KickfurtherReviews of kickfurther.com

A lot of offerings are not able to complete their obligations and kickfurther only "try" to sell the inventory to recover your money. A great idea that needs maturation and execution.

I started investing via Kickfurther because I liked the idea that our investment was secured by inventory, as opposed to Lending Club or Prosper, which were unsecured. Since that time I have learned that the value of that "security" is almost nothing. Companies were not properly vetted and KF only recently began filing UCCs on the inventory we backed. They have no way of tracking sales and companies seem to pay at will rather than by contract. I have enjoyed helping many young businesses and have lost some money when products didn't sell as hoped, which was the risk I assumed when I invested. However, I have also lost money because vendors refused to pay, and the KF contracts had no teeth.

I started using Kickfurther over the summer of 2016. I had high hope for this platform as per their marketing on their website and really wanted to make it work. It has been nothing but nightmares the one after the others. On some investments, their transactions dashboard was double charging me. Too many errors with money put in my account and then taken back. No available support throughout their website (no chat, no phone number, no email address...). I had to go in a reddit forum to finally get the email address of an individual working at Kickfurther and try to get things resolved. The quality of the information provided by kickfurther about companies is consistently incorrect. I am assuming that kickfurther does not have a quality control process when a co-op goes live. The reporting from the platform is almost non existent which makes it impossible to effectively manage my co-ops investment. Many users have said that they are doing their own Excel worksheets to track their co-ops investments. It takes too much time to manage my co-ops (hours a week), it is not scalable. I was not made aware when a co-op is not paying back and had to find out myself, going through their convoluted non user friendly website. There is very little communication from kickfurther as to why a co-op (company) is not paying back and what is being done. Kickfurther does not provide internal metrics like default rate, etc...I only have been with this platform since summer so I do not have enough history but I have already 4 of my co-ops that are not making their payments and not much information from the companies themselves and kickfurther. If they do not pay, it will take me years to break even (assuming every other companies pay me back...). My personal experience has been very frustrating and aggravating (and I am an investor/trader). I really wanted to make it work as I was very excited to be able to invest in a different asset class. I think this company went live without being prepared and 2 years latter is still providing a very inadequate and overall poor service. To put it mildly, if you join the platform consider yourself part of a beta release and accept that you will likely lose money. Also understand that it will take a lot of your time to review and manage your co-ops and likely aggravate you a great deal along the way.... Edit 12/03/2016: The following reddit forum (KFTalk) has a post that captures the Troubled and Cancelled investments (Businesses that have stopped paying investors, never paid, paid less than supposed to, paid back partially, etc....). Not perfect but at least it provides an idea of the range of the various default rates and the problems rate to expect: Sorry, I am not able to paste the link as this review system does not allow links in reviews. You would have to go to the reddit website and in the search box: KFTalk Update 03/19/2017: 1- KickFurther still refuses to provide a default rate or any other helpful to investors metrics of that type. The overall default rate (troubled and cancelled investments) we are calculating on the Reddit forum is +27%. 2- Kickfurther leadership keeps on engaging in completing fake surveys and making false statements without identifying themselves. The VP of Operations and Business Development at Kickfurther was caught on this very website making a fake review and very misleading statement. 3- On their Facebook page Review: 16x "1 Star" reviews and 15x "5 Star" reviews. 25% of the "5 Star" reviews have been made again by Kickfurther leadership team. 3- Height (8) complaints to the BBB have been made recently by investors against KickFurther 4- KickFurther is still deceiving potential investors by advertizing an outrageous "38.16% average annualized coop profit Margin" and furthermore making no mention of risk or default rate.

First of all I want to say I am a larger contributor to kf, having backed more than 100k worth of offers so far. I think the idea for the site is great but the tech part of the site needs a lot of work. As a software developer, I really believe the web developers for the site are incompetent. There are frequent bugs introduced and useful features that are removed for no reason. For some examples 1. the payout graph, which never actually worked properly but was useful anyway, was removed without notice. 2. newlines don't work in comments or company updates which makes it really hard to read 3. when kf provides an update on an offer page no notification email is sent 4. calendar showed wrong dates (fixed) 5. contributed/paid back amounts in dashboard show as 0 (fixed) 6. co-ops being taken down because new features are broken 7. balances in accounts being incorrect and then fixed silently Maybe a system where larger contributors (eg, someone who has more than 20k in the site at the time, or top 100 contributors overall, etc) can take a look at the current task board to give suggestions on how to prioritize and maybe even suggest new tasks/bugs for the site. I have a lot of feature ideas that would be easy to implement and could add value to the site. I know a lot of the community also complains about improper vetting but I don't really have much opinion about that. But I would say KF needs to be more proactive in giving updates when offers are behind. Even an update like "we're currently in contact with xx and looking to make an arrangement by yy" would be good. I think this has been improved recently but I still think it needs work.

Too many companies that got their investors money vanish and then there becomes lack of communication from Kickfurther on the progress of recovering the inventory/money. It would be better if they gave us an honost time line on the recovery, even if its a harsh truth as in 6-12 months. Think the profit experience so far is in the negative.

Great idea and platform. Over the past year I have been using this there have been many improvements to the items I had issues with. I believe Kickfurther is still a young company and working to further develop. One suggestion would be to develop a solid plan of action for each company that does not pay. I understand legal actions take time, but maybe a standard could be set in place for all companies to understand. Also, if companies had a strict test before they utilize the platform it would weed out the companies who are flakes.

Good customer support but the site has numerous glitches and there seem to be some fundamental problems with how the site works. For instance, how difficult it is to get a 50% no-confidence vote for companies that are clearly deserving it, most likely because investors are not paying attention to their consignments. I think after a certain amount of time there should be a 50% CONFIDENCE vote, otherwise KF will take action. Whether or not that could be a solution, KF needs to do more with troubled consignments.

As a way to support small companies and earn a very good risk adjusted return, this is my favorite investment site. Of course there is risk in small business debt, but I find the inventory pledge behind the loan reassuring. The deal metrics are easy to navigate on your "dashboard". I'm pleased to say that most entrepreneurs are transparent and communicate well with the Kickfurther backers.