Is Eucopia dead?

@JasonToon

@JasonToon Sorry to hear that. It was a good effort. I will enjoy my tiki mugs for a long time.

@SSteve those mugs are awesome! I think it would be fun to plant something in them, maybe a trailing vine or something.

@annwat You and me both, fellow dreamer/sucker.

@mossygreen @annwat And here I was feeling bad for being out $140. Still waiting for that email @jasontoon mentioned on Oct 10.

@jbartus i’m not certain but it looks like there won’t be any more monthly/semi-monthly boxes delivered. supposedly an email went out to subscribers but i never received one.

Pinging @jasontoon, I’m sure he’ll contact you. He’s a good guy. I mean, I wouldn’t want him to marry my sister, but he’s a good guy . . . Plus, my sis is old and past her prime, so he would probably not like that. Unless he would. In which case, ewe, but welcome to the family ya perv, you’ll fit right in.

@Pavlov
I’d be careful about calling one’s own sister “past her prime”.

Sounds like a risky move.

@f00l Sis is a Luddite - no computer, I’m safe. She’s all bark and no bite anyway . . . She lost her teeth years ago.

@Pavlov

Somehow I don’t entirely believe you.

Guess no one here besides you has her phone number, huh?

@f00l Call her at your own peril. She never shuts up.

@Pavlov

Game, set, match.

@f00l I’d hit it

@annwat That is terribly disappointing. And you must have the patience of a saint. Try emailing eucopia@eucopia.com. I’m a bit flabbergasted he didn’t reach out . . . Dumbfounded I am, frankly. Not cool. Hopefully it is just an email / spam folder error or something similar.

@annwat It’s coming don’e ever lose faith.

@Pavlov nope, i don’t think so - i’d previously received eucopia emails and i check my spam folder daily. oh well, not your problem but thanks for taking an interest!

@annwat I don’t even . . . SMH.

Seriously, @jasontoon ! ! ! The fuck man? Send the guy an email. Or communicate at least a little something here.

The next time a Meh staffer flogs some idea on here, bullshit like this will make many of us think twice.

@Pavlov I’m still waiting too. I’m sure it’s too late but I’m going to contact my credit card company to see if I can get my money back. I guess giving @jasontoon the benefit of the doubt was not the most fiscally prudent decision.

@SSteve You can try, but, if your payment was through the crowdfunding campaign, Indiegogo is pretty clear that there are no guarantees you’ll get your perks. It’s a risky investment, not a purchase.

@craigthom Just for the record, I did get the three boxes from the initial crowdfunding campaign. Then I signed up for another three months.

@Pantheist I think that is one of the issues with pre orders and using a credit card. You have 60 days from the date the transaction is posted to dispute the charge. I doubt most credit card companies can help you if it has been past that 60 day period. They can try but then the company can easily say, “It’s past 60 days” and probably win the dispute based on that alone.

@cengland0 I did win despite indiegogo protesting- that was how.

@Pantheist Was it over a year later? I think that is the sticking point for some of us less aggressive people.

@mossygreen 8 or 9 months

@cengland0 @mossygreen @Pantheist of course all of this presumes that a crowdfunding pledge is a preorder as opposed to patronage with a thank you gift attached.

@jbartus I suppose that matters if you want to get into the ethics of the thing, but if you want just want to get your money back from a scammer all that counts is that indiegogo is classified as a merchant.

@Pantheist thanks for the info about trying to reclaim the money that was donated.

i don’t consider the eucopia campaign to have been a scam. but the fact that I contributed $450 for 12 months worth of boxes and only got three has now left me sour on the whole idea of contributing to any other crowdfunding/kickstarter type effort. so eucopia has indirectly screwed other possible startups out of money i would have been willing to contribute.

had i known that i would have been out that much money, i would have put my $450 into kiva - at least that would have made me feel better about “losing” my money.

@Pantheist is a person who enters into a campaign with every intention of doing the right thing (as I’m sure @JasonToon did) only to have the realities of trying to make their business model / product / whatever work stand in the way of delivering what they’d hoped to deliver a scammer or simply a dreamer that aimed too high?

