Yeah so from a PR standpoint this is "ZOMG DICE FROM HUMAN BONEZ GAMERZ ARE TEH NUTZ".
however
Artisan Dice was born in June 2012 on Kickstarter as a way for a guy named Charlie to buy himself a Tormach. 'cuz hey - platonic solids out of aluminum? That's pretty much basicbitch Machining 101, shouldn't be any problem, right? Tormach sure thinks it's cool.
- With no real machine experience, Brumfield immediately found a learning curve when it came to things like speeds and feeds. “When we started out, I would destroy an end mill every five or six titanium D20s we made. Now, we can run one end mill a week – week and a half – running eight hours on these machines. “ Once he figured out how to cut and hold 20-sided dice, he looked to making his small shop more production oriented. “A big thing for us was once we figured out how to make these things, was how do we get fast? One of the challenges after doing the Kickstarter was figuring out how to be a production shop, because we weren’t at the time. That was our biggest learning curve.”
Note that titanium dice are still in their shop but you can't order them. This is likely due to the fact that a Tormach will barely hold two thousandths with aluminum, and even "chemically pure" titanium (the stuff most jewelry is made out of - since you don't need the strength you go with the unalloyed stuff which mills like steel only stickier) requires more rigidity than you get out of a 3/4ton mill.
Note also that deciding you're going to mill dice for a living before you know how to mill dice for a living does not do wonders for your reputation. Thus are you left making the same shitty poured-resin bullshit dice as every other wanker out there (some of us have been forced to learn things about resin) only with the added overhead of a couple semi-worthless CNC machines (Artisan Dice claims they have $400k in equipment, which I have no idea how they came up with that number).
So instead you start making dice out of WTFEver you can find. And since there are only so many people willing to pay $43 for a single d20 made of moose poop, it isn't too long until you're carving up old school skeletons because you can't actually do any work with the machines you bought.
This cautionary tale is brought to me by me, who has compiled a chart of what machines are capable of holding what tolerances that illustrated exactly why Tormachs are a waste of money.
Kickstarter is so much worse than that: it's startup capital at a brutal fee for people that can't write a business plan. In a normal world, you'd have an idea. Then you'd figure out how to pay for it. Then you'd write that up as a business plan and shop it around to banks, to see who would give you the money. Being in the business of risking money on ideas, they accept or reject, ask for clarification, give you conditions and concessions, etc. You then get the money, line up vendors, line up distributors, and launch your product. OR You get your high school buddy with a useless film degree to help you shoot an infomercial. Kickstarter takes their 5% and their 3% processing fee and wipes their hands of what happens next because it's the Internet. You are left to figure out... manufacturing. Distribution. Packaging. All that shit. Which is how three different choads have raised $250k each selling jellyfish tanks while if you ask any aquarium they'll tell you "yeah the ones you see here are always a week from dead because the rest of the lifecycle is uninteresting they last about ten days and then we cycle them through there's an entire jellyfish ecosystem not on display" because dollars to donuts? You never knew you needed a jellyfish tank until you saw some shit on Upworthy. I have backed three kickstarters. None of them have been less than 24 months late. Two of them have launched businesses - I backed Robot Turtles, without which we wouldn't have Glowforge (turns out manufacturing a board game with no knowledge of papercraft teaches you a thing or two about the limitations of the marketplace). And I backed Sisyphus, which is now making tables. Of course, before that the guy who started Sisyphus had spent fifteen years making tables for museums so it was a pretty sure bet. But the guys who figured they'd get the chinese to make them infinity mirrors? Yeah, their blog is one long rant of "we thought this would be easy, turns out it's hard, have no fear we're still making stuff". It's fucking erosive, too. I have bailed on three friends who had projects that, instead of asking me to mix them, asked me to fund their kickstarter so that they could sit in their pajamas and learn to mix on someone else's dime. Kickstarter incentivizes coming into something with absolutely no expertise and leaning into every contact you have to see if you can shake them down. I used to call it "as seen on TV dot com" but it's so, so much worse.
Well, we used it for marketing. We already had a product but no easy path to market. This was a cheap and easy way to get our puzzle out there. We hit our goal in 18 hours and when the campaign ended we were 968%. And now our webstore, which was getting about 2 orders a month is now getting 2 orders a day. Yeah, not killer sales but fine for a start. We sold almost 800 puzzles in two weeks, which is a lot for us. Even after expenses and unexpected extra costs, it's still good money. We're probably going to run about 6 more campaigns next year, figuring out more and more of the process as we go to be more efficient. Yeah, KS is taking a significant cut, but it was easy and fun. If you've got recommendations for other ways for a tiny business to effectively market their products, I'd love to hear suggestions!
