The amazing adventures of Doug Hughes

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A Public Message to Gameloft

Dear Gameloft support,

My good friend Jessamy Green-Husted recently emailed Gameloft about an accidental purchase her pre-school aged son made in the game Oregon Settler. The in app purchase price was $50, which is no small amount of money. She did not approve this purchase and did not want this purchase to be made.

I understand that she wrote this support email address (support@gameloft.com) about the issue and requested that the purchase be refunded. She corresponded with Lyudmila Granovskaya who rejected her request.

I am happy to say that I have not yet had the misfortune of buying any of Gameloft’s games. And, since this is apparently how you treat your customers, I am greatly relieved.

I thought Gameloft should know that Jessamy had posted on Facebook how much she was enjoying this game before this issue. So, where I previously had a positive attitude about Gameloft and their games, I now have a rather bluntly negative attitude.

I hope Gameloft chooses to resolve this issue for Jessamy. Wouldn’t that be a nice story for her and her friends to share on Facebook and Twitter?

In the meantime I will be posting a copy of this email publicly on my website, Facebook, and Twitter this as well.

Doug Hughes
doug@doughughes.net

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My Personal Time Management… Thingy

I’ve ranted and raved on this blog previously about how having ADD can make it hard to actually accomplish anything that’s not strictly necessary.  It’s also no secret that I have entrepreneurial aspirations, but I’ve had a really hard time successfully executing on them.

I have also been known to avoid doing other things that I should, like cleaning, laundry, etc.  Unless it’s a responsibility, like keeping the kids, cats, and chickens alive or doing work I’m contractually obliged to do, it’s rare that I willingly do it.  Trust me, my grass needs mowing like you wouldn’t believe, and I’m just not very likely to actually do it.  As far as I’m concerned, laundry is for schmucks who care if their shirts are wrinkled.

While drugs have helped me, they’re not a panacea.  They can give me the extra wind behind me that helps make things like lawn mowing a tenable idea.  However, I still have to decide what to do at any given moment, and that’s where I fall down.

It turns out that ADD is an impairment of working memory.  Working memory is essentially the memory associated with goals and task execution.  The net effect of this (I once worked for a company called the NetEffect) is that it can be really hard to remember why I’m doing something.  Essentially, every time I decide what to do I have a different perspective on the world and therefore my decision making process changes.  This is why I could work for two or three months on a personal project and then switch to something new and exciting as soon as the first project becomes something less than thrilling.

There’s a ton of frustration, self flagellation, and guilt that goes along with this.  I really, really, want to get beyond these roadblocks!

My psychiatrist recommended that I create a flow chart of my decision making process that I could hang on the wall.  The purpose of this is to keep all the little variables that play into what I could be doing visible and harder to forget.  I tried making this flow chart and got pretty much nowhere.  However, after a little more consultation, she helped me come up with another approach.

What I’ve done is break things that I can or need to do down into categories.  For me these categories (currently) are:

  • Family Responsibilities
  • Chores
  • Recreation
  • Personal Projects (Not Committed)
  • Entrepreneurship (Committed)
  • Contracting Work

These are categories of things that I need or want to do.  For example, a family responsibility might be to take a kid to the doctor.  Recreation is anything I enjoy.  Etc, etc.  There’s also a seventh category of On Hold, which where my personal projects go to die (but now with permission).

For each of these categories I’ve created a list of categories of my life that they relate to, general notes about them, examples of these types of things, best time of day to do them, best moods to do them in, and ways to convince myself to do them.

My goal is to take this document and use it to help keep in focus what I’m working towards and what’s really important to me.  I assume this will morph over time as I learn better how to use it.  Heck, maybe I actually can make that flow chart now that I have so much information about each category easily accessible.

For those of you who might find it useful, here’s the final document I created (click for a larger version):

This is my table of stuff to do, when to do it, and more.

Who knew life could be so complicated?

So… what do you think?  Would this work for you?  Any bets on this being useful for me?

