Looks like we have a winner.

[Steve Baker]

I know a bunch of people have seen me busily lasering away at bits of
plywood over the last six months - mostly making Medieval building models
for 28mm gamers, RPG players, etc.

That work reached fruition on Friday when we launched our Kickstarter to
turn this into a proper business:

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1093338811/medieval-village-for-28mm-gamers

http://renaissanceminiatures.com

We've reached 50% of our funding goal after just three days out of the
thirty for which the project is running. Now we're being bombarded by
retailers wanting to buy our kits in bulk, everywhere from Europe to
Australia. So it's very likely we'll not only reach our goal but scarily
exceed it. Renee will have a full-time (and reasonably well paid) job.
If some of the prediction tools are to be believed, and if retailers truly
are this excited, then we could soon be looking for a small industrial
space for multiple laser cutters and an employee to oversee them...but
that's just speculation right now.

I want to thank everyone at Hackerspace who made this possible. Without
the hand-holding, expertise and encouragement we had from everyone (oh,
yes - and that small matter of 24/7 free access to a really superb laser
cutter!), this absolutely couldn't have happened. People who took the
time to explain details of how the laser cutter operates and how to take
care of the beast deserve special praise.

I see it as an important function of our little group to make this kind of
thing possible...and I encourage anyone with a spark of a business idea to
try to turn it into reality.

Ideas + Hackerspace + Social Media + Kickstarter = $$$.

I plan to put out a project update on Kickstarter plugging the joys of ATX
Hackerspace membership and expressing much the same sentiments that I do
now - but I want to hold off until closer to the end of the project when
the most people will watching for news (hopefully by then we'll also have
more firm news about our future home).

-- Steve

[Jessica Ross]

Oh my.

 -- Steve


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[Mandie Kramer]

Steve, 

That is FANTASTIC!

(Can we quote you on this?)  :)

On Mon, Oct 8, 2012 at 9:03 AM, Steve Baker <st...@sjbaker.org> wrote:

 -- Steve

[Steve Baker]

Yeah...it's hard to estimate where it'll end up. Some Kickstarter experts
are saying we could reach multiples of $100k. That's *scary*.
Personally, I'll be happy if it hits $50k...which is the low end of the
estimates I've seen.

Oh my...indeed!

-- Steve

-- Steve

[MElbert]

HUZZAH!

[Steve Baker]

You might want to hold off quoting me until we actually meet our
goal...which at present rate should be three or four days from now.
(Fingers crossed!)

But in general, yes, of course Hackerspace should be pointing out to
anyone who will listen that we're teaching local people valuable,
practical, high-tech skills - and that over the long term, this really
does translate into new jobs and people getting better jobs.

How else can someone learn how to work with a fancy machine like a laser
cutter or a 3D printer or a CNC mill? For $50 a month it's one hell of a
deal!

I guess if we want to pitch this to potential members, we should tell the
whole story.

Here's how it fit together for us (Sorry - it's long!):

FLEXIBLE MANUFACTURING:

You can't make tiny, fiddly little bits of complicated-shaped wood
economically in any other way than laser cutting or die-cutting. Die-cut
stuff sucks - the edges are horrible and the cost of making the dies
(although it's come down dramatically) prevents you from having a wide
range of product...and they wear out alarmingly quickly. Laser cutting
opens up the use of super-cheap materials (3.5mm plywood, Glidden paint!)
to making goods that cost big bucks. Our flagship "Tavern" model has
about $8 of plywood and $2 of paint - and we sell it for $200!

HACKERSPACE:

From a small business perspective, without hackerspace, we'd have had to
lease a crappy little laser system for $400 a month with a three year
commitment...or outlay $10,000 to buy one! Who can afford that for the
six months it took us to learn the technology, design and make prototypes
- and all for something that might fail miserably - as our first
Kickstarter did.

With Hackerspace, we could treat this more or less as a hobby - spending
small amounts time over evenings and weekends, gradually getting confident
that we could do this - and iterating on our design about weekly! No
pressure - and lots of experts on hand to ask questions of.

