Because everyone asks, usually while backing away toward the door.
So many bad products get made for one simple, honest reason: they’re profitable. Nobody builds a lawn-measuring satellite out of malice — they build it because an HOA board will pay for it, and no force on Earth has ever out-argued a purchase order. You can’t boycott it, either: it was never for sale to you. Your one-star review does not reach orbit.
We at KickStopper looked at this and saw not a market failure, but the best of capitalism waiting to be unlocked. If profit is why bad products exist, profit can be why they don’t. We let customers vote with their wallets on the sort of future they’d like to live in — by buying terrible ideas outright, before they hit the shelves and the internet. The founder sells. The public buys. The deliverable, in the most elegant transaction ever devised, is the not-happening. Adam Smith never said the invisible hand couldn’t push back. We checked. It’s not in the book.
And everybody wins. The founder gets paid, without the exhausting formality of shipping. The world gets a future with one less thing in it. The free market gets to do what it does best — allocate resources efficiently — toward nothing, for once. We’re doing founders a favor. We’re doing the world a favor. We are, and we say this with complete humility, such good people. There’s a plaque about it in our lobby. We bought it ourselves. That’s also capitalism.
They must bring a credible threat: a working prototype or finished design, a team that can genuinely ship, and evidence that at least one buyer exists. Our Vetting Committee verifies everything. Vaporware is rejected — we don’t sell protection from ghosts.
The goal is calculated as the price at which walking away beats building: projected profits, sunk costs, ego premium, and a rehabilitation stipend. Too low and the founder builds anyway. Too high and the public gives up. It is a delicate, dismal science.
The public pledges toward the goal before the deadline. Reach it: the product is never made. The founder signs the Covenant of Eternal Non-Shipping, deletion is supervised by a third party, and the campaign moves to the Graveyard. Miss it: they ship — directly to the people you’d least want owning one. Your HOA board. Your landlord. Your gym. Deborah.
Every fully funded campaign is disbursed under the supervision of our escrow partner, a firm that also handles hostage negotiations and celebrity prenups, and describes us as “the weird account.”
Rehabilitation matters more than people expect. An unrehabilitated anti-founder simply reappears in eighteen months with the same product wearing a new name. A rehabilitated one opens a bakery. We have funded four bakeries. They are all excellent, and one of them still refuses to sell you a second croissant without a subscription, but the therapist says progress isn’t linear.
Built something the world will pay you to un-build? List it. Get stopped. Get paid. Get better.
Seven credible threats are live right now. Several are days from their deadlines.
Explore active threats