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Weird News in Limerick Form

I’m currently enrolled in Standup 101 at DSI Comedy Theater in Carrboro. As a part of a class project we need to essentially report the news in a funny manner.  I decided to troll around the web for some amusing articles and write summaries in limerick form since limericks are inherently funny.

A couple of quick lessons I learned:

  1. Rhyming dictionaries are your friend
  2. Thesauruses are also your friend.
  3. Choose funny words to work with and then write the rest of the limerick around them
  4. It doesn’t matter what my wife says, the word “cock” is funny.

My brother, nephew, and class enjoyed them, so I figured I’d share them here.  What do you think?

Cruise Ship To Retrace Fateful Voyage

A cruise ship sails transoceanic?
The idea, to me, seems schizophrenic
What were they drinking?
Because surely they’re sinking,
since they’re retracing the voyage Titanic.

Eighteen-year-old breaks up with former teacher

To the public and press he’s quite vile,
Though a student loved him a while.
But when he went to jail,
She refused to make bail,
She dumped him for being a pedophile

Family’s ‘friendly pet’ removed from home

When police responding to an agitator,
Found only a blatant procrastinator
They were truly confused
and the beast was removed.
Babys don’t need a pet Alligator.

Timber Accident Leaves One Dead in Jackson County

Roy Heath was chopping down his tree
When to his most nonexistent glee,
Another tree uprooted
And upon his head imputed
That poor Roy was dead, most instantly.

Church cock victory joy: ‘it’s huge and majestic’

It’s really fun that our cock won,
Said senior Lars-Goran Vedon,
It’s huge and majestic!
But not actually phallic.
It’s a weathervane, not a hard-on.

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ProjectSpark! #2: HappyPayments

I announced last week that I’m starting what I’m calling ProjectSpark!  As a quick summary, ProjectSpark! is my attempt to publicly describe business ideas I’ve come up with that I think have merit.  My intent is to collect feedback on the idea and, if I’m lucky, to try to build a team of partners with complementary skills to work together to bring the idea to market and to share in its guidance, ownership, and profits. Without further ado, here is my second ProjectSpark! idea:

I’ve mentioned in the past that I was working with some people to start a new non-profit called Supporting.us.  Unfortunately it looks Supporting.us is dead in the water.

The basic concept of Supporting.us was that non profits or charitable causes could create “Supporting.us Codes” which would look something like this:

Potential donors would recognize these codes and could scan the QR code in the image with a QR reader on their smart phone.  This would take them to a mobile-optimized web page where they would be able to make a donation with a single click.

Unfortunately, this won’t fly.  This falls under the realm of Third Party Payment Processing (TPPP) and I have been unable to find a way to work around this.  The problem is that credit card processors do a credit check on merchants (IE: Supporting.us) before they let them process credit cards.

With Supporting.us, we were essentially wanting to extend that processing capability to our customers, the charities.  But, since the processor wouldn’t be the ones deciding if our recipients were worthy of credit, they wouldn’t approve us.  Basically, it’s too risky for them.  What if we let someone use our system and they are fraudulent?  The processor will end up holding the bag on the chargebacks, not Supporting.us.  We’ve tried a few different processors and keep running into the same problem.  There’s still a chance we might be able to work around this, but I’m not sure how.

However, this experience got me thinking about mobile payments, which is, well, a huge area of investment at the moment.  You have the up-and-coming NFC technology where you can just wave your phone by a reader, rather than whipping out your credit/debit card and sliding it through the reader.  (I’m excited about NFC!)  There are also card readers that can attach to phones for mobile payment processing.  While both of these are awesome, they don’t really change how people actually make purchases and interact with stores.

So, I had an idea: What if you could change the way people buy things in stores altogether?

Think about this: What if you could walk into Best Buy (or any other retailer), find the merchandise you want to purchase, scan the barcode on the product using an app, and click one button to make your purchase?  At this point you’d own the item and could walk out the front door, skipping waiting in line.  Your phone would show a receipt for your purchase with a QR code that contained encrypted information about your purchase.

