They crowdfunded $250,000 in 2014 when they were named Doorbot and delivered a fairly underwhelming product prior. No idea how the current product stacks up. I wonder how much of that money went towards the domain instead of engineering, software, QA, etc.
This is one of the many reasons I'm wary of kickstarter-like activities. I think my money is going to go to delivering a product, but it may just end up used for marketing/branding I don't agree with, which may or may not detract from the actual product because $slick_marketing_firm knows make a geeky firm do their bidding. "Of course you need our gold star domain and SEO package!"
Frankly, it seems excessive. I'm pretty much the target demographic and am salivating at replacing my existing video doorbell with this (non-wifi). If it was still named Doorbot I would be just as excited. If anything, I'm wary of generic domains as they often seem associated with shady or uninteresting companies.
The domain was definitely not cheap. So far I think it was the right decision to buy it and I believe we have seen enough benefit from it to make it worthwhile. However we will not know if it was really worth it for at least another year or two.
We had already been doing a lot of direct business before we changed the name to Ring (we were formally Doorbot).
I basically made the assumption that if Ring.com increased our direct sales by X%, how many years would it pay back. It turned out that even at a very high price for the domain it did not have to increase sales by a lot (single digit) in order to pay itself off over just a few years.
We launched Ring.com in October and so far it appears that the benefits are happening however it will never be something that we can 100% be sure of.
I am actually not a big fan of domains anymore but I think a extremely marquee one like Ring.com was worth stretching the budget for.
