A friend asked why am I not doing a Kickstart for this project? On one hand, it would make sense: A successful campaign provides financing to finish the development and  parts procurement for the kit, and most importantly, gives some idea about the how many of you actually want to buy the kit. At this point, I have no idea if the kits will sell one a month or ten a day.

On the other hand, in this case Kickstart would not bring any customer benefits: I am not actually starving, and don’t need money for development. Time spent preparing for a Kickstart campaign is time not spent on development, so it would actually slow down things. From a customer point of view, there is not much difference between Kickstart and an order with a long delivery period – except higher price, Kickstart is not free!

So, I don’t bother with Kickstart. There just will be a longish delivery time after the beta series is sold. That time (I’m thinking two months or so) will give us an idea about the popularity of the LitePlacer and we can purchase parts accordingly, as well as allow us to streamline our processes to make everything happen smoothly.  Most importantly, the time lets us sort out any issues that might surface when there are more than the few development machines in existence.