$500K High-Speed Trigger Project Funds. Pulls Back After A Year. Owner Is Taking Responsibility
Mar 2, 2015
Udi Tirosh
Udi Tirosh is an entrepreneur, photography inventor, journalist, educator, and writer based in Israel. With over 25 years of experience in the photo-video industry, Udi has built and sold several photography-related brands. Udi has a double degree in mass media communications and computer science.
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This is an interesting story about how your best dream coming true can turn into your worst nightmare. TriggerTrap who makes mobile camera triggers did the impossible and raised over £290,386 in their Ada kickstarter campaign, this is not trivial at all considering that high speed photography is a bit of a niche. Now a year after funding they are cancelling the project. I think it is a great story about what Kickstarter really is, why it takes so long to deliver a good product and how you handle (or should handle) such a massive fail.
You would think that funding half a million dollars would make almost anything impossible, right? Turns out that even that much money may not be enough when you are making a high-ended-complex product.
I talked to Haje (TriggerTrap CEO) and he shared some painful (and extremely honest) insights about why the project has gone the way that it has. So, back to November 16, 2013, which is when (give or take a day) £290,386 “magically” appeared in TriggerTrap’s bank account. Well, of course they did not magically appeared. TriggerTrap has developed several products so the market had faith in them + they are one of the most talented marketing gurus I know. No big surprise that they funded so well.
The story so far
Fast forward about a year later and the team ran into difficulties. Haje shares some of the hurdles the team came by on Medium, here are some of the major ones:
Mistake #1: Picking the wrong supplier.
It turned out that not all of the agencies we chose were a great selection; Cubik, as it turned out, were able to deliver the electronics side of things rather quickly, but the software side of things were letting us down right from the startMistake #3: Lack of communications
We said right from the start of Triggertrap Ada that we were going to keep our Kickstarter backers in the loop throughout the project. And yet, we screwed up on that front. Triggertrap’s CTO Matt left the company in May. It was a difficult time for everyone at Triggertrap, but we had to keep moving and focus on trying to get Triggertrap Ada out of the door. At the time, as far as we knew, we were ‘very close’ to being ready to ship… But that wasn’t quite the case.When I went to see the agencies to see what the status was of the project upon Matt’s departure, I got a very nasty surprise indeed: In the meeting where I expected to go and take delivery of a final version of the prototype, we were told that there was still a lot of work left to be done.
We did a re-estimation of where we were at, and at the end of May 2014, we updated our shipping estimate to October, but sadly that wasn’t the final delay. In August, we figured we’d be able to deliver by the end of 2014. In December, we had more bad news, and re-estimated the shipping date to be May 2015
Sadly, that was not the end of it. Today the TriggerTrap team decided to pull the project altogether.
Finally finishing the software was absolutely worth celebrating, but the celebration didn’t last long: Once we finally had the software sorted, we were confident that the hardware didn’t need any further updates. This meant that we were finally able to finalise the Bill of Materials (BOM), and to get the tooling (i.e. the injection moulding parts) ready to put Triggertrap Ada into mass production. This was the point where we received a final quote from our manufacturing partners. This was the point when it all ground to a halt
The team has an enlightening article over at Medium, but I think those two charts pretty much sums is all up:
So the project is being pulled away, now what?
well, the major point is that Ada will not be delivered:
But… Triggertrap is a going concern; We have hundreds of thousands of customers around the world, and more than a million photographs are taken with Triggertrap’s Mobile products every month. If we commit to delivering Triggertrap Ada, there’s an extremely good chance that the company won’t survive. If that happens, we don’t just let down our Kickstarter backers; We also let down the six-figure number of customers we have around the world, the Triggertrap staff lose their jobs, and it all grinds to a halt. That simply cannot happen on my watch.
But I also think that the TriggerTrap team is handling this with the integrity and openness that a good brand does. Here is
What it means to Backers
- TriggerTrap still has some money left, that will be refunded to the backers. Of course, TT could have just cancelled the project, but I think that the fact that they are indeed returning money to their backers is a good sign.
- You can select several refund options (money back, charity, products voucher) – and while this may seem trivial, it shows that the company took the time to make sure that the little that is left is being optimized for their backers
- They will do their best to opensource the software, and this means that the technology they spent a year developing is not lost, it is going back to the community. Probably not as good as owning an ADA, but also this means that the project is not really dead and maybe it will spawn a new life as a community project.
