After a discouraging response from Kickstarter as to why HiLO Lens is not appropriate, we do have a more personalized reply :

Thanks for writing in and sharing your idea. With Kickstarter, it’s important to be able to communicate past experience, visual examples of your work, and a comprehensive plan to complete your project within a reasonably certain time-frame — projects at the very beginning stages are less successful because they are not able to do this.

Something like this sounds exciting, but is not in an ideal position to benefit from our platform.

I’ll break this down into possible causes for rejection :

  • insufficient past experience
  • visual examples of the work
  • comprehensive plan
  • early stage

Regarding insufficient past experience our team has a great depth of experience, including project management, optical design, app development and mechanical design. Maybe my presentation was not clear but I would expect a question in this regard, rather than a flat out rejection.

I didn’t provide visual examples of the work, the main reason for this is because there is no way to upload attachments with the project proposal. I assumed the proposal would be a first interaction with Kickstarter and we could then provide more details.

A comprehensive plan is in place. But they asked for a brief outline ! Why not ask for more information rather than flat out rejecting the proposal ?

In regards to a Kickstarter campaign we are not at an early stage. The project has been developed for around 8 months and significant investments have been made e.g. optics design and prototyping, case design and prototyping, app development.

The Kickstarter project submission requires the following :

  • Description of the project (max 750 characters)
  • Description of the rewards (max 1000 characters)
  • Link to web content about the project. Kickstarter asks for information on you, your work, and/or this project. I linked to some articles in this blog.

The submission form does not mention visual examples of the work or a comprehensive plan. It makes sense that they will want to see this at a later stage, however the proposal asks to keep things short.

On one hand I am happy to get a response that looks less like the previous template answers. But I would love feedback on how to get the project into a state that is acceptable. It is frustrating, to say the least, but I’ve not given up yet.

I’ve addressed the concerns raised in a reply to Kickstarter. Now for the inevitable waiting.

In the meantime we’ve finished designing the case for the prototype optics module. That will be 3D printed and tested shortly. Things are progressing independently of Kickstarter.