Stereophile has turned a critical eye to Light Harmonic’s “Geek “crowd-funding campaigns (the “Geek Out” and the “Geek Pulse”). After a very nice article covering Geek in the January issue, things turned for the worse by the time February rolled around. Rocks started to get thrown. As Stephen Mejias writes on page 43: “Essentially they have sidestepped the burden of establishing a trustworthy dealer network.” Stephen seems clearly uncomfortable, or, at best, he simply has mixed emotions when it comes to the new business model represented by crowd funding.
The editor of Stereophile, John Atkinson, proceeded to write even more bizarre comments on the Stereophile website, with a January 14th posting criticizing the underlying crowd-funding model that Geek used to fund the “Geek Pulse”. He states, “Unlike KickStarter, where the company being funded doesn’t receive a dollar until the goal is reached, with Indiegogo the donors’ credit cards are charged and the money credited to the company when they make the pledge, regardless of the goal. LH Labs will therefore have the use of that $1.1M until they start shipping the Geek Pulse.” It seems John takes up issue with the immediate access to capital and the seemingly (to me, at least) trivial amount of interest income. Doesn’t the access to capital pay for manufacturing the product? What the heck is going on here? Why are rocks being thrown at good people trying something new?
It seemed very clear to me that the successful LH Geek campaigns are .....
Continues @ http://thehighfidelityreport.com/death-of-a-salesman-lh-geek-out-campaigns/