My thoughts
1. Integrity counts – I love the fact that despite the project being killed prematurely, the team is being accountable and trying to minimize the outcome for their backers. I also think that this is the only way to go if you are to run a successful company.
2. will they ever bring another kickstarter project? this is a hard one. I would love to see more big scale products from the team and kickstarter is a good platform for large scale projects, I guess it depends on wether the community will lean towards A – appreciating the integrity and openness or B – be utterly bummed about not getting a product.
3. For buyers: Kickstater is not a store. When you back a project on kickstarter you are essentially buying into a dream. Some dreams never come to life, some try hard and fail. Either way know that it is more of an investment than a purchase.
4. For entrepreneurs: this is a very good example of a project that was ran by a successful company, with relevant experience and still failed. Epically. With $500,000 to run with. Making a product is not trivial and making something for 2,000 people is not the same as making it for 4.
I really want to see what will come out of TriggerTrap next.
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Udi Tirosh
Udi Tirosh is an entrepreneur, photography inventor, journalist, educator, and writer based in Israel. With over 25 years of experience in the photo-video industry, Udi has built and sold several photography-related brands. Udi has a double degree in mass media communications and computer science.
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72 responses to “$500K High-Speed Trigger Project Funds. Pulls Back After A Year. Owner Is Taking Responsibility”
:( if one of the big costs was tooling for injection molding etc couldn’t they send out an electronics kit only? If the software is “done” now?
I am sure that a kit of the electronic parts could be sent out cheap enough to come under the funding they had.
that would have been a very cool idea to propose …
Realistically only a very small percentage of the recipients would have the soldering skills necessary to assemble such micro circuitry.
Maybe, but options don’t hurt. I am not sure of the money they have left Vs the cost of the electronics. They might have enough to send out assembled or partially assembled boards, I don’t know.
Those that can’t assemble it can opt for whatever refund is currently being offered. It won’t hurt surely?
I for one, had I backed this, would appreciate the offer of at least a working board I could use even if it wasn’t assembled in a nice plastic case. That’s what 3D printers are for after all.
:(
I was sad when I just missed this Kickstarter, seeing it only a few days after it ended. And it was sad to read this outcome. Instead, I ended up backing Miops from the people behind Nerotrigger: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/nerotrigger/miops-smartphone-controllable-high-speed-camera-tr
Hopefully, that will not end the same way. So far, so good.
Bullshit they need to refund the money back to the people I’m one of them. Not just 20% but 100% of what we pay.
Quoting the article here ” Kickstater is not a store. When you back a project on kickstarter you are essentially buying into a dream. Some dreams never come to life, some try hard and fail. Either way know that it is more of an investment than a purchase.”
Quoting the Kickstarter ToS.
– Kickstarter does not offer refunds. A Project Creator is not required to grant a Backer’s request for a refund unless the Project Creator is unable or unwilling to fulfill the reward.
– Project Creators are required to fulfill all rewards of their successful fundraising campaigns or refund any Backer whose reward they do not or cannot fulfill.
Pretty annoying
Annoying, sure. But these things happen. Mistakes are occasionally made and the company is trying to do the right and ethical thing for their backers by returning as much money as they can to them.
as much money as they can should also include that if they have to take a second mortgage on their house they should and that mercedes or lexus car that is in their drive way too…. ethical move is NOT business move its just a PR move…
when i lost my ISP my investors did not care a sinch about my ethical efforts to explain and disclosed what happened they wanted their money back and I lost my shirt and shoes paying them back… that is why i think there should be some kind of auditing or process wedged in place in Kickstarter to screen these “day dreamer entrepreneurs” that don’t have their shit together.
Hi Frank,
Helena from Triggertrap here. The reason why we didn’t want to jeopardise the company and staff is because we have a lot more existing customers than we do backers (some of whom are also existing customers), and it wouldn’t be right to potentially let both groups of people down. If the company wouldn’t be able to survive the launch of the product, then we also wouldn’t be able to offer any support for this new product either, which didn’t seem fair. That’s why in the end cancelling Ada, even though very upsetting at this late stage, had to make the most sense.
Yeah.. that is the very position that usually is taken… no surprises. Save the company. I will definitively look very hard at your next offering in a kickstarter and based on the position you took… definitively not suggest investing in it … if you have more clients than backers then even more to my point that you should return ALL the money that was given to back this project and assume the loss on YOUR side not your backers. I am so sorry but your explanation does not fly.