Right - you're out in the back of beyond with a laser cutter and some graphic design skillz. The archetypal business model has been to run up a suitcase full of demo product, visit every toy and craft store within driving distance, consign a few, gift a few, sell a few, hit up the craft fairs, and spend the first two years driving around establishing relationships. Which, if you want to do it, is fun. If not? It's the life of a traveling salesman. Or you toss it up on the as-seen-on-TV store. I'm guessing your investment is an Epilog or a Glowforge and your materials costs include wood, stain and glue. Your monetization pathway was basically (1) puzzles (2) lamps (3) coasters (4) 3d topo maps and since you love puzzles, it was gonna be puzzles. 2 orders a day for laser-cut puzzles is excellent hobby-level sales - congratulations! That doesn't interfere with what you want to do with your life when you don't have to, and you're your own boss. And 800 puzzles is a year's worth of inventory in two weeks so again, congrats. I'll level with you - I hate puzzles and I hate craft fairs. Frankly I'm not fond of wood so your entire market segment is one I avoid three times over. I'm dipping my toe in pens, which is absolutely 100% "dude monetizing a lathe through craft fairs" and all the suppliers know it. You can't browse Penn State Industries without seeing a survey of average costs for any given kit they sell. Sure - spend six minutes making a pen, spend $4 on the kit, sell it for $10 and you're at $36 an hour minus the time you spent under a pop-up. Or you throw them up on Etsy with custom engraving to pay off your glowforge while you're at it. Or you cut a video and throw it up on Kickstarter and front-load a year's worth of work. Yaaay six minute pens. The problem is that everything becomes a six minute pen. Let's say you want to sell pens. You can make the six minute ones, or you can sell the thousand dollar ones. There is no in-between except Montblanc because Cross was bought by Rubbermaid and they have no fucking idea what to do with pens. So you've got craft show pens, heinously expensive craft show pens, Montblanc, Cartier and Faberge. That entire missing middle segment? It was destroyed by Penn State Industries and their six minute pens. Know how many American watch brands there are? Seven, maybe eight. Know how many "American watch brands" there are on Kickstarter? Couple thousand. Dudes buying shit off of AliExpress, slapping parts together and maybe meeting their goal. The winners are the ones who rawk at marketing. MVMT was bought by Movado for fuckin' $100m. "MVMT - Bauhaus done Badly". And that's my basic beef. Kickstarter, and the entire Kickstarter ecosystem, favors flashy garbage that doesn't work. Sure, use it for marketing because that's where it excels - you needn't have anything like a viable product to sell product. And since Kickstarter is where this stuff gets sold, your product will do better if it's flashy garbage.... to the detriment of not-flashy not-garbage. Hollywood is now $200m blockbusters (which they're having to release via streaming services - talk about disruption) and "passion projects" made at a loss by kids whose relatives financed their educations and are now being asked to pony up on a microbudg feature no one will ever watch. Kickstarter is perfect for this: they save the kids from the embarrassing calls for money and centralize the begging bowl for 5%. They also allow you to set your "Uncle Phil" tier so that when your college buddies' measly $20 donations don't come through Phil can swoop in and get his "extra special thanks" title card for $5k. Neither you nor anyone you worked with on this will be in the entertainment industry in five years. Your relatives know that. If this is what it takes for Susie to feel like she followed her muse, well at least it's cheaper than treatment. Apply that model to product development and marketing. Once upon a time you'd have to know where to get cheap laminate. You'd need to find out where puzzles were bought around you. You'd need to call up and form relationships with everyone within reasonable tourism distance, maybe go to a trade show or two, learn a thing or two about running a company, build a network of a dozen suppliers and two dozen vendors and try to place yourself in the middle based on your merits. Now? Now you surf the internet for the cheapest Chinese parts to be put together by the cheapest Mexican factory to be packaged by the cheapest Philippino packager to be distributed by On-Trac. Your supply chain is a hundred people you'll never meet for a thousand people with no brand loyalty who saw something on Facebook that pointed them to Cool Huntings or TOMO or whatever. Skymall without the Skymall. one of the most backed projects in the history of Kickstarter Project Kickstarter does not consider infringement Do I have recommendations? No. Do I have lament? In spades. The entire ecosystem is toxic to craftsmen, toxic to small business and toxic to expertise. It's been happening since the dawn of Amazon and eBay but Kickstarter puts the grift and begging front and center and I hate it.
I get your point. A lot of our customers have expressed surprise that we are delivering on time. I suppose they are the ones most experienced with KS and know that on-time delivery is unusual! Yes, for us KS has been great for marketing. We decided last year to expand our hobby to a tiny business. We have many tiny businesses we're running at the same time and think puzzles could become the largest. Sales is the hardest part. We sold puzzles at some local fairs, visited a few local shops, got our puzzles in 3 stores in the city, did a mailing of samples to 20 stores, two of them bought a few packs, and we started to plan a sales road trip around the country for fun when corona hit and killed our plans. Selling 2 puzzles a day from our webshop is definitely hobby-level, but that is 30x increase from before we did the kickstarter. We also picked up 3 stores, 2 in the UK and one in the US that want to sell our puzzles, so from a marketing perspective our KS has been a hit. 2 puzzles a day plus 6x $10k KS next year is over $100k in sales and that's no longer hobby but small business. And if we can increase sales 30x again next year then it's really good business. We got a new machine we'll order this month with large cutting bed and double heads that can make 50 puzzles/hour. With enough sales we can employ someone to assemble and avoid manufacturing overseas, which we've tried and quality is a problem. My wife's been enjoying posting updates on KS, which lots of personal touches and touches of Norwegian culture. Some have been loving the updates and many have signed up for a newsletter, so she's going to start a blog on our website and build this brand-loyalty by drawing our customers into a kind of friend group. Fun stuff.