Don’t get me wrong I do agree that it’s pretty reprehensible that @JasonToon has let this lapse for as long as he has. With that said the Meh staffers seem to like him well enough to keep him around and since I think we can all agree that they’re good people he’s probably good people too (commutative property FTFW) so I’m guessing (hoping?) that the main reason he hasn’t gotten the promised email out to his patrons / customers is some combination of embarrassment, procrastination of a distasteful task (which I think we can all empathize with), the desire to figure out as fair a resolution for all parties involved as he can, and the ever slippery forward march of time.

That said, I don’t actually know him from Adam so I suppose it’s possible that he’s some kind of dirty rotten crook but, as noted, given those who keep him in their company I feel pretty strongly that there’s some other explanation.

@annwat the biggest thing with crowdfunding is that you need to go into it expecting nothing in return beyond the good-faith efforts of the campaign holder to create the product / service they are asking for money to make. It really is like the traditional and somewhat antiquated idea of patronage. You don’t know for sure what Michelangelo is going to make, it might be the Statue of David that you envisioned it to be based on his description, it might be the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel which (while nice) bears little or no resemblance to what you pictured, or it might be a half-shapen mound of clay lovingly worked on but abandoned due to the pressures of every day life. (Yes, there is a fourth option wherein Michelangelo moves to the Costa del Sol and lives with a dozen concubines on your dime but they’re really quite rare)

The point being that starting out you’re supporting someone’s idea and hoping that from the seed money you’ve planted their idea will flourish and bloom to become that which you always thought it would be. There are no guarantees.

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

@jbartus Nah . He’s traveling right now. I can’t. Didn’t support this, but he’s obviously spending money that other people can’t while not upholding his end of a deal.

@jbartus yep, you are correct.

i’d had good results with donations to prior crowdfunding projects so i thought this would also be a successful effort. this was a good lesson for me overall; a disappointing one but still a lesson learned.

@Pantheist you’re assuming his travel is personal for pleasure versus business related. Perhaps the reason things fell apart is that he had a shift in responsibilities at whatever job he’s doing when he’s not writing blurbs for Meh and it has him travelling for work? I feel it’s a bit soon to be applying the scammer label before we’ve gotten his explanation.

He did indicate that he’s trying to liquidate the assets of Eucopia, something he’d be foolish to mention unless it had a corresponding (partial) refund associated with it which indicates to me he’s probably out to do the right thing. I do think he would be well served to air whatever explanation he has publicly though so it’s not dependent on the grape vine as his name has been pretty well muddied by this whole affair.

@jbartus shrug I love his meh writeups. In my mind that is completely unrelated to this. If a person takes money for a product/service, he either needs to produce or refund all the money he collected for it. I know a depressing number of people who collect money from a crowdfunding campaign, don’t produce, then live more extravagantly than I can afford to- in part because of the essentially swindled money. That appears to be exactly what is happening here. Your opinion is obviously different, and that’s fine.

@Pantheist but that’s the point, crowdfunding isn’t preordering, he took money in support of his idea and pledged to provide different sorts of donor gifts in gratitude provided everything worked out. Clearly that isn’t what happened.

If Eucopia was viable don’t you think @JasonToon would be happily collecting monthly subscriptions and sending out boxes? Do bear in mind he did send out three months worth of boxes, it’s not like he collected and never delivered anything. What’s he supposed to do bankrupt himself to deliver packages?

@jbartus I think people are responsible for their ideas, especially when they solicit money from others based on those ideas. If I make a crowdfunding platform to give people gills so they can breathe underwater, in carnival barker style convince them that it will work, then run off with the funds you could make the same argument. After all, if my plan for gill implants worked, why wouldn’t I still be selling them?

@Pantheist the difference being that he shipped three months worth of boxes, you wouldn’t have ever shipped any gill implants.

@jbartus How about if I sent people shark gills (labeled as my progress towards human gills) as proof that I was onto something and collected more money from them?

Seems worse.

@Pantheist I feel like we’re in either a situation where you consider pledges to be preorders or investments, both of which would be situations wherein the person receiving money has a fiscal responsibility to their benefactors, crowdfunding doesn’t work that way except in very few (and legally very gray) specialized cases wherein it’s specifically termed equity crowdfunding.

