As a hacker who just terminated his FB account, it sounds like I'm the target audience. But I have to confess that after reading the blog post and clicking through to the faux Kickstarter page, my response went from "That could be interesting" to "That's disappointing."
If they are going to leverage the Kickstarter model, then they should at least learn from other KS projects: show me the problem, build a prototype, show the prototype solving the problem, play cool music, and for crying out loud look at me (the camera) when talking.
There's probably a good reason that Kickstarter doesn't accept nebulous web businesses - scaling manufacturing costs real money, but building a software prototype is cheap. If someone had made a video dryly explaining GitHub or DuckDuckGo as a concept prior to developing them, I wouldn't have signed up. But I find them invaluable today.
I agree. While the article got me interested, the video was disappointing. I expected Dalton to show me something, not just talk for three minutes. In the article, he writes "This isn’t vaporware." So where's the screencast?
Worse, he's not a very convincing speaker. The impatient demeanor, the failure to look directly at the camera, and the multiple stitched-together takes all suggest a lack of confidence. If you're not good at public speaking, fine, but admit that and pick a better way to present your pitch.
Ultimately, I'm left feeling like the idea is a good one, but doubting whether he is the right person to build it.
This is a tangent, but Dalton is actually a really charismatic speaker. He was probably the favorite speaker of my YC class, and was reportedly great at Startup School a few years ago (though I wasn't there). Must come off better in person.
I was excited till I saw the video too although I think his "tone" or way of speaking and quirks bugged me more than lack of a prototype and cool music. I know that's a pretty shitty thing to say but its true (at least for me). Ironically his writing came off exactly the opposite.
If they are going to leverage the Kickstarter model, then they should at least learn from other KS projects: show me the problem, build a prototype, show the prototype solving the problem, play cool music, and for crying out loud look at me (the camera) when talking.
There's probably a good reason that Kickstarter doesn't accept nebulous web businesses - scaling manufacturing costs real money, but building a software prototype is cheap. If someone had made a video dryly explaining GitHub or DuckDuckGo as a concept prior to developing them, I wouldn't have signed up. But I find them invaluable today.