Welcome to the decisive year

[fusion_power]

I like the fact that you are making sure to have a prototype / everything ready before starting to take preorder. With any kind of pre-order or funding campain, it will definitely help to have a realistic shipping date.

Don't underestimate the big step from "working prototype" to the final and finished mass production unit. It can still take a while and usualy longer than expected. And we still don't even have a complete working prototype yet.


I'm lurking around in Kickstarter since years and study various projects. Even successful funded campaigns with ALOT more extra money than needed tend to underestimate the huge work that must be put into an idea to become ready. Here are two good (or call it bad) Examples of successful KS campaingns with huge delays, both are afaik more than one year behind and have made alot of bakers very angry:

CST-01: The World's Thinnest Watch :  Nice project but they ran into heavy technical trouble because they just don't wanted to make compromises in size and thickness of their watch. 1mm would be no problem but they want 0.8mm which causes alot of trouble.  Lesson to ED: don't stay that close to the size if it causes trouble (Pyra Case!) 

Bonaverde : "World’s first roast-grind-brew coffee machine" So they say. Well, the very interesting and promising fair trade concept is nice but somehow they basicly re-designed the entire Machine after they presented their "finished" prototype from the beginning of the campaign. To much "german engineering" I guess. The final machine doesn't look anything like the beautiful prototype, is also "closed" through RFID like chips that are needed to enable the machine (which never was mentioned during the funding campaign). Lesson to ED: make sure the Prototype is REALLY the finished prototype that represents the final product. ^^

 

[_wb_]

Happy New Year everyone!

I don't think we will need a KS at all, we already have a large enough community to spread the word ourselves. We could of course imitate the KS style of crowdfunding, with a website that shows the amount of money raised and the number of backers - I guess progress bars and visibility of other buyers helps to encourage people. But ED could host such a crowdfunding website on his own server (basically just create a special page on his webshop) and avoid the cost of the middle man.

 

[klapse]

I don't think we will need a KS at all, we already have a large enough community to spread the word ourselves.

I think Kickstarter would reach far more people than a couple hundred active forum users ever could. Orders of magnitude, _wb_.

 

[slaeshjag]

^ I don't think ED wants too many preorders either. 

 

[the_marshal]

Advantage to KS - huge exposure to a very wide audience.  Essentially a mass advertising campaign.  Very likely to be picked up by news coverage.  Could go viral.

Disadvantage to KS - very expensive as they take their cut off the top.  This product out prices a lot of the KS audience.

The price of the Pyra is a very good point. It might indeed be too high for most people. The mainstream audiance is also very much into phone and tablets.

I think retro gaming is somewhat popular even in some younger crownd (people exposed through  AVGN...). But convincing them to buy a Pyra at its price point might not be easy.

The idea of having a full Linux system in one's pocket is another thing I love about the Pyra. Again this might be a bit of a niche market for KS.

I am sure a proper KS will still bring more people that simply doing preorder from the Pyra website. The quesion is really down to how many more and at what cost. Not sure if Evildragon really want to produce more than a 1000 units to start.

If 1000 people can be convinced to pre-order from the Pyra website that's probably the best solution. Many people in the community would need to pre-order as well as word of mouth, and probably some inexpensive marketting / communication action.

And I know the price of the Pyra is not known yet but I fell it's pretty safe to assume it will be higher than the original Pandora pre-order price.

 

[fusion_power]

I don't think we will need a KS at all, we already have a large enough community to spread the word ourselves.

I think Kickstarter would reach far more people than a couple hundred active forum users ever could. Orders of magnitude, _wb_.

This usualy also brings more critical customers, complainers and so on, dangerous.

However, IF ED can manage to make the first batch of Pyras without a KS campaign, I can imagine that he uses an KS campaign afterwards to fund more batches much faster. This would have the advantage to already have an finished and tested product, so the bakers can directly see what they get and ask users that already have a Pyra.

