Why The FatherIO Crowdfunding Campaign Was Never Going To Work

If you haven't been part of the father.io journey from the beginning, here is some background info first.

It all started with an awesome video

In October 2014 I stumbled upon this video:

It was one of the more inspiring ideas I had seen recently, in a field that hasn't seen such disruption.

The father.io web site only had the above video and a one-box sign up form to "Enter the beta wait list!" This got me really excited, so I signed up and got the following message.

It started feeling like I was becoming part of an online gaming revolution and it was about to happen soon. I started spreading the word almost immediately and started talking with my friends and colleagues how we would play the game in certain locations (like the BBH London office for starters!).

A few weeks later, I received an email with the subject line stating that the game "has just been launched". It started with the words "The long wait is over!"

Boy, was I ready!

Disappointment

But then it gave me one of the bigger disappointments of late. There was a catch!

By "launch", the FatherIO team meant they had started a crowdfunding campaign to build a "trigger" for $59.

There was just so many things wrong with this:

Maybe the word "launch" got lost in translation (father.io team, Proxy 42 Inc, are Italian) but I expected something else - an actual product launch.
Crowdfunding, by the very nature of it, is about funding an idea to get it to market. This felt like the team was on a mission to sell a product instead.
A video published on the fatherio YouTube channel showed that the current state of the product was far from what was in the original trailer.
Above all, the biggest disappointment was that this "trigger" was never mentioned before. In hindsight (watching the video again), there seems to be a device connected to mobile phones but I missed that. As did almost everybody else I passed the video on to...
The trigger wasn't built. The game wasn't ready. The team was basically trying to raise an investment round (without giving away equity) to build these things.

We even talked about this in the office

Yesterday we had a strategy meeting for our business, and I don't know how but at some point the discussion came to FatherIO.

I told my business partner, Ian, that the FatherIO campaign wouldn't work because of the above reasons, and mainly because "I felt cheated - I didn't know I had to purchase a device to play this game."

But actually the real disappointment was this:

Proxy 42 had sold me and 55,000 other people a grand vision and left us under the impression (by not stating otherwise) that they were really close to getting us to that vision.

After all, we saw an amazing trailer that looked like the real deal, signed up to a "beta waitlist" and a couple of weeks later got told the magic was "launched".

What the crowdfunding campaign revealed was that this was far from the truth. In fact, there were just so many unknowns.

Then the campaign ends

Tonight I received the following email:

The link above takes you to a form that looks like this:

Back to square one

It sounds like it is back to square one for the Proxy 42 team.

In fact, they just took down a whole bunch of other pages from their web site, including https://father.io/team.html and https://father.io/press.html. Google still has cached copies though, including a link to a Dropbox share with the press kit. (By the way, I just noticed that the press release was sent out a week before I got the "we launched" email - so press came before the crowd, much before!)

But the problem is the team doesn't seem to understand what went wrong. In fact, the multiple choice answers to their "why didn't you buy the trigger" question pretty much supports this claim. So I wanted to write an open letter to their CEO. Here we go...

Dear Franceso,

(Congratulations on a global, disruptive, visionary idea, etc etc - you've read my thoughts already above)

I'm saddened to hear the crowdfunding campaign didn't work out, but you must understand it was obvious where it headed.

You've set a great expectation among thousands of people with an amazing video. You chose not to share any other information about your vision and let the trailer do the selling. It worked. We bought into the idea and made it viral, along with our assumptions. Your crowdfunding campaign; however, became your Pandora's box. With a single email, you've revealed that most of our assumptions were incorrect. This meant there was now a major discrepancy between our expectations and the current status of the project. This is why I think the above questionnaire won't get you closer to the truth.

You have a new challenge now: You have to reset the expectations of fifty five thousand people. If they feel cheated, starting with an apology may be a good idea.

But this is also a very big opportunity to redefine your proposition.

If you must have the "trigger" you should start the whole journey by explaining why. "Look what this small device would enable you to do..."

If the trigger must cost $59 at the outset, you should find another way to fund it. You've proven the market interest so my preference would have been to give away some equity and raise a seed round (e.g. $500k investment is almost like you getting 8500 pre-orders for the trigger); build the product (both the trigger and the game); then go out and sell it. This would force you to think differently - you would not be releasing a beta, but the real thing, and since you are pricing yourself above established game makers such as EA Games (FIFA 15 $49) and Ubisoft (Assassin's Creed Unity $55) FatherIO would have to be at a certain standard.

And remember; now that the idea is out and inspiring so many people, you may have started a race for creating the first real life FPS and you may have to scale quicker than you initially thought.

I'm afraid in any case either your wonderful trailer would have to change or you should be prepared to support it with other information. You have to set the right expectation for any newcomers.

I wish you all the best with this project and sincerely hope you can move it forward quickly.

Ekin Caglar, 27 November 2014