Pirate3D: our ship isn’t sinking

Roger Chang is the CEO and co-founder of Pirate3D, a company that designs and sells 3D printers. While generally uncontactable as his pirate ship has no mobile reception, he is reachable on Twitter @rogermcchang

“The reports of my death are greatly exaggerated.” – Mark Twain

Concerned friends have been asking me about Pirate3D in the aftermath of our blunder with the Kickstarter refund algorithm.

Mistakes were made, but overall it’s been great. Our new round of fundraising is just about done, we are ramping up to high volume production, and we are preparing for retail sales.

Nonetheless, I feel that I can clarify more about our situation. Here are some of the questions I’ve been frequently asked. If you’re looking to run a Kickstarter campaign yourself, you might find this useful.

Why the Kickstarter refunds?

We are behind schedule on our Buccaneer deliveries. Some backers also wanted official ABS material support, which we pulled for safety reasons.

Refunds for delays are actually not required by Kickstarter’s guidelines unless the Project Creator is unable or unwilling to fulfill the promised pledges.

We opted to offer refunds anyway because we have a saying in Pirate3D: “Do what is right, not what is easy.”

Your backers are the only people crazy or enlightened enough to put money behind your unproven product. They deserve to be treated fairly.

Don’t the refunds hurt Pirate3D?

Yes. We lose about 10 percent of the amounts refunded owing to commissions paid to Kickstarter as well as Amazon Payments.

Nonetheless, we had already planned and provisioned for refunds in April when we missed our first delivery date. In fact, our refund policy was announced to backers in July, way before any coding errors made it public.

All-in-all, we’ve only had to refund about 15 percent of backers.

Why the delays then?

Wait, doesn’t having all that Kickstarter backing make things easier?

So what now for Pirate3D?