstarter. I used it a lot and the printing quality was not bad. It was sadly a closed system and you also had to use the desktop or phone app that was soo barebone, not like what other printers has now when it comes to software settings. Sadly it broke down on me, the heating part in the printerhead died after years of use, and after talking to them about getting a replacement head I decided not to give them more money (people still havent gotten their printers, there was a version 2.0 on their website and the support person I was talking to changed way to often (i guess people didnt stay long at the company). The head is now in pecies for me to pick it up and fix someday...

Or I been thinking about useing the shell and build a custom one. I can take pictures of it, but it wont have the printer head as those parts are here and there at the moment.

[u/PixelBlock]

On a related note, I really wish the Peachy Printer had worked out.

[u/savaero]

Hey — he mentions a guy that built a house — what happened there?? That’s insane?

[u/zrene0]

Reminds me of the "Tiko 3D" Kickstarter I "contributed to". I don't think it was a fraud but a badly managed project.

[u/Adahn33]

Doesn't seem shitty to me, they just underestimated the costs involved.

[u/CheesyGoodness]

Good video. He does a solid job of explaining the obvious in a clear, concise manner to the many who don't understand how KS works. Anyone who is thinking of backing a KS project should be required to watch this before they do so.

[u/kachunkachunk]

Ah yes, I know this one all too well. Fuck everything about this kickstarter and the people behind it.