From a recipe book featuring 15-second meals like cold buttered bread and cereal for lunch, to a coconut shampoo specially designed for coconuts, crowdfunding site Flopstarter is the place to go for truly terrible ideas.
Self-described “real crowdfunding site” and “platform for bad ideas”, Flopstarter gets full mileage from its parody business model. Various projects are featured via the site’s homepage, while options even exist to submit or back a project.
“So far we have had hundreds of submissions to the site, all of them useless,” Flopstarter proclaims.
Fast Company’s Mark Wilson, writing at Co.Design, sought clarification about the Flopstarter model via Twitter, asking chief executive and founder Oli Frost whether the “parody site claims to be literally shipping projects on funded goals”.
Frost, who is also the co-founder of Lifefaker, a startup helping users fake the perfect online life, said yes, that’s exactly what it’s doing.
“It’s the same principle as Kickstarter. If people will put up money for it then it should exist, right? You can’t flaw that logic,” he said.
So, be it a vintage food market that serves “real people’s leftovers in rustic paper boxes” or timeless watches that do away with the distraction of watch hands, Flopstarter is well worth checking out for those who place a premium on bad ideas.
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