Originally Posted by
Robert C
Not on the bike, but on kickstarter, which is nothing but public begging; this is a gross abuse. Here is an established company trying to use kickstarter to fund a development and tooling effort.
Remember, you are not investing when you spend money on a kickstarter project. I would love to be able to invest on a project like that one; but I am not going to give them money via kickstarter.
It seems like it's actually
two established companies, Tern and Xtracycle, doing the begging as a joint venture. I had a similar thought, why would they do this, but it's clear that Kickstarter has reached a level of success and trust where it is actually cheap marketing with no real stigma of being a start-up. That said, if they are giving a price break to the early backers then I think it's a win-win. So I do hope that the price that they give the Cargo Node backers is at least a few hundred bucks lower than what the retail price will be. Otherwise they will be setting a precedent that will make it harder to get projects like this funded in the future because people won't have an incentive to get in early.