Editing The Pen Addict 243/transcript (section)

== Visionaire Pen ==


'''Myke Hurley:''' I came across that thing the other day. I love it. I love that I own it. It's one of, you know, it's a real, honestly, I consider it like a centerpiece of my collection.

'''Jared:''' Yeah. There's no doubt.

'''Myke Hurley:''' Because of just the history that this pen holds. I will try and find, like, an episode to put in the show notes if you're not familiar with it. But the problem is the Visionaire thing lasted for so long, I don't really know which one to put in.

'''Jared:''' Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. I think put in the one where I was texting Morgan during the show.

'''Myke Hurley:''' I don't even know what one that will be. Yeah, I'd have to find it. I don't know either. It's one of the first or second ones. Episode 64, Johnny Anypen, which is that episode, I think, was the beginning of the Visionaire. So, I'd recommend go back to episode 64 and then just listen over the next few weeks and you're gonna get what you're looking for.

'''Jared:''' Yeah. So, we bring that up because I got an email. This is a week or two ago email that I didn't know what would come of it. I just got this generic email from someone named Emmanuel saying, And being a huge fan of fountain pens, love the podcast, by the way, I regularly look for interesting ones on Kickstarter. I found the Flow a while back and realized it looks like a lot like the Parker Sonnet. I'm convinced that the Flow is a minimally changed Parker Sonnet clone and that the Kickstarter campaign is an attempt to sell a $10 pen for $35. It's the Visionaire all over again. And he linked me to the project. And he actually said, I appreciate it if the podcast audience could be warned about this. So, I didn't know what to think about it when I got this email. I was like, oh, okay. I hadn't heard of this Flow pen. And no one mentioned that to me before I received this email. And I click over to the link. I'm like, okay, this is interesting. You know, it's or uninteresting as the case may be. The pen is just, you know, mock-up drawings. No real pen. And then in the comments section, people had already started taking the project creator to task for tell me more, show me it in action. You know, the things that people should be asking any project creator to prove, right? You want my money? Prove it. And she continually delayed, pushed. At one point, she added to the fact. Someone basically called out, said, you're buying this pen from Alibaba. Here's the link. Which is what Visionaire did. For those, if you're not familiar with that, they essentially bought a $1 or $2 Chinese pen. And mass manufactured to fulfill these kicks as their Kickstarter creation. Like, this is, you know, this is, you know, the project creator's life work to design this pen, right? And all this fluff and nonsense. She actually put that she's buying it from this specific company on Alibaba, is the person making this pen. And people just flipped. Like, which they should have. And I, like, I don't even understand if she's trying to pull something over. Like, she screwed the pooch right there. But it was just an awful, awful project that was so generic and lacking in details. Um, the commenters were on it from the jump. It had raised $20,000. And about, what, five days ago, it got yanked. Thank goodness. From Kickstarter. How do these projects make the money that they make?

'''Myke Hurley:''' Where are these people coming from? I just don't get it.

'''Jared:''' So, like, once this, once I started reading the comments and reading all this, I was like, okay, let me do a little digging. And, like, you can't find anything on the project creator. There's no, nothing. There's, it's just someone wanting to resell the pens they get from, for $2, for $35. I mean, it's just, people think they can do this. Um, and Kickstarter. And it's not saying they can't do it. You know, go build your website. Do it. And that's fine. But going through a platform like Kickstarter, when you're not, you know, when you're posing as someone who created the greatest pen design ever, um, and it's highly, highly not unique. It's essentially just a copy of a copy of a copy of a knockoff, um, that you're paying, you know, $2 for and passing it off as something that it's just not. And, uh, thankfully, Kickstarter caught this one ahead of time, canceled the project. And, uh, but it's out there for all to see. It's just kind of an embarrassment. So, I don't know.

'''Myke Hurley:''' It's such a good design decision, um, from Kickstarter that when they pull a campaign, the page remains. Yeah. I think that that's a good thing. Yeah. It remains there for people to see it. Um, I think that that is a, it's not necessarily the decision to make, right? Like, I can easily see a decision of, like, no, the page gets deleted. Like, and both of those is acceptable. But I'm happy that they choose the option where they basically say, no, we, this isn't going to happen. Like, for whatever reason, we don't think that this is the right thing to do to keep this project going.

'''Jared:''' But it looks like the, since they make that choice, the comments stay open. So, if you were a backer, you can continue to comment. Not that there's anything more to say. I mean, it's done. And they've essentially been found out, if you will. But, um, I mean, even the user's account is deleted. The project creator's account is deleted. I don't know that Kickstarter does that. Or if the project creator just bailed once the project got canned, they deleted their own account. But their accounts, it shows up, like, all their comment shows is deleted. Like, the comments live, but the project, the user ID shows deleted. So, it's crazy. So, I'm glad people will take, well, yeah, take project creators to task. Take me to task. If I say something or do something, people wanted to know about the budget for the pin. Where's all this money for the, for our Kickstarter? Where's all this money going? I posted the budget. I mean, you should call project creators out.

'''Myke Hurley:''' Yep.

'''Jared:''' Like, and people were like, oh, wow, I didn't think you'd do that. And I was like, well, I'm asking for your trust. It's your money. Yeah, it's your money. Here's how we're, here's how I intend to spend it. It's like, I'm not trying to, you know, hide anything. So, why wouldn't I post the budget? I'm, I'm totally cool with that. And I think people who know me and know my history, like, you can ask me anything. There's gonna be things I can't tell you, but I'm gonna give you everything that I can. If you ask me for the, hey, what's this? Hey, it's not, why are you raising all this money? It's not that much to fly Myke over. Okay. Let me show you the budget for what we're trying to do. Oh, that makes sense.

'''Myke Hurley:''' Okay. Thank you. Yep. Because we got to bring in a team. There's not, it's just me to fly over anymore and we have to pay people.

'''Jared:''' And yeah. Yeah. But people want to know, take me to task and I'll give you an answer. And you know, I, we keep it open and honest like that. And you know, that's how I run my businesses. That's how I run the pen addict, knock everything. So yeah, it's good to have accountability. I mean, accountability, trust with the community. I mean, it's important. You know, if I screw up, I'm going to tell you, I screwed up. You know, I'm not perfect. There's going to be issues. But you're going to hear it from me. So, you know, we just try to work through these things and you know, it's fun, but this I'm glad that the community is taking these project creators to task and hold their feet to the fire and good things come out of it. Like getting, like saving these people from spending $20,000 on a $2 pen. So, all right, stop me.