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After 24 days and nearly $200k raised, the SOWATCH team was thrilled. They had cruised past their funding goal, and were excited to bring an innovative new tech product to 1,500+ backers -- the first smart watch that can measure blood pressure.Built by a Silicon Valley team of engineers and cardiologists, the watch has many innovative features, including an ovulation tracker, and software that lets users analyze the impact of their medications, sending statistics directly to their doctor for consultation and analysis.
But on the 25th day, founder and CEO Yassir Belhaj got a vaguely-worded message from Kickstarter’s “Integrity Team” saying that the project would be suspended in 48 hours. Their advice was to notify backers.
According to him, “Kickstarter has informed us of their decision to suspend our project ‘SOWATCH,’ claiming that it doesn't fall within their rules, although they had fully reviewed it before our launching and had made absolutely no complaints about its content.”
Kickstarter made no mention of the possibility to appeal the decision, or any adjustments that could be made to resuscitate the doomed campaign, even though it was still raising almost $7k every day.
After some back and forth with Kickstarter, SOWATCH was able to reverse the decision by tweaking some verbiage which Kickstarter had objected to -- but not before informing their backers that they would be shut down. The result was over $35,000 lost because people decided to pull their pledges, and a general skittishness on behalf of those who did continue to support it.
“We worked all day responding to messages from backers who were confused by the reversal. We just wanted to keep people confident in us, because we know that this is a product that will help people.” - Yassir Belhaj, Founder & CEO
Why does Kickstarter wait until projects like this are wildly successful before shutting them down? And why didn’t they mention the possibility to appeal in the first email?
This sloppy approval process not only wastes the time of backers who invest in a project, but it also damages the entire Kickstarter ecosystem by frustrating creators and entrepreneurs, creating even more barriers for building a successful business and bringing a product to life.
Last year The Guardian reported that Kickstarter still only vets two thirds of its campaigns by a real person. When are they going to get it together and take responsibility for enforcing their own rules and remove the burden from the creators and backers?
This is not the first time Kickstarter damaged a campaign’s credibility only after they had raised a large amount of money.
More recently, the C-Rest was suspended after raising $414k. The creators were able to appeal, but not in time. Now a new C-Rest campaign is live and seemingly identical, but has only gathered a fraction of the pledges from the first campaign.
They did the same thing with LunoWear Watches, as well as the Skarp Razor which initially raised over $4 million before Kickstarter could be bothered to take a closer look.
After an ultimately successful Kickstarter campaign that was riddled with difficulties, SOWATCH is not continuing its fundraising on Indiegogo, where it has raised an additional $60,000 so far, and is taking orders for the first generation of its offering. The ambitious creators hope that their creation will help people achieve better athletic performance, self-awareness, and cardiovascular health for now and in the future.
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Links:
SOWATCH on Indiegogo
SOWATCH on Kickstarter
Contact Info:
Name: Scott Hughes
Email: Send Email
Organization: Farasha LLC
Website: http://thesowatch.com
Release ID: 145279
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