Kickstarter Success Could Lie in Your Words

[Chuckt]

Kickstarter Success Could Lie in Your Words

Researchers analyzed more than 45,000 different Kickstarter campaigns and found that certain phrases were more likely to appear in successful projects than in failed ones.

While finding that language had a significant effect on Kickstarter success was surprising, the phrases associated with success or failure weren't. The successful projects were more likely to use assertive words and phrases, such as "we can afford" or "we have chosen." Failures were more likely to use phrases that emphasized the investor's role, such as "provide us" or "help support our ..."

http://abcnews.go.com/Technology/kickst ... d=21548618

This may be good to know to always meet your Kickstarter goals.

[Garth]

What do you think of the whole crowdfunding thing? It would be great to have someone saying, "We like what you're doing on your website for the 6502/816, hobby & small-industrial computers, and the workbench, and we know you have lots more helpful material you want to post but that you'd have to quit your job and work on it full time for at least a couple of years, so here's a grant so you can do that." I don't think I could bring myself to actually ask for it, but if it were offered, I might accept it as long as it's not from the government. Various websites have a "Donate" button, and even facebook now has a "Give gift" button for your facebook friends. I'm kind of watching the whole thing trying to understand how many of the requests are legitimate, how much of it has positive results in terms of what the donors expect to see happen from their donation, how many donors do it because they have a wad of money burning a hole in their pocket and the cause sounded good but they donate without follow-up, how much is just plain greed, etc..

[Chuckt]

What do I think about the crowd funding effort?

They already expect the product founder to already have a working prototype or product so in that respect, crowd funding will be no help to people who don't have the funds to complete a product.

Crowd Funding may help some people or groups meet their goals. The goal of the "Natami" (Natural Amiga) computer was to order parts in the thousands in order to bring costs down and to do a production run that everyone could afford. If you search parts on Digikey or Mouser, you get a different cost for a part when you buy 100 or 1,000 instead of buying just one.

I think there is a possibility to be burned on Kickstarter and after the product Ouya raised over $8.5 million, I think the risk became apparent and Kickstarter and others said they weren't a store and creators must talk about risks and challenges:

http://www.kickstarter.com/blog/kicksta ... ot-a-store

The other risk is that your project may not be built and you might not get anything. What was to stop the creators of Ouya who raised $8.5 million from running off to South America or somewhere you can't find them?

Kickstarter's Poor Record in Tech
viewtopic.php?f=14&t=653

Crowd funding may be a way to raise funds for small companies wanting to do a production run or get started. It is free advertising and it is also a way for people to raise funds for expensive projects like a record album and costs associated with that because studio time costs money to rent. It is a way to get your product out there and in the hands of consumers. It is also a way to get a following because if you put your product in the hands of consumers, they use it and some of them like it and you get repeat sales and then have to provide a level of support. Think of it as American Idol on television. People watch contestants sing and compete on television for the top spot or spots, viewers fall in love with the music / singing and all of a sudden, unknown artists have instant fans and people who will buy their songs.

I know an individual who has a microcontroller board for sale on the internet. He has sent his board out for manufacture and the risks and challenges he faces is that some of the boards come back not working from manufacturing and he is / was losing money.

Imagine you order the parts, have the parts shipped off to a company to assemble, the worker drops a part on the floor and doesn't pick it up. Or imagine that the worker solders the wrong diode in the wrong direction or the wrong hole. You basically have a loss. When you have surface mount parts and multi layer boards, the difficulty may go up for some places that don't have a pick and place machine.

Disclosure: I have not made any Kickstarter projects or manufactured anything.

[Chuckt]

I built a LOL Shield from a kit which is basically a daughterboard that fits on top of an Arduino microcontroller.

viewtopic.php?f=17&t=802

The problem is cutting all of the leads and soldering the LEDs all in there so that they are the same length and that the LEDs are all standing in the same direction without a tool to put the LEDs in. I used a Panavise Jr and helping hands and this is difficult to solder when the part you are soldering is upside down. Parts can move because of gravity and the movement cannot always be seen because they are on the other side of the board which hides your line of sight.

Pogo pins are also used to test manufacturing.

Imagine you are a cook in a restaurant and your job is to create every meal so that they all look exactly like the one in the picture. You have other orders coming out and handling demand and cooking all ingredients equally as long so that they come out perfectly is a chore for people handling assembly. They can't be undercooked or overcooked. The ingredients have to be mixed just right. Imagine you don't mix eggs and there is white egg in an omelet and yellow eggs. Everything has to be perfect or just right.

That is the risk with manufacturing.

[Garth]

Thanks for the links. They clear things up quite a bit about Kickstarter. I know someone who is using it (I think it was Kickstarter) to make a movie. She's in her last year of college majoring in moviemaking, so there's a bit of credibility there, and I am aware of a couple of the scenes being shot last month, with a lot of people involved, so it's not like she's just vacationing on the money.

On the LED alignment, I can imagine ways to make a jig, but it might not be worth it for just one. If you're doing at least a few, then definitely, and all the more if you're doing hundreds, although by that time you'd go with SMT which is always done by machine for production units. The set-up cost to do it in the States might be prohibitive if you only have a hundred to assemble, but we usually use a place in Taiwan. Since I've brought a lot of products to market at work, I am familiar with the process of getting PC boards made and assembled reliably in quantity. For PC board manufacture, we've been using Imagineering (pcbnet.com). Their starting charges are more than the hobbyist PCB houses, but they do a professional job inexpensively for small production quantities. For example, as you do a curve fit on their pricing chart after you give them the board specifications, you might find that your first double-sided board (bare) costs $300 and it's $0.50 for each board after that, so $300 for one piece, $350 for 100 pieces, which was the case for my 2.25"x1.25" 4Mx8 5V SRAM module PCB (which I still have to sell just a few more of to break even). I would like to do a lot more of this kind of thing, and have a lot more pre-made modules for hobbyists to use to make computers.

[brad]

Sorry to be late to the discussion here guys, but i've been busy working on my kickstarter campaigns!

I think that's very interesting about the key words used in the campaigns. I'll have to be sure to not use 'please help me!' type phrases etc...

I have found that kickstarter is a great platform to get a (in my case) product put into production. As you guys would know, it costs quite a bit to make a one off prototype, but the costs come down significantly when you get 100s or 1000s of them made. So this is where crowd funding comes in extremely useful.

There certainly are problems with it and even with my little projects, it does take a lot of work to get everything right. There are so many variables to think about, not only to do with the manufacturer doing their job properly, but also the backers credit cards not bouncing, the backers sending through their addresses on time and also backers filling out their survey correctly (I.E. they pledged $10 for a reward that actually cost $15 etc...)

And then you have postage to think about too!

It's quite an experience I must say