One video buried Kanoa

Potential buyers received such a photo of Kanoa headphones last year.

Hope audiophiles to get elegant wireless headphones did not come true. The Kanoa project isone of the unsuccessful crowdsourcing projects. The founders of the company sincerely apologize: they have mastered the money raised, but they could not release the promised product. The reason for the failure is called "bad publicity", namely one review of their headphones on YouTube, after which the backers massively decided to take the money.

The collection of money was carried out through Indiegogo .

“Unfortunately, we are stumped,” said Kanoa’s official website , which now represents a single black page with a description of the causes and sequence of events that led the company to such a disappointing outcome.

It all started in 2015. Then the founder of the company came up with the idea to combine music and technology into one wonderful gadget - elegant headphones that almost never need to get out of your ears. They are so beautiful that they look like an expensive ornament in their ears. In addition, the headphones are equipped with a mass of additional functions: background noise suppression, fitness tracker, etc.

Even before the start of the crowdsourcing campaign, the founder invested his own money in conducting marketing research and developing headphone designs. After that, he turned to the public with a proposal to issue a pre-order. According to the rules of the crowdsourcing campaign, the project backers are not considered as “buyers”, but as “investors”, that is, they should understand the risks assigned to them. No one guarantees that the product will actually be released in reality. Unfortunately, until now many participants in crowdfunding campaigns are not fully aware of this and therefore fall for the fraudsters.

In the first year, Kanoa writes, “progress looked promising until the end of the year, when it became obvious that we were not ready to manufacture, the product did not meet our standards, and we knew that it would not match yours.” Translated into a normal language, this means that the founders of the startup showed people a beautiful picture, raised money, and then tried to make a real gadget, but on the cheap it didn’t work.

In the second year we started all over again. “Hand-picked” elite engineers were hired, and the founders “established more careful control over product development.” This process was completely transparent for agitated backers (probably, people started to suspect something already), the founders reported every Thursday about everything that was done in a week.

Everything seemed to go according to plan. Moreover, last week the first samples of headphones were made and sent to buyers, and a mobile application appeared in the Apple App Store.



But then the money suddenly ran out. Unlike other startups, Kanoa allowed backers to ask for a refund at any time - because of this, the company did not have financial stability. And here the decisive factor came into play, due to which, probably, many investors made the decision to claim the money. As Kanoa calls it, “bad publicity, like reviews that are not subject to sending beta samples.” Because of this or not, the fact remains: indeed, investors massively demanded a refund.

That's all. The company Kanoa believes that it has done everything possible, but the backers themselves are to blame for taking the money and did not wait for the release of the final product.

Note that the message Kanoa, probably, we are talking about the video Kanoa Review , published on August 19, which currently has 176,000 views.


The video's author, techno-blogger Cody Crouch [iTw4kz], found a lot of serious flaws in the headphones sent to him for review: they didn’t keep in touch with the phone, didn’t charge from the charging station, the noise reduction function worked terribly,

Crouch also said that Kanoa was trying to bribe it. They offered to publish "a good review, a good video by sunday for $ 500."

After that, Crouch delivered an honest video where he directly said: “This is rubbish. You do not want to buy it. You don’t want to deal with this company. ”

Four days later, it was all over.

In Kanoa's death note, nothing is said about the return of money to those backers who did not have time to return them in previous days. It is said that support staff and social media are fired among others. Probably more from the company, we will not hear anything.

Some of the backers are now organizing a class action lawsuit against Kanoa.

Well, over the two years of the project’s existence, investors have gained quite a few impressions, have participated in an interesting project or scam. We can assume that the investment has paid off, at least as a ticket to the show or as a useful lesson. True, the ticket turned out to be a little expensive: the minimum order for headphones was $ 150.