Love KB's input, and your perspective on the whole thing, Mike. As an old Marketing Dude, I feel like I want to stick my oar in here, and make some suggestions... I think Kickstarter is where you find your core fans. Your initial customers who not only love the product, but also love you and your wife and your story. (Keep it up with the "Fjord Lyfe!" - "Fjord Ljfe"? - posts! They are enchanting and wonderful. AND they engage your audience with more than just the physical product... there's a story and real people they can have feelings for.) I think your second wave of KS projects won't be nearly as successful. People love KS because they like the idea of helping out a creative lunatic with a groovy idea. They connect with the person/story, and feel like a friend. When you issue a second KS project, it's like you are saying to those initial customers, "Hey thanks. But we are looking for OTHER people now. Have a nice day!" It can be off-putting to the original backers to see you going out and trying to make "new friends" rather than working with your existing ones again. So back up a bit... the first customers via Kickstarter are INVESTED in you. The number of people who express surprise that you are shipping on time is a perfect example; they bought in EXPECTING you to miss the ship date, and probably 50% of the projects they never receive at all... so shipping on time is a double-win. Delivering a quality product on time means these people are now your sales force. You need to give them a way for them to spread your message to others, and incentivize others to buy from you. For example... make a small, laser-engraved, thin wooden 'business card' that says "mail this back to us for a 50% discount on any puzzle!", and put a simple serial number on it, like "0001". Include three of these with each "valuable" item you ship, and tell the customer that if they like the product they bought from you, they should pass these "discount chips" on to friends, so they can buy from you too. ("Can only be used on your first purchase! So give them to friends to introduce them to our fun!") (Note: the specific numbers - size of discount, and minimum cost of the products that have chips included, and how many chips to include - are all variables that you need to calculate appropriately for your business.) This gives you several things: I see very few Kickstarter campaigns treat their initial backers as Special, once the product ships. But they ARE special... and they FEEL special... and they want to be recognized in some way. AND, psychologically speaking, everyone wants to prove they made the right decision, and they look for proof their decision was the right one to make. By embracing them with something unique and special - and empowering them to help spread your message - you are feeding that base psychological need, and further reinforcing that they made the right decision.... making them want to spread your message even more! Just some thoughts for ya.... 1. Enables your committed customers to help spread the word about you and your products (and how smart they were to back this successful Kickstarter) 2. Inspires others to buy into your mythos/culture/mission with an undeniably good deal/discount 3. Makes them work for the discount (send back something) 4. Helps you identify who your most influential customers are (all of their discount chips were returned to you, and introduced you to new customers) 5. Defines the relationships between your customers ("How did you find us?") 6. Enables you to continue to make your most valuable customers feel Special, by tracking not only their purchases, but their friend's purchases, and their friend's purchases, etc.) 7. Allows you to set up an "early access" plan, or other Special Customer benefit for those truly impactful/influencer types 8. Gives you content for social media: Every discount chip you get back gets affixed to a wall of your shop, and - over time - becomes a "trophy wall" where your customers can see their effect on your business. (Heck, mount them on an exterior wall, so they weather over time, giving them a feeling of longevity and history too...)
I'm hit and miss on Kickstarter with significant hits that make up for the misses. First off, I never back anything expensive. $100 tops. Various cellphone mounts and holders have all been garbage. Maybe 4 of them, in total. My Bongo bluetooth speaker is extraordinary. I have three of them. And the 5 I gave away as presents are still heavily used. It started the company Otis & Eleanor, who went on to actually become manufacturers for other Kickstarters! mike has already shipped me my Puzzle-A-Day calendar puzzles I backed last week! The saddest/funniest one is a little tiny pocket drum/synth noisemaker called the Bitty that's going on 1.5 years of updates now. Dude is a complete pillock, but is tenacious! And now assures us that the 200 PCBs he has in stock - and then needs to put 5-8 hours into assembling each one - will be done this month... the same month his infant child was born. So yeah. Should be another 3 years or so on that one, IF it ever ships. The De La Soul album was a fucking gold mine... not only did they deliver an entire new album, they also gave everyone all the samples and source material they used, so they could make their own music! I still haven't gotten to the bottom of everything they delivered. The Lightman was a fantastic little pocket light that worked well, and was going to be very useful... and then just ... poofed into thin air. Feb 3, 2016 was the latest update where the guy was talking about production happening and there will be "an update soon with shipping times"... and silence for the last 4 years. I'm not optimistic... ;-) I did manage to get the Polar Pen before the Postal Service figured out they were shipping small magnets to the US and put the kibosh on that. Apparently you can't ship small magnets to the US from Canada for two reasons: some weird military thing, and the fact that the US bans all magnets under a certain size because some kid ate two rare earth magnets, they connected two parts of his duodenum together, and he died. That was the end of their business, AFAIK. Kickstarter draws in the weirdos. I'm a much bigger fan of Patreon.