Today I stumbled across this post via a series of purely serendipitous clicks. It shows the complete process Tom and Dan followed to build, fund, and ship the glif.
What I learned today is a new way to fund your project – Kickstarter. Basically, you pitch your idea and ask viewers to pre-order your product. If enough people pre-order your product, you get the funding you asked for. You then make the product and give them to your backers. If you don’t get enough funding, you only lost some time. You can modify your product and try again, or realize that the product does not have a market. Your idea has been validated or invalidated without actually making anything.
Quora is a good place to ask questions if you need further validation. If you do end up making the product, Tom and Dan recommend Shopify to build an online store and Shipwire to handle and ship your products.
A majority of the products kickstarted through Kickstarter seems to be items that cost $10 to $20 each. Obviously, the manufacturer needs to make it for much less to make it viable. I’m planning to check out crowd-sourcing ideas a bit more.
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Joshua Picked Up Sketchup Easily at Maker Faire « Simple Solutions
May 25, 2011 at 9:19 pm (UTC -8) Link to this comment
[...] were at the Faire, we also visited the Shapeways stall. I should have mentioned them in this post: A new way to validate your project ideas, but I had not. Thats where the glif guys built their prototype. At the fair, I was able to touch [...]