You’ll regularly find us harping on about how amazing crowdfunding is and how many fantastic ideas are now realities thanks to this modern phenomenon. Well, believe it or not, we’ve never looked at the flip side of the coin – the Irish Kickstarter fails. It’s easy to enjoy the brilliant, but for one moment, let’s pause and appreciate the dreamers that just didn’t think their idea through.
Determining the worst Irish Kickstarter fails
Our methodology is simple. Kickstarter allows you to search campaigns by country, funding goal and actual funding achieved. We consider the fails to be sitting atop a list of campaigns with huge goals but very little interest. Using Kickstarter’s advanced search, we are able to find campaigns raising less than €1000 after targeting over €1 million: all from within Ireland of course. Without further ado we present to you the worst Irish Kickstarter fails.
Kickstart a Millionaire
If you’re going to kick off the list of Irish Kickstarter fails what better way to do it that a blatant attempt to get rich. Dublin’s Glenn O Carroll, who we can only imagine had just watched the Truman Show, had plans of the public simply giving him money. With this money, Glenn would strap up some GoPro cameras to himself and show the world what it’s like to be the “flavor of the month”.
Reading this got me a little excited as it’s genuinely a really interesting concept. Sure enough, Glenn was worried about “becoming a meme”, so much he declared this as one of the projects main risks. Alas, fears were put aside as he missed two key funding targets. First he fell short of €1 million and second he fell short of his honest prediction of even achieving €2. Glenn raised €1.
The Beloved
Since its inception Kickstarter has been involved in the creation of several movies with the likes of the Veronica Mars movie, receiving almost $6 million from just over 90,000 backers being a prime example of how to do it. The Beloved didn’t quite reach the same heights.
Set in an 1968 Welsh commune, The Beloved proved to be a steamy affair, aiming for £850,000 in crowdfunding, The Beloved achieved a grand total of £101 from two backers. This was all despite having £2.66 million already secured prior to the campaign starting.
Building Michael’s house from GTA 5
We don’t really know which of the two points we should start with on this one. We either start with how crazy it is, or the fact it’s crazy 10 people backed it, raising €33 of the overall €1.7 million funding target.
Well we’ve pretty much covered how off the wall that second bit is just by mentioning it, so now onto the idea. Grand Theft Auto has seen many of us enjoy hours of waging horrendous violence on a virtual world. Many worry about that virtual world creeping into reality, but few would have predicted that emerge as a Kickstarter campaign. Well that’s just what happened as a man by the name of Paul Boyle thought it a good idea to get a rake of people together to fund the main character’s mafia gaff for a cool €1.7 million.
As we said, €33 was raised by 10 people but the proposed Carlingford site in Louth won’t be seeing the GTA mansion anytime soon.
Three Armed Decoy Tour
We could have featured them twice in this list of Irish Kickstarter Fails, but we won’t. First in March and again in May 2015, Three Armed Decoy attempted to raise €1.1 million to fund a world tour following years of support from dedicated fans in an effort to reach even more fans. Described as a “simple project” needing help from “normal people” the first campaign did achieve €30 from two backers. The follow up campaign didn’t raise anything.
We wouldn’t mind but we’ve heard worse.
FERDO.com – August 2015
We’re pretty sure this was a real campaign that didn’t lack some fairytale thinking. The campaign’s founder had the idea at the age of eight to design a site combining “social network, an on-line shop, an on-line arcade, an entertainment station and tones [sic] of applications”, summed up by the creator as holding the potential to “be one of the most beneficial and creative sites ever”. Backers were offered free access to downloads in the first year, but this was not to be a problem. With an initial target of €1.25 million, FERDO.com raised €1 from one backer – whom we imagine was the founder himself.
It was a lack of interest that scuppered FERDO.com despite the founder predicting the primary risks and challenges of the project to be the possibility “it will need to become popular before it becomes successful.” Unfortunately, owing to the fact FERDO.com was practically Facebook, they missed their goal but did earn the title of “least successful Kickstarter campaign in Ireland”.
That’s the best of the best…or is it worst of the worst?
