"A Cavalcade of Human Failure" - the ups and downs of Crowdfunding projects.

[pathology_doc]

View: https://youtu.be/VKCZMceV1FE?si=xYSw8AMhFflu-LOh


Some of them are clearly scams, some of them have actually launched in one form or another, and one - while totally viable - died in a humiliating pile of its own pretentiousness.

One thing is very clear, though; in between the scams and the successes is that valley of failure filled with the metaphorical bodies of those who simply didn't realize how hard it is to get a new invention off the ground.

John Forbat - the same John Forbat who wrote two books about guided weapons and attack systems work at Vickers/BAC - wrote a book called "Entrepreneurship, the seeds of success", in which he recounted his own journey through the world of trying to bring various products (home security systems among them) to the customer base. In this he was no doubt aided by the work he'd done on Red Dean, Vigilant and other missile projects while at Vickers, and by the insights he'd received into how and why a major project is managed and either proceeds (Vigilant) or doesn't (almost everything else was involved with, through no fault of his own).

Quite a few people out there simply have no idea - and if they have tech mastery, might have no business savvy. They have an idea, but they don't have even the beginnings of knowledge of how to bring that to fruition.

I know I'm in that category... but then I admit my limitations. And what little I know, ironically enough, I've learned through studying the absolute disasters and failures to proceed that fill the pages of Secret Projects.

 

[OliverSedlacek]

So you've got a great idea, do you go to Kickstarter et al or do you go to the vulture (sorry, venture) capitalists. I'm not sure there's that much difference between them. For sure having worked in product development all my career, there's fifty times more work in the development, productionisation and compliance stages than in producing a prototype.