I think the company is serious trouble either way at this point. Who is ever going to trust you again?
I am a past (non-kickstarter) buyer of TT. I will certainly be skipping all future kickstarters from you and waiting for new products to be released and reviewed.
That is complete nonsense. The existing customers already have product the backers were just willfully defrauded.
Hey Helena, get legal to review the ToS your company agreed to when they started their Kickstarter … I smell Class Action.
Two simple questions:
1: The devices you showed on kickstarter. Were thoses prototypes (as that would be in accordance with kickstarters rules) or were they rather mock-ups?
2: As you will certainly be able to use the research, that I obviously funded with a lot of money, on other products to make a profit, do you think this is fair?
Exactly. This was fraud. There was not a single project update that indicated anything was amiss.
Right thing would be 100% refund. Its not our fault they chose the wrong supplier/developer.
Actually by the ToS they agreed to they HAVE to refund or else they are violating the contract they had with each backer.
Go look up the Pre October, 2014 ToS.
You fail to mention that they are refunding only 20% of backer money. That is hardly “taking responsibility”, especially from an established company with a steady revenue stream. It’s also not according to the Kickstarteri TOS. You really should update your article to reflect this.
And note only the money that is remaining. He hasn’t offered to put up any of his own salary or anything else of substance.
I know it’s not a store but a reward was supposed to be delivered and was not deliver
Do the American thing and do a class action lawsuit. That would have them spend more money fighting that then the kickstarter project. Another note I did not see in the story that they could not pay back 100% of the money.
Hope they come back fighting. Love my Trigger Trap products. I even applied for a job with them :-)
I’ve always had mixed feelings about kickstarter… and the projects in there. half a million that is a lot of money and even though what is left of TT made the ethical move to “return the money left” the truth is that those where very high paying jobs that got funded. Play money is not invest money and should not be taken lightly… Example Horror story? Aptera… after millions of dollars invested in this supposedly amazin future car “the board” decided to pull the plug and declare bankruptcy … yet the top executives lived a jet set life for a couple of years and bought houses and cars with that money … only 1 freaking car produced that was the show car …. evertyhing else they said was spent in research and development… TT sounds exaclty the same …. just saying “we are sorry we couldnt deliver … here is the cents to the dollars left after we traveled all over the world looking for suppliers…. just does not hack it with me. There should be a more strict guidelines of who, and how kickstarter lets promote in their site… high risk investing is NOT equal to piss money out the door with hope and a prayer.
While I applaud their honesty this should have been discussed a long time ago when they realized that they chose the wrong developer/supplier. They knew costs were going to go up, and as an established business they know better.
Triggertrap is now dead to me. They lost me as a valued customer. Honestly I deserve a 100% refund as product has not been delivered, while I understand we are funding development, a company this large should have the capital to fund any issues they run into. Its not like this was a start up, they had a great first kickstarter campaign, and a decent mobile app. Those do not cut it for me, I was really anticipating this new product. So glad they screwed me in the end.
On a project this large believe this will now make any kickstarter project tough to back as the company can go along using your money and not delivering a project. Bet Kickstarter will now have to reevaluate how they go about business as well as this cannot happen again.
I think in the end companies should have insurance policies in case of failure. Basically I feel they took my money and ran with it. Like they said they have a large customer base, I believe many of them were backers. They need to find a way to make this work.
Hi Geoffrey,
We’re so sad that you’ve lost faith in Triggertrap, and we’re really gutted we can’t get Ada to you. Unfortunately we’ve been trying since the start of the year to save this project and have informed backers as soon as we felt certain in our decision.
If we could supply all of our backers with a 100% refund, we honestly would. However that money has gone into developing Ada. We’re hoping we can get all the remaining funds back into backers’ hands as soon as possible.
Thanks for sticking with us until now, and again we really are sorry.
wait so… YOU guYS knew about this WAY before you informed your backers!!!! and felt certain???!!!! that you where going to crash are u kidding me??? the thing is YOU CAN SUPPLY 100% of the refund you are choosing NOT WANTING to supply it because it will compromise your other life style expenditures and company perks… wow… yeah I will make definitively sure that Your entitiy is a trap… no wonder the name
trigger trap
Hi Frank,
Unfortunately not. It was at the start of the year that we started to evaluate the situation and try to find a way to save the situation. We only made the decision that it couldn’t be done very recently. At this stage, the money really has gone into developing Ada rather than any other part of the company.
