I create Kickstarter projects for stuff that I wanted to do myself and think that others might want to do.
I often create cards for needs I see at work that I look around and can't find a suitable product on the market. My One Wire Data Logger which I personally use for brewing beer in my BrewStation is used to log temperatures in electronic equipment testing is such an example.
I try to do stuff that is not "out there" in some particular way. My stuff might be a permutation on something Adafruit does but not in the same form factor. Case in point is the Console Card for the Raspberry Pi. Adafruit has a cable which forces you to put pins on the Pi Connector. I have a card. Not much more money for the card but for some more convenient and less error prone.
Most of my personal projects don't end up on Kickstarter because there's no math to support the project. Case in point is the card MyMenu. I use these in my own projects all over the place but it doesn't make financial sense for me (in the US) to make this a product. I can't count on China as a source of consistent supply for the OLED display.
We don't want to be too successful. My own greatest fear is getting too many orders to fill but too few orders to quit my day job.
I like Kickstarter as a front end to my Tindie store. It continues to drive sales to the Tindie store well after the campaign ends.
.When fulfilling orders we are busy building boards or shipping them every spare moment most weeknights and every hour of the weekend. I was building boards on the weekend my oldest son got married. We we discussing life as I was assembling kits to ship.
Part of the fun for me is that this is something my adult children and I do together. Gives us an excuse to do stuff together.
We have a very good record of meeting our reward dates. Usually we end up shipping the weekend before the end of the month.
I think we missed one shipment date and had to ship a week later than the estimated date.
I had to take a day off work once to meet a shipping deadline of the end of the month due to PCBs coming in late. I did it. The campaign was for less money than I would have been paid that day had I stayed on my day job.
People like to do the "but I can buy that from China for less $$$" game. I do it too. I get it. And I am deliberately not creating projects which China sees the volume to do - yet.
People often fail to give you their address to fulfill all the orders at once. I've had people come back 9 months later and fill in the address survey. That's a pain to deal with individually when you previously did things in large batches.
Filling out the export forms on the USPS site was a pain. We wrote some custom software to make it easier. Tried to turn this into a Kickstarter project without success.
All in all, I've got to know some incredible backers. One guy has backed literally hundreds of projects. Not sure what he does with the rewards but he's clearly into the community. Some people are along on the same journey that we are on. They are excited to see what projects we are coming out with next. We often message previous project backers to let them know we have a new project and we've seen a very good rate of people who follow from one to the next project. But that only comes by doing what you promised.
Our key nitch is mounting holes. There are tons of benchtop/prototype/breadboard/toys. Until you put mounting holes to mount something in a box, it's just a toy. That's my own biggest gripe with the Arduino. Really bad mounting holes. The earlier Pi models had that problem but the Pi people now get it.
In my opinion, Doug, there are more profitable and reliable ways than Kickstarter to promote your projects and launch them. Some tips for a good strategy may give good results, seriously with the advantage - but I repeat, it is just my personal vision, a bit integralist - that you are not confused with the tons of fish-sellers (no idea if this gives the idea but gives a lot of sense in Italian, that is, pescivendoli) and the crowd of senseless ideas pretending to reinvent the world.
In my opinion, Doug, there are more profitable and reliable ways than Kickstarter to promote your projects and launch them. Some tips for a good strategy may give good results, seriously with the advantage - but I repeat, it is just my personal vision, a bit integralist - that you are not confused with the tons of fish-sellers (no idea if this gives the idea but gives a lot of sense in Italian, that is, pescivendoli) and the crowd of senseless ideas pretending to reinvent the world.