On the way out of the store, Best Buy’s security guys would scan your receipt’s QR code with their own mobile device to validate it.  This would lookup your purchase and confirm that the receipt is valid and that the user hasn’t already left the store before with this product.  Heck, this could be put into a stand-alone kiosk to remove the human element from the equation.

As a note, buyers would enter their credit card information into this app the first time they used it.  This would be securely stored either on the phone itself or, perhaps, in a PCI compliant data store in the cloud.

There are a couple of things that make this distinct from the failing Supporting.us concept.  First off, this business (let’s call it HappyPayments Inc, for the sake of a recognizable name in this article) would itself be a credit card processor.  They would fulfill the same role as First Data, or any other processor.  Basically, companies that want to use the HappyPayments to process mobile credit card payments would use their existing merchant account, but would use HappyPayments as the processor.  This would not prevent them from continuing to use the same payment processor they currently use for in store and online purchases.

HappyPayments would have an API that the merchant could use to either populate HappyPayment’s database with store locations, products, prices, inventory, etc.  Also, HappyPayments would also be able to call web services specified by the client to dynamically get this information.  Of course, it could also be manually managed if merchants so wished.

So, when I’m in Best Buy making my purchase, I select where I am from a list of stores near me that use HappyPayments.  This would be similar to how FourSquare works when you check in.  Using this, when I scan the product’s barcode, HappyPayments is able to lookup the price of the product at that store at that time.  When purchases are made, HappyPayments can relay that information back down to the store’s POS via a standard web service API (if the client wishes to implement this feature).

The fees for using this would be similar to any other payment processor gateway: A small percentage and a small transaction fee.  The mobile app would be free on the various app stores.  Any deeper or custom integration with store systems would likely have associated fees.  But, the idea here is to make money off of the transaction fees and not from the consulting fees.  This helps lower the barriers to entry and makes it easier for merchants to start using this service.

Now, this is not a simple nut to crack.  How does one get started?  Well, it seems that if you want to break into being a payment processor, there are some fairly high costs and legal requirements.  To get around this, new companies will often partner with existing processors.  So, that’s the approach to the first problem: partner with a payment processor to avoid having to actually be a payment processor at first.  As a part of the partnership, the processor would get a significant percentage interest in HappyPayments.

Secondarily, how do you get any sort of scale to get started?  And how do you finance development and the initial work that needs to be done?  Well, again, you partner.  In this case, I’d love to partner with a business like Best Buy.  They would make an initial investment to build this app (and business).  They would get exclusive use of it for a period of time while kinks are worked out.  In exchange for this investment Best Buy would also get a significant percentage of the company.

Once the system is stable, BestBuy starts promoting this in all of it’s stores to get people to install the app and make purchases using it.  Then, we open up the gates to other retailers and businesses that want to offer a similar buying experience. (Apple, perhaps?)

While that more or less wraps up the idea, I wanted to add that I recently learned that Stephen Gillett, who pioneered StarBuck’s recent forays into mobile payments, has moved to Best Buy where he be doing the same thing.  If I had a way to get in touch with Mr. Stephen Gillett, I think he might just be interested in this concept.  Who knows?  Anything’s possible, and it never hurts to ask.

So, what do you think?

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All Hat, No Cattle

I think I’ve finally made an important mental leap, as far as business and startups are concerned.  It’s not just the idea I need, it’s the execution of the idea.  So far, with the exception of Alagad, my execution on my various ideas has been less than stellar.

What brought this realization on was a post I saw on Reddit the other day.  This image was posted to /r/entrepreneur:

Ideas are just a multiplier of execution 2009-07-28 It's so funny when I hear people being so protective of ideas. (People who want me to sign an NDA to tell me the simplest idea.) To me, ideas are worth nothing unless executed. They are just a multiplier. Execution is worth millions. Explanation: AWFUL IDEA = -1 WEAK IDEA = 1 SO-SO IDEA = 5 GOOD IDEA = 10 GREAT IDEA = 15 BRILLIANT IDEA = 20 NO EXECUTION = $1 WEAK EXECUTION = $1000 SO-SO EXECUTION = $10,000 GOOD EXECUTION = $100,000 GREAT EXECUTION = $1,000,000 BRILLIANT EXECUTION = $10,000,000 To make a business, you need to multiply the two. The most brilliant idea, with no execution, is worth $20. The most brilliant idea takes great execution to be worth $20,000,000. That's why I don't want to hear people's ideas. I'm not interested until I see their execution.

