With the huge amount of backing towards the Instacube there should have been a huge development shift and a fast turnaround. Since September last year D2M, the company behind the Instacube, promised a March-early April delivery date. The whole project itself initially wanted $250,000 to get it going, and ended up with nearly 3x that amount landing at $621,049. This amount allowed for promises such as Facebook integration, SmartThings integration and some snazzy outer casing. But in a recent update D2M have finally publicly announced that their money from Kickstarter has almost vanished.
In their public announcement it’s said that they had trouble with a partner pulling out last minute, and for this they are greatly sorry. Following this they stated that they’re doing fundraising to make the difference lost in this failed partnership. Sounds great, until they drop the bomb that they’re under budget by about $850,000. In total this cost adds up to just over $1.6mil, lets say that again: the project as a whole will cost $1.6mil.
Putting this into perspective, $1.6million is a vast amount to pay for anything. You could be a couple of houses with that and then some. It’s a shock to the system for a lot of backers, and a lot are requesting a refund. In the statement itself there is no chance of a refund until the product actually launches but one commenter, Paul Morris, has made a valid point for some UK backers:
It seems that the majority of banks and credit card companies (definitely in the UK anyway) have a 120 day chargeback and disputes policy. This product was funded late September with the deliverable date being set for March 3rd. This falls within the 120 day policy, which is therefore why my bank are honouring the refund.If your bank or credit card company states that your concern is now over 120 days then give them the aforementioned dates. The chargeback timeframe refers to promised DELIVERABLE date, which was March.
This may be a route for a lot of backers if they don’t see a turnaround sooner. But where has this money all gone? They’ve produced a list in their recent update of the locations that the money was spent in:
- Full-time design, engineering and manufacturing staff
- Â Manufacturing tooling
- Manufacturing testing
- Travel to factories and suppliers
- Prototypes, samples, materials
Within this list there are a couple of odd ones, including a salary to a social media manager? Salary to staff and also travel costs. None are delved into very deeply but the idea of paying staff a regular wage on a project like this sounds a little overkill. If a company is invested in a project and believes it’ll take off, they would hold out on crazy staff spending and wait for the return on profits to resolve any overspending and thus take profit.
This is a great idea on where it all went, but also their fund raising efforts within the company didn’t turn out the way they expected either. During a time that they were building the Instacube they started a new company to turn heads towards the Instacubes new founders NuMatter. Looking up the name brings up no results on google, except for one website.
This website,NuMatter, shows the instacube and has a couple of extra slide, but it feels unfinished. Almost wasted time. As we haven’t heard anything from this company at all with no new content it’s hard to understand why they did this other than to protect themselves from legal liability.
As this is on-going, there is a lot of speculation as to whether or not this product is going to set sail, or it’s going to sit in Kickstarters failure to launch bay forever.
Have you backed the Instacube? What do you think of all this?
See the update in full here:Kickstarter