You just caught yourself in your own lie. “At this stage the money really has gone into developing Ada” whereas your leader already let us know that money went into lawyers defending the name of the product. That is just the one lie we know about. I am betting there are many more. For example, let’s see some open books regarding how much he was paid during this time.
Please comment on your planning horizon regarding the question: “When will you use the development work we financed to make a quite profitable product und another name?”
Anybody else ever notice that the more dishonest a person or a company is the more they say trust me and honestly?
Wow, you are the “Head of Happiness” of Triggertrap.
This is really brilliant PR work!
I totally agree with Geoffrey… 100%.
What honesty? We have absolutely no way of knowing anything that has been said has been honest. We just know that someone who in January was painting a rosy picture suddendly did an about face and refused to refund the money that he took
Frank Nazario Im not sure that using Aptera as an example is relevant in this other than a feeling of sour grapes.
With TT your dealing with a small group thats had good success with building and delivery of an already existing product. The ADA is a hell of a jump from making a cable and some software to an actual box with a minicomputer in it.
The point your missing is Kickstarter is an investment concept not a store concept, with your contribution you agree to take on the risk associated with building the item.
Irrespective of the Republican hype around the Aptera and any wrong doing in regards to salaries and personal gain, that was a venture on the order of millions and millions of dollars to create a product that would be a billion dollar market.
Unfortunately getting the right suppliers and getting the right estimates at such a lower level of product development is crucial to delivery and from the sounds of it they lost the focus needed to complete the project as well as the cost estimates skyrocketed.
The problem with outsourcing projects is managing the deliverables from those partners and if that gets mismanaged or the partners aren’t able to deliver thats the end of it.
Looking at the charts provided sad there isn’t any numbers attached but if we take the chart at face value the hardware and software costs went off the scale for what they had originally budgeted which im not surprised at all.
Aptera was impossible to deliver from day one even if it was not a straight-up scam. (which I believe it was, as much as 38 Studios was a scam)
I think Ada shows that Triggertrap never had the capability to produce something this complex in the first place. I am sure they planned on actually releasing something, but it seems like the burnt away all the money well after it was apparent they could never release it and make money. It sure seems like reaching for excuses here. Dev costs 1000% expected? Production costs skyrocketing seems possible, but dev costs? How did that happen?
Thats a lot of supposition and a bit of a stretch not to mention a lot of assumptions.
Was the Aptera impossible to deliver I think is a bias thats been pushed by the oil interests and conservatives and by this I’m referring to the type of technology and specs. That being said the people running the project really didn’t do what they should have and the company died for a whole heck of a lot of reasons including very bad money management.
TT and the the ADA project have been very open from what I’ve seen from day one as they’ve tried to solve the problems to of getting the product done.
I dont see any evidence of the TT people running around blowing money on vacations and hotels and other unrelated costs that would show fraud or negligence.
Reading the threads on the development you can see a lot of the issues they ran into including the most obvious in that the original TT cable is a add on device that outside of the circuits to make sure you don’t fry the camera or the phone is pretty much an off the shelf part.
It takes advantage that all the R&D of developing it has already been done on the device to run the software by the company who developed the phone and the OS running on the phone.
Building the whole thing from scratch ensures that the R&D costs especially Dev will skyrocket unless you have a super tight control on whats going on which its obvious they didn’t.
With each iteration they should have not just assed did thy solve the issue at hand but also its place in the overall plan. They obviously didn’t and their estimate of how little it as going to cost was problematic to start with.
Dev costs are much more the bitch because you have to start with a set of assumptions that if they are wrong can cost you 10 times what it already cost you to make work or you have to go back to the beginning and start totally over and now doubled your costs at minimum.
I think they would have done better sourcing an existing mini computer usb hdmi type and used that as there base for the project rather than building it from scratch
“The point your missing is Kickstarter is an investment concept not a store concept, with your contribution you agree to take on the risk associated with building the item.”
Kickstarter ToS
– Kickstarter does not offer refunds. A Project Creator is not required to grant a Backer’s request for a refund unless the Project Creator is unable or unwilling to fulfill the reward.
– Project Creators are required to fulfill all rewards of their successful fundraising campaigns or refund any Backer whose reward they do not or cannot fulfill.
