Small iPhone 4 holder raises 100k at Kickstarter and counting | Hacker News Reader

Small iPhone 4 holder raises 100k at Kickstarter and counting

kickstarter.com

100 pointseande31 comments

I contributed a week or so ago. It wasn't charity, though, I simply thought $20 was a fair price to pay for the item and was willing to wait a couple months for it.

I want this to exist...

Can someone explain what "THIS PROJECT WILL BE FUNDED ON TUESDAY NOV 2, 9:45PM EDT." means? Is it when, if funds keep accruing at the current rate, they'll have made their goal? Or is that when they'll get the money they've raised from Kickstarter?

I didn't see anything on the page explaining that bit of information.

It's when the funding period ends. At that point the money will actually change hands. They've already done basically 10x their goal ($10k).

Note: Kickstarter is not a forum for investment. You don't get equity in return. In this case you are really just pre-ordering one of those stands.

What's bizarre about the Kickstarter model is that for the most successful projects they end up acting as a blocker — if you reach your goal in a few days and you set your deadline to a month away, there's no way for you to get the funds until it passes — even afterwards it'll take a while for Amazon to let you cash out.

There's no way for the creator to say 'we passed the goal, that's enough money, lets get to work' — something that set Diaspora up for a far more epic failure.

blasdel brings up a great point.

we actually did a kickstarter project for our startup @ http://gorankem.com in august 2009 when kickstarter was still pretty young themselves.

we had no clue how it would turn out so we set our threshold at $1,000 to be raised over 30 days. Before we knew it, we had hit our goal in under a week. unfortunately, it became a lot tougher to justify soliciting donations once our goal had been met.

in hindsight, i wish we had set our initial goal higher, but at the same time, the kickstarter search in fall '09 didn't exactly net us any donations outside of our network of supporters.

this past summer i helped a great band out of nashville put together a successful $10,000 project so they could get a van to tour the country: http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/slowmotioncenterfold/slo...

needless to say, i'm a big supporter/believer in the crowdfunding model!

-adam

p.s. a bit embarrassing to look back at our video/project for Rank 'em (we've come a long way since), but here it is for anybody that's interested: http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1003234199/help-us-keep-...

"something that set Diaspora up for a far more epic failure"

Is Diaspora a failure? How did the Kickstarter model set them up for this failure in your opinion?

It was clear from the beginning that Diaspora would have problems — they were a handful of NYU students just learning to program who'd never shipped anything before, starting from scratch on a white-elephant project that several other groups had been working for years on. When they were forced by their schedule to release something a month ago it had more fundamental security vulnerabilities than features!

Had they not taken donations none of would have cared that they'd released a totally unviable social network Rails app licensed under the AGPL. Kickstarter did them a great disservice by raising $200,000 instead of their goal of $10,000 and swamping them with the publicity to match. The expectations were far higher than they could possibly meet.

Kickstarter sure got a lot of marketing out of it though (and a $10,000 fee)

I don't think this is a problem with kickstarter, I actually think this shows the power of kickstarter! The problem is with diaspora itself, you touched on it there: "they were a handful of NYU students just learning to program who'd never shipped anything before" and it's they who chose kickstarter.

Really though, if they had that kind of funding they could have afforded some serious mentoring, code review, reality checks, etc. I think the problem was/is their schedule and inexperience rather than the funding and publicity.

the way kickstarter works: if you meet your goal, you see everything you raised. if you don't meet your goal (i.e. anything under $9,999 in theglif's case), they won't see a penny.

needless to say, those guys will be doing just fine in another 19 days :)

This is one of the times I wish I had a 3D printer. To make one RIGHT NOW.

Some Styrofoam and an Exacto knife could probably replicate a close approximation. Might not be very durable though.

They will have to 3D print 360 (for those who pledged $50 or more). I don’t know how fast their 3D printer is but that seems like quite the task.

Hopefully they'll let one of the larger rapid-prototyping companies handle that task.

Typically, when I need more than a handful of 3D rapid prototypes I'll order cast urethane pieces. The rapid prototype shop will take my part, create a two-piece SLA (type of 3D printing) mold, then cast the individual pieces in this 3D-printed mold. Turn-around times are very quick.

Lately, though, I've been able to get molds cut and have 20-100 first article pieces (sans final texture) in 4-6 weeks from China. If they've already settled on the design, they may want to just send the $50 contributors a first article and then ship them a final unit again later. Of course, it's not entirely the same feel as a 3D printed part, but it's probably far stronger and still gets them to the front of the line.

I'm consistently surprised at the kind of things Kickstarter projects offer to donors. If a project becomes really successful, some projects may get into a bind. One project offered a phone call to donors, which alone would be really difficult with a lot of people. (>1000?)

Isn't that the reason why you can set limits at each level of how many thank you "packages" are available at that level?

According to The Economist the 3D printing is outsourced to Shapeways so the load shouldn't be a problem.

http://www.economist.com/blogs/babbage/2010/10/small-scale_p...

Shapeways is apparently already doing north of 10k prints a month:

http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/09/23/shapeways-and-its-3...

That’s a great article, thanks for that! The two guys behind the project really seem to be very thoughtful.

My understanding of the video is that the first one was 3D-printed, but they need the money so they can use injection molding, and your donation is a pre-order for the injection-molded batch they produce.

PLEDGE $50 OR MORE
Not only will you receive a new Glif when they are ready, but we will also mail you a 3D printed Glif immediately after funding ends.

347 BACKERS

Sorry, missed that. I just went by what was said in the video, so I didn't realize there was a separate benefit to the $50 pledge other than what they said you get for the $20 pledge in the video. My bad.

Wait, I thought they said they were going to manufacture them using injection molding, not 3D printing. It looked to me like they use used the 3D printer to make the prototype.

If you pledge $50 or more they will as quickly as possible send you a 3D printed stand, presumably because setting up the injection molding process will take some time.

For a part that size, a normal 3D Printer could print out 30-60 a go, depending on the size of the printer. The primary determinant of printing time is the Z-axis I'd estimate it would be a 4-5 hour job, so they could print these in a week. That said, Shapeways has access to much more production capability.

Their pitch video is great in explaining the product with all the alternative use cases. I'm inspired.

Is there a Kickstarter in europe and if not shouldn't there be?

Why are so many people willing to pay $20 for a product, that if it already existed and was available at a checkout counter would probably cost less than $5 or $10?

EDIT 2:

Hey there, it's early in the morning, and it's pretty clear that 3,000 * 30,000 != 100,000... But go ahead, downvote me some more.

I think I need another few cups of tea.

$25 per person? [I think Diaspora did it with much less people] I will be looking at you from now on with suspicious eyes. EDIT: Feel free to delete it

I'd rather publicly admit I made a mistake than just make it disappear. I rarely think deleting posts is appropriate.

Well you already deleted the first half of it, so why not the rest?

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