 

[_jr_]

Using kickstarter or whatever for subsequent batches might be a good idea. With a working system and some interesting apps available one could try to get a 10.000 batch funded allowing for a slightly lower unit price. If it doesn't succeed it won't be a big problem.

 

[WizardStan]

I don't think 10'000 even would be enough scale to bring the price down much.

And even if, say, 10'000 could bring the price down to $500 that's five million dollars that would need to be kickstartered. That'd be an amazing feat.

 

[slaeshjag]

And if kickstarter takes a 6% (or whatever it is) share, I doubt it'd actually get any cheaper

 

[_jr_]

Yes, and a lot of work. Still might be worth to try.

 

[b_o_b]

We could of course imitate the KS style of crowdfunding, with a website that shows the amount of money raised and the number of backers - I guess progress bars and visibility of other buyers helps to encourage people. But ED could host such a crowdfunding website on his own server (basically just create a special page on his webshop) and avoid the cost of the middle man.

Pretty much what http://neo900.org does.  The initial "kickstarter" was just a post on a forum http://talk.maemo.org/showthread.php?t=91142 

 

[sepulep]

I don't think we will need a KS at all, we already have a large enough community to spread the word ourselves.

I think Kickstarter would reach far more people than a couple hundred active forum users ever could. Orders of magnitude, _wb_.

This usualy also brings more critical customers, complainers and so on, dangerous.

However, IF ED can manage to make the first batch of Pyras without a KS campaign, I can imagine that he uses an KS campaign afterwards to fund more batches much faster. This would have the advantage to already have an finished and tested product, so the bakers can directly see what they get and ask users that already have a Pyra.

I don't like this idea floating around here that you can have too many (pre)orders - I think you would rather be in the position of having a very successful campaign (you can always limit the number of orders by incrementally increasing the price on the pledges, as is often done) than having a moribund campaign petering out after a few hundred orders (also, you can't really fire up or restart a campaign cause the initial enthusiasm will have faded)..I wouldn't take it for granted that you can get a 1000 preorders without maximum effort and in any case, I would rather have ed working to figure out  how to increase production, than have him sweating about the number of preorders...

 

[levi]

Plenty of projects I've sponsored switched from a failed KS or IGG campaign to the other, so that's not the death-knell it need be.


A small KS project might be an idea if it gains attention of the device. Even if most people who see it aren't able to get a cheap Pyra because they've all sold out, a number of them might follow the project so might be able to find their way to the dragonbox site once the device is in full production. After all, that's what kickstarting a project means - gaining enough orders to be able to complete development and fulfil those orders, but after that it becomes a going concern.


On the other hand, a kickstarter can be a fair bit of work. There are other ways to publicise a product, so I'm not sure a kickstarter is necessarily worth it.

 

[hns]

We could of course imitate the KS style of crowdfunding, with a website that shows the amount of money raised and the number of backers - I guess progress bars and visibility of other buyers helps to encourage people. But ED could host such a crowdfunding website on his own server (basically just create a special page on his webshop) and avoid the cost of the middle man.

Pretty much what http://neo900.org does.  The initial "kickstarter" was just a post on a forum http://talk.maemo.org/showthread.php?t=91142 

Yes. It worked well

[just compare who did run the original campaign before it was transferred to neo900 and who is developing the Pyra]

 

[Xcl4m4t10n]

I want a Neo900 so badly!

 

[Hồng Thất Công]

When is the Neo900 available for sale?

 

[hns]

When is the Neo900 available for sale?

Please see:

http://neo900.org/faq#buy

[note: Golden Delicious is not responsible for the Neo900 marketing and sales - just development, and the initial crowd funding campaign. Now the full project has been transferred to Neo900 UG]

 

[Hồng Thất Công]

When is the Neo900 available for sale?

Please see:

http://neo900.org/faq#buy

[note: Golden Delicious is not responsible for the Neo900 marketing and sales - just development, and the initial crowd funding campaign. Now the full project has been transferred to Neo900 UG]

Ah in 7 more moths!

 

[Fzero]

Spoiler

 

[Klumpen]

whether it'll be actually produced or not