Unfortunately for TT they agreed to the original TOS where they are required to pay back 100%.
Haje is also refusing to disclose who from KickStarter told him to only issue a partial refund. Sorry, not honorable! Not taking responsibility!
“Taking Responsibility”… then lists a bunch of excuses why they made off with most of their backers money.
I have a TriggerTrap, though rarely use it because it works very poorly. Anything other than the timelaps options does not work reliably at all; though even as timelapse only it is cheaper than most other interval0meters. I might have backed Ada if I had a use for it.
This goes to show that Kickstarter is a good way to take money in exchange for vague if not impossible promises. Even from people that have had a Kickstarter in the past.
One more comment, if this thing had been $20 or $30, then people can shrug and move on.
When you take $300 from a thousand people… and refuse to say where you spent it… That is what we like to call a scam.
I do understand how a mistake is a mistake, but also that if I made a mistake the customer/investor still needs 100% satisfaction! 138 us dollars to only get 20 back!? I dont think so. I want a FULL refund back. It is not our fault this was mis-managed, over spent and did NOT show us full transparency. TT needs to take what money they have from the rest of their company and put it in the backers hands. We invest in these from the start on faith of a good idea, sometimes they fail. But when a goal is 50000 and reached 290,386 there is obviously a GIANT lack of organization mis-spending that was apparent right form the start. You played with our money and failed, Now make it right, and give the backers a FULL refund. NO excuses.
As per the ToS that TriggerTrap agreed to when they created the campaign THEY HAVE TO REFUND YOU.
They are under the old ToS (before October 2014) contact them and remind them of that fact … otherwise … Class Action.
So many bitter, self-absorbed people. “I want my money back no matter the cost!” You would rather see a company go under, with all it’s employees losing their jobs and thus their own livelihoods because you want a couple hundred dollars back. Whilst you could expect the owners of the company to “mortgage houses” and expensive cars, it’s not exactly fair that the rest of them end up out of work.
TT are owning it, they have admitted they did poorly and they now have a reputation to rebuild (if they can). Yes, it’s PR, but at least it’s decent PR in that they are keeping people up to date with what has happened. They could have just taken the money and run.
I suppose for many people the amount refunded will determine their future contributions towards crowd funding.
Its cases like this one that give crowd funding a bad name… and create accumulative reluctance reaction of distrust to some one that see a great project and want to finance/help it.
The way I see it if you have raised $500,000 for research and development of a product, you do not just go on a spending spree. What this shows is lack of planning and incompetence on the company’s part. If you blow half a million dollars worth of other people’s money, you can’t just say ‘We underestimated’ and wipe your hands clean by offering them a coupon to your site.
reality check… business is business … they should have had their ducks lined up (suppliers, vendors, PLAN B!!!) before asking for the general people to drop the money. its business. “Owning it will not return the $$ they spent incompetently.” I OWNED A BUSINESS and when it failed I had to respond to the investors. Period. That is how it rolls it does not matter intentions or “Oh my bad we had a bad apple in our company… so sorry” Get the freaking Benz you bought to the dealer and start making the checks to the people that trusted you… that way when you are back again asking for it they will NOT blink in financing you because YOUR ACTIONS AND YOUR WORDS run in the same track!!!
Really and so how much money has the CEO put up? Only the backers who trusted him are losing money in this.
A company that cannot deliver product and effectively steals money from their customers does not deserve to exist. A company that expects its customers to foot allt he risk and the company take all the profit does not deserve to exist. The employess can find jobs at a real company that produces a real product.
If the company I worked for stole $500k from its customers, I would be looking for a job tomorrow.
Pulling stunts like this hurts every legitimate kickstarter out there.
Yes … I would rather get my money back. I shoot weddings if I mess up, I don;t expect my client to pay me anyways.
“I’m sorry, I know I didn’t make it to your wedding but I’m going to keep your retainer anyways … you won’t begrudge me a couple of hundred dollars right? If I had to pay you back, I’d have to fire my assistant!”
You’d tell me to go f’myself and would take me to court.
“but at least it’s decent PR in that they are keeping people up to date”
Actually, it’s HORRIBLE PR.
They were 100% in control of the announcement of the folding of the product. The ball was in their court! They could have chosen the time and place to announce it and controlled the messaging. Their communications expert needs to be fired … preferably from a cannon.
1- Proper press releases should have been prepared.