Your shark gills wouldn’t be a finished product. JasonToon (tag omitted to avoid flooding him) delivered a finished product for three months. I suspect we’re going to find out that Eucopia never hit the critical mass required to make it financially viable. At some point with a failing business venture you have to pull the plug. As stated, I do think it’s gotten a bit absurd at this point with regards to the delay but again, liquidating assets seems to indicate an intent to make customers / patrons as whole as possible so the heart seems to be in the right place.

@jbartus I maintain if you take money for a product and don’t deliver that product or return 100% of the money, you effectively scammed people. What you’re describing sounds like a justified ponzi scheme to me. I have no vested interest in this, so I’m going to let it go after this response. Fact remains, if anyone else feels like they were cheated they can win by disputing charges as I described.

@Pantheist Crowdfunding is for supporting dreams and ideas, the problem is when people don’t acknowledge that fact and treat it as a marketplace for buying products. Like I said, it’s patronage, if people want to buy a finished product with guaranteed delivery they should try Amazon or some other retailer. Anyhow, we can agree to disagree.

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

@jbartus @Pantheist

good god. did two people just have a polite disagreement on the internet?

you make me sick! where’s the hate and vitriol?? you’ve totally ruined the internet for me. i hate you.

@carl669

They were not only even-tempered and respectful, they were fairly rational and intelligent. And I don’t think they called names or made up facts.

Should we burn them?

@carl669 fuck you! Who the fuck do you think you are to fucking tell me how to disagree with someone on the fucking internet you fucking fuck? If I wanted fucking advice from you I’d be more interested in how your mom likes to be fucked, not that I fucking care if she enjoys tonight or not. That’s right, your opinion is fucking irrelevant because I’m fucking your mom, deal with it! It’s common fucking knowledge that fucking your mother makes me your daddy so respect your fucking elders and shut the fuck up.

---

Better, @f00l? @carl669? How’s the fuck count looking these days anyhow?

@jbartus

That’s some sort of masterpiece.

Bravo!!!

@Pantheist I had the opposite experience with a Kickstarter. I got burned on Zano after like 11 months when the scam irrefutably came crumbling down around the company. My bank refused to look at it due to age, mastercard said it’s the bank’s call, and Kickstarter said “sorry, here’s a blog post about what happened”. That blog post was not worth however many hundreds of dollars I will never see again, and my bank’s attitude made it clear that they do not have my back in a situation like this. I have been much less likely to participate in crowdfunding that seems risky since then, figuring it is worth paying full price later if the product does survive.

@djslack Sorry to hear that- I have bank of america and visa if it matters. I stopped doing crowdfunding too since it just wasn’t worth the hassle. Backed three projects- two never happened and one came a year late.

@RiotDemon To me this isn’t crowdfunding…it’s more of an order minimum. I think the issue is really that crowdfunding has often been used for the order minimum and not as a way to actually fund the design of a new product etc, where there are established costs that can be shared. I assume that part of the expenses for Eucopia were sunk cost startup expenses, just what crowdfunding is for. Few of us would just donate money to him (that’s what investors are for) so the promise of goods/services was a fair exchange. Those seeking to recoup their good faith donation are actually the scammers here.

@tightwad I think that ssteve said he resubscribed after his initial indegogo thing but for the rest that’s just the risk you take. I’m with @riotdemon- I did a month of Eucopia and I do card games but the risk is too high for the big buck items. Look at that crazy cooler/blender/speaker thing from kickstarter.

@sammydog01 I had initially started watching the kickstarter for the Skarp laser razor. It was up to 4 MILLION dollars! I had told kickstarter to send me a reminder a few days before it ended so I could do more research. A while went by, and I remembered the razor, hoping that kickstarter hadn’t forgotten me. Turns out, they cancelled it because it didn’t fit their criteria of having a working prototype. It ended up moving to Indiegogo and they only got around half a million this time. I guess I wasn’t the only one scared off. It’s been around 8 months and they still haven’t finished their prototype. I’m glad I put way less money towards a groupon for laser hair removal instead, lol

@RiotDemon funding on Indiegogo is to funding on Kickstarter what making your own e-commerce site is to selling on Amazon. They’re not even in the same league. I’m sure a decent amount of people reconsidered after it was cancelled but the venue has nearly as much to do with that outcome.