This screencap was taken from Derek Sivers blog. Why the poster posted an image and not a link to the blog, I don’t know.

I’ve ranted in the past about how many brilliant ideas I have.  And, in all seriousness, I do think some of them are pretty good.  But it would seem that my execution has been pretty weak.  Truth be told, I already knew this, but this image really crystalized the idea for me.

In fact, I don’t even technically run my own company, Alagad, any more.  Randy Miller, my father in law, took over as CEO about a year ago.  I still drive the company’s concepts and technical direction.  But, when it comes down to making sure we get stuff done that we need to, I’ve handed that off to Randy. For Randy, this must be like herding cats.

To a degree, I think the fact that Alagad grew to what it was at its’ peak (13 people and 7 figures of income) was almost luck and perseverance more than a good execution.  I had the passion for what we were doing, but I pretty much was clueless on how to generate leads and make sales.  To a degree, I think that’s because Alagad has always tried to be everything to everyone.  I’d say “If it can be done on the internet, we can do it.”  True though this may be, it’s not the easiest thing to sell.

So, with all these ideas I’ve worked on over the years (TaskForce, urate.it, Supporting.us, Respondin.gs, CouponHor.se, and many, many, more), I’ve failed to get anywhere because my execution sucks.  That a fun realization to have, isn’t it?  (No.)

I was talking with my psychiatrist the other day about ADHD, which I’ve recently learned I have.  I was lamenting how many half finished projects I have.  I’ll be working on one of my ideas diligently, and then suddenly come up with some brilliant new idea that I’m totally incapable of ignoring.  It’s so easy for me to get knocked off track and feel like my latest idea cannot be ignored!  It’ll be quicker, easier, bigger, and when it’s done, it will finance all these other ideas I want to do!

This is actually why I started ProjectSpark! last week.  I’m really hoping to find some people who can help me overcome some of my weaknesses, such as execution.  Because, frankly, I don’t want to flop around like a fish out of water forever.

For those who don’t know, ADHD is essentially an impairment of working memory.  What that means is I don’t have as much storage as other people do in the part of my brain where I work with information.  So, when I come up with an exciting new idea I essentially can’t remember why my previous ideas shouldn’t be immediately usurped.  I’m always seeing the world from a new perspective.  This might also explain why I can’t remember names to save my frickin’ life.

To help overcome this, my psychiatrist assigned some homework to me.  She wants me to create a flow chart of my decision making process.  Basically, I need to draw up how I decide what I should be doing at any given time, and where that will lead me.  The idea being that I can constantly refer back to this flowchart to go through a decision making process that doesn’t change every time I make a choice.  This should help me prioritize my work and keep my eye on the prize.  Frankly, I have no idea how the hell to do this.  I’m going to draw something up and probably share it here.  And then later I’ll revise it with her assistance.  I see the value in this, but I’ve got no idea how to do it.

So, now I know I need to improve my execution.  (Not that kind, sorry to disappoint.)  Figuring out how is the next big challenge.  Any ideas?

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We have a(nother) bird!

A bird of some sort has nested in a column on my front porch.  There’s a male and female and presumably eventually some eggs.  I’m not sure what breed they are, to me they’re of the Red and Brown family.

They’re quite skittish so they’re hard to get a good look at.  It’s funny because the male will sit and look in the window above the front door, keeping watch.  Not for predators outside like cats or whatever, but us people on the inside.  But, because of that we can’t get a good look at them.  That gave me the idea to pull my old IP webcam and point it at the nest.

Without further ado, I give you the birdcam: http://bird.doughughes.net (please disregard the broken images, the camera is borked for some reason.).  A full 24 hours of birdly goodness.  Where you can watch a bird sit in its nest.  Sometimes it doesn’t sit in its nest.  Often times though that’s what it’s doing.   Occasionally it will look around.  It’s surprisingly fun to watch!  Personally, I’m hoping that if they hatch some chicks that we’ll be able to see them grow up and leave the nest.