2- Their lawyers (and not some anonymous jack ass from Kickstarter) should have been consulted and messaging devised around his proper legal advice in regards to the Kickstarter ToS and the various UK business laws.
3- Changes to the website should have been ready to go live BEFORE the announcement was made.
This feels more like a company scrambling after an un-expected nasty expose than a properly planned announcement.
The company is dead in the water … faced with a lack of a strong corporate message, the media (Peta Pixel, ePhotozine, The Register, Amateur Photographer …) have run with the facts and the facts are not in TT’s favor.
No one is ever going to trust this company again. Why would they.
Also, you can’t force someone into a binding agreement (Fill in the form or you agree to 50% store credit). That like me posting on my website “Anyone who doesn’t want to sell me their car for 1$ has to let me know before noon tomorrow or else I’ll consider your silence as your legally binding approval.”
This is going to lead into a class action lawsuit (known as Civil Procedure Rules in the UK).
When an investor drops $100,000 into a typical series “A” offering, he expects to lose his money most of the time and win big every now and again. He knows management sucks, and expects a later round investor (e.g., a big hedge fund) to take care of that problem.
Kickstarter isn’t like the above. Kickstarter projects are usually ready-to-go or close to it, with funding simply necessary for production. “Investors” believe they will get their product almost all of the time despite disclosures to the contrary. The out of pocket “investment” is minimal, covering the cost of the product with some profit built in for the seller. No one thinks about the quality of management since 28-year olds have the world all figured out, right?
These guys screwed up because they are incompetent. There is no other excuse.
agree…
I find it interesting that their CTO, Matt Kane, left TT to start his own Kickstarter project – Vela One. On the Vela site he has a post on how to build a laser camera/flash trigger for $2 complete with wiring diagrams and parts list. It makes me wonder several things: if he was the brains behind the Ada operation, he figured out that the trigger was not viable and flash duration was the proper approach, or that he may be looking to do the same thing (fail a kickstarter) on another product. It seems there is more here than “we spent the money on R&D…”
Hi. I left well before any of this, for personal reasons unrelated to the project. It certainly wasn’t because I thought Ada was unviable. I still believe the Ada product is great, and I’m gutted that I won’t be able to buy one. As for my Kickstarter: the Vela flash is already in production.
yeah … very cool dude… forget it. not a single cent. already warned my friends about your name too… definitely earned VIP spot in my black list specially if you call yourself a CTO
oh and by the way … a BB sphere is NOT a bullet.. jeezzz you can do that with a Youngnuo 568-II in 1/128 of a second using High Speed sync. try it… oh and by the way … $124 US dollars and TTL metering too..
what that guy projects is that he will post a project find people to fund it and then pull the plug and give some half ass excuse … he is not a cto he is a scammer. I will make sure that anything that asshole touches I will NOT fund and make sure that anyone that does knows what he did in the past… their has to be some community movement in here to audit these lampreys and groups that take Kickstarter and its community as their feeding grounds.
Not much I can say to that, really. You’re judging me for the actions of a former employer, nearly a year after I left the company. I’m not CTO of anything now: I’m just one guy making a flash.
Presuming this is the real Matt Kane, of course:
It is not my fault you were involved in a fraudulent company. Perhaps you should have thought about your reputation before getting involved with TT in the first place.
I backed the high speed kit, not so much angry about losing 80% of the money, more so disappointed in not getting the product. It was really really cool.
The ratio is still good considering the amount you back on the website.
I am / was an investor in the project. I went in for the full package. With each update posted I would scan the text quickly looking for the actual ship date. I was very disappointed when I read this post. Can’t be true. As a investor I would have known already. Sadly I was wrong. I have requested my “refund” as a 50% store credit. I already have an early version of the mobile app and dongle so unless I learn the new dongle has much better performance I will let the credit ride for a while. My hope is the R&D is complete and they have all the manufacturing lined up, so in reality they are ready to market what maybe a great product. They can demonstrate a demand. With cancellation of the Kickstarter project they have basically removed the debt of the order fulfilment. They could locate new financing or even do limited production runs to bring the product to market. At this point they know the true costs to produce the product so they should be able to have a valid business plan. I think we will still see the product come to market, maybe under a new name. That is my hope.
