{"id":614,"date":"2014-03-27T14:52:01","date_gmt":"2014-03-27T14:52:01","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/payne.org\/blog\/?p=614"},"modified":"2017-09-09T11:57:20","modified_gmt":"2017-09-09T11:57:20","slug":"y-u-no-kickstart","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/payne.org\/blog\/y-u-no-kickstart\/","title":{"rendered":"Y U No Kickstart?"},"content":{"rendered":"<div>The presale, best typified by <a href=\"https:\/\/www.kickstarter.com\/\">Kickstarter<\/a>, has become a powerful tool for hardware companies to sample market demand and fund initial\u00a0manufacturing. It&#8217;s not the endless beta-test that software developers have, but it moves in that direction.<\/p>\n<div><\/div>\n<div>Presales are not perfect: \u00a0a successful sale is not necessarily evidence of product-market fit. \u00a0 Witness <a href=\"https:\/\/www.ouya.tv\/\">Ouya<\/a>, which had one of the <a href=\"https:\/\/www.kickstarter.com\/projects\/ouya\/ouya-a-new-kind-of-video-game-console\">most successful campaigns<\/a> ever, shipped product as promised, but then <a href=\"http:\/\/www.theverge.com\/2014\/3\/7\/5478198\/the-indie-game-console-may-already-be-dead\">failed to create<\/a> a library of compelling games. In this case, users bought into a vision that turned out to be much harder to realize than expected (namely, enabling a vibrant, non-proprietary, micro-console game development ecosystem).<\/div>\n<div><\/div>\n<div>In other cases, a presale may find the hard-core early adopters, but may not represent the broader\u00a0market. \u00a0Kickstarter is littered with small, but successful products that never transitioned to mainstream.<\/div>\n<div><\/div>\n<div>However, a presell\u00a0<i>failure<\/i>\u00a0can be quite telling: if you can&#8217;t find (say) a few hundred or thousand buyers out of those bleeding edge adopters, how will you succeed in the main market?<\/div>\n<div><\/div>\n<div>Which leads to a very reasonable investor question: \u00a0if your hardware startup has no presale plan, why not? \u00a0There may be some good reasons, but that&#8217;s become the exception, not the rule. \u00a0After all, a presale yields valuable insights, early in the product cycle, for a relatively low amount of work (and work you&#8217;re mostly going to have to do anyway). \u00a0The process forces a lot of good <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Minimum_viable_product\">MVP<\/a> hygiene: \u00a0entrepreneurs have to describe the value clearly, converge the features &amp; design, and understand pricing &amp; margins.<\/div>\n<div><\/div>\n<div>It&#8217;s certainly possible that Kickstarter is the strategy fad of the decade, much like India offshore development was 10+ years ago. \u00a0But I don&#8217;t think so: \u00a0the hardware presale is here to stay!<\/div>\n<div><\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The presale, best typified by Kickstarter, has become a powerful tool for hardware companies to sample market demand and fund initial\u00a0manufacturing. It&#8217;s not the endless beta-test that software developers have, but it moves in that direction. Presales are not perfect: &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/payne.org\/blog\/y-u-no-kickstart\/\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-614","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/payne.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/614","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/payne.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/payne.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/payne.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/payne.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=614"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/payne.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/614\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":615,"href":"https:\/\/payne.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/614\/revisions\/615"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/payne.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=614"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/payne.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=614"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/payne.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=614"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}