Let's discuss the face of domestic crowdfunding

Hello, Habr. For a long time I did not want to write on this topic, due to the clearly negative color of the aspects raised. However, I see that for some reason no one voices the issues that concern me in the community. Under the cut, I’ll try to describe what doesn’t suit me personally in the top national crowdfunding project, and I also expect to hear the opinion of the community - I am right or wrong.

So, what is this “face of domestic crowdfunding”? Now, without a twinge of conscience, we can assume that most people who are even slightly familiar with the topic, having heard such a phrase, will think about Boomstarter.

Why am I discussing this here? I believe that this whole project became possible only thanks to information technology, which means that it is appropriate to discuss ethical issues of this project primarily with the IT community.

It would seem that now it is already a very successful platform. On the main page proudly flaunts a counter in 2 024 successful projects. Among all domestic platforms, this is probably the highest result.

But is everything really good with him?

I registered there back in 2014, being intrigued by their rapid growth and sharing an excellent, inherently idea. I replenished the account with some insignificant amount, it seems about 500 rubles. Supported several projects ...

And then the first disappointment awaited me. None of the projects I supported came to an end. Of course, there seems to be no questions for the organizers. We all know that even on the top-end Kickstarter, the lion's share of projects do not take off. However, I believe that all this, as well as the state of the industry in our market in general, is a consequence of the attitude of the people who do this business to their users. A simple question - what is the percentage of completed projects on this site relative to all created? It is not possible to find such information on the site. For me, this is also a bell. Here, for example, the same Kickstarter provides similar information on all projects (not only successful ones) in the Our Stats section:



Well, okay ... okay. They didn’t take off, so they didn’t take off. It happens. In the end, this issue is quite complicated - maybe we just don’t share such a model with us, and in principle, the percentage of successful projects will always be low.

Several years have passed. I met an advertisement for another project on the page of one of the authors on a social network. I was surprised and remembered that I have an account and that I can support the author without unnecessary gestures. Logged into your account and ... I saw that the entire balance of my funds was written off in favor of the site. Not immediately, of course, for about a month this happened, somehow like this: For



some reason, the last ten were written off two years later, I don’t know why.

It would seem ... Well, probably it is somewhere even described in the user agreement. But damn it! This, in fact, is again about the attitude to their own customers. Do you know a lot of companies that relate to your money in this way ? Here I went to PayPal for the sake of interest, I even had to restore the password, so long ago I did not look there. And what? Here are my unfortunate 139 rubles. Yes, of course, from an economic point of view, PayPal is unwise to compare with Boomstarter. However, the question is rather a matter of principle.

Be prepared that the site will take your money when it is convenient.

Well, the last straw that prompted me to raise this unpleasant question here was the launch by Boomstarter of its ICO. There was even some beautiful WhitePaper, everything was wonderfully painted.

As you know, the first case with money, alas, taught me nothing. I looked at the beautiful financial performance of the company, I liked the idea, and I thought that these guys are serious, and not some swindlers, they’ll probably bring their project to the end. This time I invested even more, something about 2k.

Actually, as you might already have guessed, we will never see either this project or the money.

However, again, the ICO in theory implies that no one gives you any guarantees. But I was more twisted, again, by the company's attitude to its founders. When registering, access was given to your personal account (now it is no longer available). There you could track the status of the project and the balance of your own tokens.

After buying tokens, the project did not send any news. No notifications, nothing. After a couple of months, for the sake of interest, I decided to go to my personal account and ...



The most interesting is that the main domain at that time was still working, but the link to the personal account has changed. I tried to log in using my login, the site told me that I was not registered. There was no news either at the post office or on the project’s blog.

And after a couple of months, the boomstarter.network site itself lay down to rest.

The funny thing is that on Twitter and Facebook they continued to do posts until early May.

My personal opinion is all this real disgusting. Domestic crowdfunding with this approach will not receive normal development. Maybe I'm wrong, so I would like to hear the opinion of the community on this subject, as well as, of course, the representative of this site.