Comment by robomartin | Hacker News Reader

Comment by robomartin | Hacker News Reader

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Another thought.

This is what gets me about some of these Kickstarter projects:

A project like LIFX is, without a doubt, impossible to get done with $100,000. Not a chance in hell anyone could pull that off. At least not for a real product that passes all testing, safety and reliability requirements that go into making a consumer product.

What would have happened if they reached their $100K goal and maybe a little more? Say, $150K. It would have been a complete bust. No way to deliver.

Are these projects fraudulent from the start or are they simply innocent or uninformed wishful thinking? You are asking for $100K of other people's money. If you know full-well that it won't be enough, what does that mean? If you don't know how much it will cost, what business do you have even posting a project like this?

As it stands right now they are at about $800K. My guess is that, to do this right, you need about two million dollars.

To be open minded, this doesn't necessarily have to come out of Kickstarter. Maybe someone is willing to invest in these guys. Someone sees this as an MVP of sorts, comes in and puts $1.5 million on the table for a big chunk of the business. I wouldn't, but, hell, I probably wouldn't have invested in Facebook in the early days either. What the hell do I know.

Perhaps someone already HAS invested in these guys? One of the team members listed (guy king) has had a very substantial exit ($90M) from a previous venture (retailmenot.com)

"A project like LIFX is, without a doubt, impossible to get done with $100,000. Not a chance in hell anyone could pull that off."

I wouldn't be so sure. There is a company here in LA called Oval Integration that has been doing stuff exactly like this, just hacking and integrating off-the-shelf electronics, see a demo here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4X6sHabSXwg .

If garage hackers can bootstrap it like this then why wouldn't a team with significant kickstarter funding be able to do the same? (edited to fix youtube URL above)

Don't confuse prototyping and making one-offs or small hand-made runs with mass manufacturing. You can make anything you can nearly imagine in a garage environment. That does not translate into a shippable consumer product.

My comment specifically stated that this lightbulb could not have been done for the stated goal of $100K. This is absolutely true.

I won't get into all of the details. I'll just mention that regulatory testing alone could easily eat-up anywhere from $25K to $100K. And, BTW, you cannot sell a device such as these lights without full FCC, CE, UL, TUV and other certifications. And, BTW, you can EASILY burn-up two months going through regulatory testing.

Beyond that, you have to develop tooling and dies. That ain't cheap.

Making a mass-market consumer product requires a lot of up-front investment and planning. It also takes time. Unless you have full in-house expertise you'll have to hire qualified mechanical designers well-versed in the technologies at play (plastics, stamping, machining and die-molding are different disciplines).

There's also the requirement for extensive testing on something that could potentially set fire to a home. This is serious business. You can't assume that production units will perform as a garage prototype might. There are manufacturing variances and issues that need to be tested and accounted for.

The project just passed the million dollar mark with about 20,000 units sold. We'll see what happens. It sounds like a lot of money, but you'd be surprised how quickly it can become "not enough" once real design and manufacturing costs start to pile-up.

My rough educated guess is that you could make a run of 100K units for about $20 a piece, packaged and landed in the US. That means that you need two million dollars plus engineering and other costs, which could reach $500K. In my eyes, at $2,500,000 the project starts to make sense. At this rate they could reach that number as they nearly have two months to do.

My real question is: What would they have done if the project only funded just past their original $100K requirement? There's no way to get this done with only $100K. Save outside investment it would have been a mess. Not sure how Kickstarter deals with such cases.

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