Yep.

I backed the ZPM Espresso machine, and lost ~$400AUD from memory.

Don’t regret it at all. The guys who ran it were expecting a hundred or two backers, and were one of the early “super over subscribed” Kickstarters. The wheels totally fell off when they tried to scale up their hardware manufacturing on the fly from an expected hundreds of units up to several thousands. From memory they were trying to raise $40k, and were one of the first to blow past a million bucks.

They were fairly open about what was going on and how things were falling apart, and while there was much gnashing of teeth in the forums and Kickstarter comments from people who’d “bought an espresso machine and never got it”, my view (both then, and still now) was that I’d given them some money to try and make their dream a reality, and if it worked out I’d get a cool new espresso machine out of it.

I was more pleasantly surprised when Pebble (smart watches) fell apart (and aquihired themselves to Garmin) and they managed to return the pledges for the 3rd version (I’ve still got Kickstarter versions of the first two Pebble watches in a drawer somewhere. I used the ~$300 refund I got back from that to start my small mechanical Russian watch collection, and haven’t worn a smart watch since).

If you’re going into this thinking “I’m making a purchase”, you might not have thought the actual risk through, and stand a good chance of being disappointed. If you want a zero risk (or at least significantly risk free) “purchase”, buy something that already exists off the shelf from a retailer who’s bound by consumer protection laws using a credit card with good member protection policies. Indegogo is a very different thing to that. Very very different.

There are a lot of risks and horror stories about outcomes other than “never received something” as well. Lots of projects end up months or years behind schedule. Lots of projects deliver something, but not anything close to what people were expecting (either very shoddy versions of what was described, or limited/cut-down versions when reality hits dreams). I backed a Swiss guy making stick on magnetic sliding covers for laptop webcams. He eventually delivered, but well before he did I’d already purchased that exact same thing from Amazon for a lot less money.

“Crowd funding is not e-commerce”, they’re _very_ up front about that.

The other side of that is that it’s quite possible thing thing you want to “purchase” may never exist unless you (and a few hundred/thousand other people) decide to accept the risk of things not working out, and throw down some money anyway. You _could_ be part of something amazing.

(The end result of the ZPM story was a guy bought their IP from them, and offered Kickstarter backers credit against orders of the machine he ended up manufacturing based on that, but in the cold harsh truth of real word manufacturing and global electrical appliance regulation requirements, it’s really a $3000 machine at direct sale pricing, it’d be a $5000+ machine if it ever ended up on the floor of a bricks and mortar retailer. The guys from Atlanta who thought they could get some parts made in China and do the rest of the work out of their garage in Atlanta were totally unaware of the magnitude of the task ahead of them. I hope my $400 helped make that a slightly less painful lesson for them. I’m vaguely tempted to go and LinkedIn stalk them to see if they’ve managed to build careers on top of it...)