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Please help me find Alex (aka Jeff) from mid-Michigan, age 46ish. I have his irreplaceable baby photos. [Updated]

Note: I have updated this entry to make it a bit easier to read and to fix and add some facts I’ve learned.

I would really appreciate some help finding someone named Alex who also went by the name of Jeff.  He lived in or around East Lansing or Mason, Michigan about 10-15 years ago.  I don’t want or need his personal information, but perhaps someone knows him and can refer him to me.

I have ten black and white baby photos of him and someone I believe to be his brother named Eric. These were entrusted to me in the mid-90’s, but were never returned to him. He specifically told me that they are irreplaceable family treasures and I really want me to return them to him.  I found them in storage a few years ago and have tried a few times to track him down, but I’ve not had any luck.

On the off chance someone on the Internet happens to know this guy, here’s everything I know about him:

  • I believe his first name is Alex. I think he often went by the name of Jeff, though I’m not sure why. When discussing him, my friends would often call him Jeff-Alex.  (In previous versions of this entry I said his name was actually Jeff, I now think that’s wrong and Alex is correct.)
  • Alex was very tall. I’d guess he was probably about 6’ 5” and very skinny. He had short hair that was brown or blonde, I believe.
  • According to dates on these photos, Alex may have been born in 1965 and would be 46ish. His older brother Eric would be 48ish and may have been born in January 1962.
  • His father’s name may be Paul.
  • He had an idea to make a line of children’s clothes with built-in reinforced handles to make kids easy to pick up. (This is related to how I ended up with his baby photos.)
  • I am pretty sure his wife’s name is/was Maggie.
  • When I knew him, Alex was dating a much younger woman whose name was probably Maggie. I think she was in her 20s at the time, so she’d be in her 30s now. At the risk of sounding like a typical guy, all I remember about her was that she wore a lot of tight clothing and had large breasts. I think she also had red hair, but I can’t remember if it was natural or dyed.  I’m not sure if this is Maggie or not.
  • He also had a young kid at the time. I’d say the kid was likely 18 months to 2ish and would be a teenager now.
  • A bunch of us used to hang out at a Cafe under the multi-colored parking garage in downtown East Lansing next door to Georgios Pizza.
  • I think his mother had a trailer north of the Lansing area, possibly at the neighborhood at the intersection of Wood Rd and East State Road called King Aurthur’s Court.
  • He used to hang out on a Lansing-area local BBS called The Ruthless Gameboard.

Just to be clear, I’m not asking for his information.  I’m hoping someone will recognize him and point him to this post.  If he wants the photos back he can get in touch with me.  Failing that, finding his last name or anyone else who knows him or can reach him would be really helpful.  I’d sure be happy to have this off my chest.

Here are the pictures:

Can you help me find his last name or get in touch with him somehow?  If you live in the East Lansing area can you please share this with people you know?  I’ll update this entry if anything happens.  Thanks for your help!

Note: I first published this blog entry in November 2008.  I posted it to my Facebook friends as well and got nothing.  I even took out Facebook and Google Ads for people who were from the area.  I got a couple of nibbles, but never found Jeff.  If you have any leads, please help a guy out!  Thanks!!

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Please Support My Wife’s New Business

So, my lovely wife Liz Hughes has started selling these health shake drinks by a company called Visalus.  She would like me to say that she also sell vitamins and supplements, etc.  Visalus an MLM gig like Pampered Chef (love it) or Tupperware (I’m ambivalent).

She’s actually gotten me drinking the shakes and, against all odds, I like them. I make them with two scoops of the shake mix, some unsweetened almond milk and Starbucks Via coffee.  Blamo, instant treat.  I am not exaggerating when I say I crave them throughout the day.  Trust me, this is a small miracle since I view most weight loss and health gimmicks as snake oil.  And, to my chagrin, I’ve been loosing weight again since I started drinking them.  I hit a new low today: 204.4, down from 232, though I’ve been exercising daily on the treadmill as well.

