Meet James Fielding, the founder and CEO of Audeara. One night in March 2017, the team from Audeara, a headphone startup company with a unique twist, was preparing for the biggest moment in the company’s short but highly watched, highly publicised and extremely buzzworthy existence.

Turning to Kickstarter for funding is often scoffed at, the success rates for large amounts of funding severe to look at. But not for Audeara. The company was ready. Its founders fortified by months of preparation. They’d done everything right - engaged marketers and public relations pros who knew how to make crowd-funding campaigns pop; their product was buzzworthy, yes, but more than that it was a thing of beauty to audiophiles, music lovers and to those whom the startup’s founders deemed to be the most deserving of the beauty that music and sound can deliver - people with hearing loss.

They were ready to hit go, ready to open the floodgates, ready to see this milestone come to life. And then, Kickstarter crashed.