He WAS NOT HONEST and he is not doing the right thing. He willfully was defrauding the funders all the way into January of this year. Below is the full text of the company’s January update. There is no hint whatsoever of any of the issues. His funding requested 50,000 and received 290,386. For people using Kickstarter as a valid excuse I call BS. He has an already established company that was in theory backing everything. There is no valid excuse for this and then refusing to refund the money of the funders.
——————————————————————–Exactly
Hello again backers!
A slightly belated happy new year to you all! We’ve got a few bits of good news to start 2015 with.
While the factory prepare tooling plans and circuit board prototypes, we’ve had some time to improve the software. Our good friend Nick at Arachnid Labs has been hard at work, and mid-way through December sent us an updated software package which improved the battery life in Timelapse mode. After a fortnight of hearing a camera shutter every 15 minutes, we had the results; Nick’s improvements have taken us from a disappointing 40 hours, to over 400 hours on a pair of AAs. This opens up a lot of timelapse possibilities that weren’t there before, and we’re incredibly grateful to Nick for all his hard work.
Ada taking on its new software via an ISP programmer. When it’s in your hands, software will be loaded over USB.
The next piece of good news is the Open Source side of things. We’ve had some incredibly useful feedback from backers who are coding wizards, and a recurring complaint was how tricky the code was to navigate around. We’ve had a ReadMe file put together for the code, which explains the purpose of each file, as well as explaining where certain values are stored within the code. Nick has also been hard at work here too, improving the way the project builds to allow for more platforms to easily get to grips with Ada’s code. As we move towards finalising the code, we’re hoping to get the software released before Ada reaches you, to allow for tinkering in anticipation of it’s arrival.
The final piece of good news is a reliability improvement. Our manufacturers in China have spotted an area of slight stress on the circuit board assembly, and have quickly offered a solution which won’t impact on production time, and is likely to speed up assembly time. These little tweaks can make a big difference, and they’re experts in spotting these things before they become a problem.
The unmodified area in question on one of our prototypes. This is where the sensors connect to Ada. You can also see a few areas of hand soldering to improve performance, which will be baked right on to the final PCB.
On another note, something that became very clear at the end of last year was how our communication with you – our awesome backers – was causing some frustrations. We have always tried to stay positive in our updates, and while we’ve been as infuriated by the delays as you, we did our best to keep the mood up in our Kickstarter posts, knowing that what we’re delivering is going to be the best high speed trigger out there. Haje – Triggertrap’s CEO – has written a 4500 word, full disclosure, warts-and-all piece about the good, the bad and the heroes of the Ada project in a piece called “Hardware is Hard” over on Medium.
In the next update, we’ll be taking a closer look at the laser sensor (to round off that little series), as well as letting you guys know the latest manufacturing news.
Rich, and all of Team Triggertrap
In my opinion this is a scam … when they knew that they would not be able to deliver in one product they excused themselves and used it to develop another… amazing I WILL NEVER EVER LET ANYONE I CARE FOR INVEST IN THIS COMPANY… IT IS THE SHADIEST weakest explanation if heard of a belly flop.
And Hellena … yes you Hellena… do your company a favor and review what you are going to post here with your execs before you do… after your justification for process and your PR attempt to do damage control you have left me a very sour taste of this entity. and I am almost positively convince that many readers here feel the same.
These are the ToS that applied to this campaign at the time.
(They changed on October 19, 2014 for campaign CREATED AFTER THAT DATE).
– Kickstarter does not offer refunds. A Project Creator is not required to grant a Backer’s request for a refund unless the Project Creator is unable or unwilling to fulfill the reward.
– Project Creators are required to fulfill all rewards of their successful fundraising campaigns or refund any Backer whose reward they do not or cannot fulfill.
Head over to the Kickstarter ToS.
So for those of you saying (Well, you gambled) … not really. We had the guarantee that unless the company went bankrupt we would get our money back.
Now those terms have changed since October 19, 2014 but those changes do not affect campaigns created before that date.
Triggertrap COULD see itself face a class action lawsuit if it’s backers so felt inclined.
TT is claiming they were told by KS not to refund. IF that’s true then KS is also fully liable to all of the backers.
In correspondence from KS they are saying take TT to court if you have a problem. WOW KS, way to stand up for the people paying your bills! Remind me never to fund another campaign AND make sure everyone I know is aware of how you’re treating backers!
Got that 45,- refund code today. Surprise: It’s not working at checkout!
And they still list the ada as “sold out” in their Webshop. That is gross!