However, she has had some challenges getting started.  Her friends have not really stepped up to the plate to offer to have parties and support her.  So, I am here now to ask from my pool of friends and followers – especially those in the RTP area in North Carolina, even those we don’t actually know – would you please go to her website and read a little about this stuff?  If you are even marginally interested, please reach out to her.  Maybe you could have a party and invite some of your friends (or people you don’t like!)  Failing that, come to our place.  She’ll give you some of the shakes and talk about it with you.  Our kids will hang out with your kids and play with our chickens.  Who cares if anyone actually buys anything at this point? Just a little interaction can go a long way towards giving her some momentum.

The thing is, she’s really into this. For the last several years (4+) she’s had terrible pain in her legs and feet.  She’s gone to countless doctors, specialists, chiropractors, and perhaps some kooks too.  She’s cut out gluton, dairy, and other things from her diet in an attempt to resolve this.  We thought maybe it was Fibromyalgia or, I don’t know, something worse.  Nothing she tried actually seemed to help.  Until she tried this stuff.

To be clear, she didn’t try the Visalus shakes to cure the pain, she tried them to help her loose weight.  But they also seemed to help with the pain.  The weight loss thing  is slow going, but it does for everyone.  And furthermore, it really should be slow for health reasons.

Anyhow, she’s been really fretting over ways to get this gig going.  It’s something that is very important to her.  She has her own business cards now.  She’s going to a conference for Visalus representatives next week.  And she’s doing things way outside her comfort zones.  Things like posting flyers in the local YMCA and standing up to talk to rooms full of strangers.

And since it’s important to her, it’s important to me.  Hence my plea to you: Please, give her a chance!  What do you have to loose?  A half hour watching some rather over the top videos?  A semi-cynical conversation about product health claims?  Perhaps.  But maybe, just maybe you’ll actually be interested.  If not, then you’ve still done a good deed by helping my wonderful wife get her start doing this and we will be greatly indebted to you.

Please, get in touch with her by email at hugliz@myvi.net or go to her website at http://hugliz.bodybyvi.com.

Thank you so much in advance for being the totally awesome friends I know you are.

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Struggling To Be Useful Today

Pardon the stream of though nature that I expect this blog post to embody.  I’m pretty much failing to do useful work today.  I did get some time in for one of my clients to finish up some unit tests I was writing and I worked on some details for a new project proposal.  But since then I’m really floundering and I’m not sure why or what I can do about it.

So, rather than do more of what I’ve done for the last couple hours, I’ve decided to hop on my treadmill and get some walking in.  I also figured that if I blog while walking that maybe, just maybe, I’d get some inspiration.

I could be working on Supporting.us, the non profit that the Alagad crew is starting up.  I need to get more content up on it, especially as related to refunds, etc.  I need this content not only so I can start promoting Supporting.us, but so I can show it to the merchant account provider and get approval for our merchant account.  With that we could really get started.

Given all the other things (ADD and depression) I’ve been trying to manage I’ve been giving myself a free pass on Supporting.us, but I’m thinking next week I’ll set a rule of doing one hour of work on it every day, first thing in the morning.  If I’m not enjoying the writing, then at least I’ll be doing a little bit each day.

Speaking of which, no chance you, fine reader, know of anyone who would be willing to donate some design time to make Supporting.us a little prettier?  If so, send me an email at doug@doughughes.net, please.

I could also be working on a couple of my other side projects (urate.it, respondin.gs, all my parked domains, etc).  But again, I’m just not.  And I’m not sure why.

Beyond that, I could also be outside trying to finish putting my kids play set together.  This would be something I just might enjoy, but it seems like I should be putting more effort into doing real work durring the weekday.

And so, I am here on the treadmill walking.  I’m hoping that maybe getting my blood flowing will get me off my arse.  And, on that note I just remembered that one of my clients needs me to research YouTube Direct.   I think I’ll do that.

