Comment by rbatty | Hacker News Reader

Comment by rbatty | Hacker News Reader

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I have to agree with tedivm. It seems somewhat disingenuous for him to act like he barely broke even if he was able to pay off $15k of debt that he was prepared to eat regardless of whether he sold a single poster or not.

Frankly, it sounds to me like he should consider himself lucky that, despite grossly mis-estimating the actual cost of printing and delivering his posters, he actually received enough funding to meet his obligations to his backers. If he had only raised the amount set as his goal, we'd be reading about yet another guy who's project was never delivered.

Maybe I'm being too uncharitable here, but I think his article is really a case study for why people should be wary of funding low-cost kickstarter projects that require delivery of physical goods.

He precisely estimated the cost of printing: "Printing was precisely what I estimated it would be: $9,500 "

The cost of re-printing, and re-shipping the posters came out to $7,073, or 9% of the total amount raised. I think we all make these large screw-ups occasionally, but rarely enough that they're not in budgets. I think I cost my last job 20k in an afternoon once.

I don't think this at all indicates people should be wary about funding projects: everything was delivered.

He would have been able to print the posters, but had he only raised 10,000, he would still be in the hole for:

Less shipping supplies ($5,811)

Less storage lease for 5 months ($690)

Less postage ($4,701)

Less temporary help ($741)

Less charity: water contribution ($2,000)

$13,943 in addition to his $15,000 loan, as well as Kickstarter taking 5% and the 5% merchant fee, which would have come out to ~$1000. I don't think people would have received the poster.

All those numbers would of been much smaller if he had only raised $10k though. Still about $2k, which ruins his original budget as well.

He also probably would have done a smaller print run, and spent less on shipping and postage. Might not have needed help shipping either.

Most likely, yes. This is what I've done with my two previous posters (smaller run).

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