After a whirlwind of a couple months, the Kickstarter is finally over! Thanks to your support, we are fully funded to produce our first products: component cables for the Sega Genesis and Super Nintendo. It was a fast paced month with little sleep and lots of time networking on social media, and we wound up with 697 backers. Outstanding! Rough estimates right now are that we have obligations for about 1000 cables.
I have already gotten emails from several people expressing to me how they missed the Kickstarter and still want to be able to be a part of getting us off the ground. We discussed this internally and decided not to pursue any other funding platforms (like Megafounder) for the time being. We instead want to focus our efforts on finishing the product development and getting the manufacturing process in line, rather than adding any additional complexity to our lives. Those who are still interested in getting their hands on some cables will be able to buy them from us after they are produced and become available.
We've also been asked about the stretch goals we did not meet. We're polling our backers to see what products they're most interested in. Initial polling data suggests the HDMIzer is likely to be the most sought after item, but we'll wait to see what everyone has to say. Our first obligation is to backers, and since we didn't hit stretch goals we don't have enough extra resources to fully pursue our next product in parallel. However, we will put whatever spare cycles we can towards whatever people seem most interested in as a future product.
Finally, for those interested, here's some observations about Kickstarter:
- The first few days I got very little sleep as I tried very hard to be responsive to the many, many messages sent to us asking questions.
- Making good contacts with similar minded people was essential for our success. I can't possibly name everyone that helped (you know who you are, and THANK YOU), but for example Games You Loved was an incredible supporter and amazingly helpful in spreading our campaign across Twitter and Facebook.
- Contacting media outlets early was important too. I started two weeks before the campaign began and didn't receive much attention until RetroCollect picked us up. Things really snowballed from there, so a big thanks to @cauterize.
- If we run any Kickstarters in the future, I'd probably want to have less reward levels. It'd just be easier to deal with less variety when we start shipping stuff out. Unfortunately Kickstarter doesn't make it easy to pledge and get X number of a product; you ultimately have to have separate reward levels for separate quantities. Which in the end means writing the same backer survey several times.
That's all I've got for now. Surveys have made their way out. Please make sure to fill them out ASAP so we can start placing orders!
Cheers,
Nick