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My Goal, Revised

A couple of weeks back, while trying to inspire myself, I made a rather bold goal.  My goal was to publish one KickStarter project a month until one was actually funded.  I’m supposed to have published my first project by Febuary 17th.  Well, that’s not going to happen.  Not because of inaction, but because I now realize that this goal is totally ridiculous.

Not long after stating this goal, I submitted my first project proposal to KickStarter.  The way it works is you write up a proposal for a project and submit it to KickStarter.  The KickStarter folks review the proposal and decide if it falls within their guidelines or not.  The following are KickStarter’s guidelines, meticulously copied off of their site:

  • I am creating a project. Kickstarter is for the funding of projects – albums, films, specific works – that have clearly defined goals and expectations.
  • My project fits within one of Kickstarter’s categories. Kickstarter can be used to fund projects from the creative fields of Art, Comics, Dance, Design, Fashion, Film, Food, Games, Music, Photography, Publishing, Technology, and Theater. We currently only support projects from these categories.
  • My project does not incorporate charity or cause funding. Examples of prohibited use include raising money for the Red Cross, funding an awareness campaign, funding a scholarship, or donating a portion of funds raised on Kickstarter to a charity or cause.
  • My project is not a “fund my life” project. Examples include projects to pay tuition or bills, go on vacation, or buy a new camera.
  • My project offers rewards, not financial incentives. The Kickstarter economy is based on the offering of rewards – copies of the work, limited editions, fun experiences. Offering financial incentives, such as ownership, financial returns (for example, a share of profits), or repayment (loans) is prohibited.

The project I submitted was Supporting.us.  Supporting.us is a non-profit that will facilitate making mobile donations to charities.  This is a work in progress created by myself and the rest of the team here at Alagad (Chris Peterson, Liz Hughes, and Randy Miller).  You can visit Supporting.us to learn more about it, but be warned that I’ve not yet completed the content on the site, I’m not happy with the design, and there are a few features left to implement.  That said, I’d love to get any feedback you may have on the overall concept.

What I was asking KickStarter for was funds to complete the development, improve the design, and generally push this app over the finish line.  Unfortunately, I was declined by KickStarter.  For those who wonder how KickStarter rejects you, this is what I received from them:

Kickstarter Staff commented on your Kickstarter submission:

Thank you for taking the time to share your idea. Unfortunately, this isn’t the right fit for Kickstarter. We receive many project proposals daily and review them all with great care and appreciation. We see a wide variety of inspiring ideas, and while we value each one’s uniqueness and creativity, Kickstarter is not the right platform for all of them. We wish you the best of luck as you continue to pursue your endeavor.

Best,
Kickstarter

It’s pretty straightforward.  I can’t say I was terribly surprised either.  Reviewing the guidelines, I think Supporting.us fell into a gray area.  Specifically, Supporting.us does incorporate charity or cause funding.  If Supporting.us itself wasn’t a non-profit (which was our original intent, but won’t work – that’s a whole other story) I think this would have been more likely to be approved.  But, giving us funds would be, well, making a donation to a non-profit.

Another challenge with KickStarter is that they require projects to offer rewards to the people who make donations.  With a physical project this is easier than with a web app, you can simply reward them with the product they’re supporting.  But this isn’t as easy with something intangible like a web app.  For Supporting.us I proposed having Chris Peterson, one of our developers, make a set of one of a kind turned pens to give out as rewards.  While the pens are beautiful, they are unrelated to the project at hand.  Overall, it was an awkward proposal and I understand why it was declined.

This rejection puy my goal into perspective.  It’s going to be hard to get a project onto KickStarter unless it’s for a physical product.  Perhaps open source projects would have better chances.  Pretty much everything I know in this world is web (and now some mobile) development.  Looking through KickStarter, there just aren’t many projects of this type.  I’ll have to be creative.

I’ve decided to update my goal. Instead of trying to publish a new project every month, I just want to publish one project this year.  I don’t care if it gets funded, though I’ll do my best to see that it is!  I simply want to have the experience of publishing a project on KickStarter. Wish me luck and give me suggestions!

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