The worst crowdfunding campaigns of 2020

Crowdfunding money never seems to dry up, so once again New Atlas is donning its thickest gloves and boots and wading into the murky world of ideas and innovations that are simultaneously half-baked and fully formed.

Power on Demand LLC

Wouldn’t it be nice if you never had to charge your phone again? As the old saying goes, “There’s an app for that!”

The Power app lets you download unlimited clean energy from the cloud to your phone, laptop, or even your Tesla. But obviously, apps, energy, cloud, phone, laptop, Tesla, doesn’t work that way.

The campaign doesn’t even attempt to explain anything; at best it’s a series of stock photos of lightning bolts and people using their phones and laptops, overlaid with a near-parody of corporate buzzword bingo. Honestly, this is almost certainly a scam; it’s so embarrassing it’s not even a scam.

Either way, Indiegogo closed the project without attracting a single applicant to its modest $27 million goal.

Jorge Diaz Crespo Valdes

Even the most die-hard skeptics have wondered what shenanigans are going on at Area 51. But wondering isn’t enough for the internet’s weirdest people, who tried to stage the world’s most reckless raid last year. Unsurprisingly, that failed, so some of them are now crowdfunding a robot that will discreetly peer over the fence for aliens.

The team set out to build “a robot that can fly over Area 51 and take aerial photos of the place undetected.” In other words, a drone. So, you might be wondering, how would a team of intrepid conspiracy YouTubers with no prior experience in robotics build a drone that could slip through the defenses of one of the most heavily guarded places in the US? “We can guarantee that we can fly over the area, secretly, undetected.” So there you have it. However, publicly declaring your plans on Kickstarter might not be the smartest first step.

But let’s give them the most generous benefit of the doubt ever and say they go through with it. We hope supporters like the dust photo, because it’s unlikely the U.S. military would let aliens roam free or leave classified documents lying around in the open.

If this futile effort somehow paid off, the next plan was to send the robot to solve other mysteries in the silliest corners of YouTube and Reddit, searching for the edge of the Flat Earth and a big hole in the North Pole that apparently leads to the inside of a hollow Earth.

But whether the Earth is both flat and hollow at the same time seems like a long shot. The campaign ended with less than $20 in revenue, which on the plus side would be enough to make a quick trip to Walmart and buy a drone with the exact same capabilities.

Bjorn Johnson

Tired of the minor hassle of making your bed every morning? Why not drop a few thousand dollars on a robotic arm to do it for you? According to a series of hastily produced renderings and a seven-second campaign video, Bedbotix is ​​a set of robotic arms that perch on your bed and help out in any way they can.

Apparently, we can make the bed, offer books and brunch trays, wake people up in the morning, give them massages, read bedtime stories to the kids, hand them glasses of water from the nightstand, and even, for all our good sense, use the fire extinguisher if necessary.

Oh yeah, and before I make the joke you’re already smirking at, yes, you can do that too: “adult bed users” can utilize their “interchangeable tools” “in any way that adult user desires.”

To be honest, Bedbotix doesn’t seem like such a bad idea, but right now, all you get for a minimum donation of $2,000 is an idea. The team has never created anything beyond a few Photoshop mockups, and doesn’t have the background to do much more than that.

Live Torch

The award for the strangest and most sinister campaign video for a fairly pointless gadget goes to LiveTorch. Special kudos to the marketing team for trying to portray a power outage as the most terrifying moment an unsuspecting family could ever experience.

If you don’t want to be left in the dark for the 2.7 seconds it takes to remove your phone from your pocket, LiveTorch might be just what you need. Sure, it’s a somewhat clever idea — a plug-in torch that only lights up when the power is out — but it falls into the trap of being a solution in search of a problem.

So, one could argue that “without this you’re literally dead.” LiveTorch doesn’t need to “change your destiny,” which is too much for any gadget, let alone a night light, to handle.

Fedor Shumakov

Gone are the days of buying a bottle of Paterson’s All-Purpose Oil from a loudmouth man in a pinstripe suit on a street corner, but don’t worry: like everything else, health scammers have just moved online.

BodyHealth feels like the kind of device a high school kid would use to get a C+ in electronics class: no one knows what it actually does, and the video is just three minutes of silent hands poking at buttons and screens and randomly picking up parts.

But don’t let that put you off! Whatever this stuff is, it seems to be able to cure everything from arthritis to allergies, headaches to hernias, the flu to full-blown diabetes.

Despite only raising $500, or just one backer, the campaign failed to reach its goal before being shut down by Kickstarter.

Want to dig deeper? Summary of the previous post It’s one of the strangest crowdfunding campaigns.