OPEN SOURCE SOFTWARE:

We designed everything with a combination of GIMP, Inkscape and Blender on
an ancient desktop PC running SuSE Linux. Our private MediaWiki setup is
the database for all of our designs, concept pictures, reference art,
business planning documents, lists of backers...you name it! We have
version control for free - and I can get at my designs online from
anywhere. Our public website is another MediaWiki - set up with
permissions that prevent outsiders from editing it. It's not the
prettiest website in the world - but it's functional.

I already pay Dreamhosts $100 a year for my personal website - and there
is plenty of space & bandwidth left over to run our business website at no
extra cost.

We didn't spend a dime on software or server infrastructure.


SOCIAL MEDIA:

We learned from our first (failed) Kickstarter that you have to
self-promote. You can't rely on Kickstarter to deliver an audience.

When the product was ready, we hit the social media to promote it - and
soon started our own forum (phpBB==free!) where we opened up every step of
our development process, how the business works, what we're building and
how. Documenting our failures as well as our successes - we're very
"open" about everything. No secrets from our customers whatever - they
know our profit margins and where all of the costs go, what we're
designing next...everything.

Barely a handful of people were listening - but they were liking what they
heard and one of them got us hooked up with another guy in the business
who makes (of all things) Chocolate Dice (http://DiceCandies.com). He is
a kickstarter alumni and was prepared to do a "joint promotion" with us.

He used his 1,500 person mailing list to promote a competition to win $400
worth of our product (which, in reality was about 4 hours of my time on
the Hackerspace laser cutter and $10 of materials) - plus $50 worth of
chocolate dice and his new book (which is what he mostly wanted to
promote).

That gave us a mailing list of about a hundred and fifty genuinely
interested people who had opted-in to us sending them product updates...so
we don't have to spam anyone who didn't ask to be spammed. The contest
also brought us coverage on several gamer blogs and forums...and our name
was mentioned in many places. We got a few email inquiries about the cost
of our product - but of course we had no way to make enough to
sell...so...

KICKSTARTER:

With that initial input of enthusiastic buyers from our mailing list, we
got around $2000 of pledges from about 30 people in just a couple of
hours! At some point over that first weekend, about 40 of them had
pledged to our project. I decided to put out announcements on about 30
RPG/gamer forums that I'd found via Google...and rapidly discovered that I
didn't have to! Suddenly there were threads popping up everywhere talking
up our product.

I dipped into some of them to add interesting tidbits about what we did
and how we did it...but I really don't think I needed to do that.

CONCLUSION:

So - all of these sexxy new things - Flexible manufacturing, Hackerspaces,
the OpenSource movement, Social Media and Kickstarter really do all work
together synergistically.

I think this is the world that hackers wanted to create - and it's arrived!

Setting up our business has so far cost us about $300 in Hackerspace
membership - and maybe $200 in materials for prototyping. The most
expensive thing the business owns is four 500 watt shop lights that we
bought to light up our product for photography!

Aside from "sweat equity", that's our total outlay! Once our business is
running, we'll have everything bought and paid for - so when we finish
delivering our kickstarter goals, we'll have no business debt at all - and
everything we need to make a decent profit.

Cool or what?

-- Steve

[Sheena Madan]

This is amazing, and the miniatures look awesome. Congratulations!

On Mon, Oct 8, 2012 at 9:03 AM, Steve Baker <st...@sjbaker.org> wrote:

[Amishacker]

Congratulations Steve!

I may only have the spare change in my budget for a pony cart, but I'll save you the shipping and hit you up for a pony later.

This will be passed around the gaming circles I know.

[Evelyn]

Congrats Steve!!! Wishing you much success.

On Monday, October 8, 2012 9:03:21 AM UTC-5, SteveBaker wrote:

[Dan DeFelippi]

Steve,

This is a fantastic, informative story. I hope you plan on sharing it outside this mailing list when you have the time. I think a lot of people could learn from your experience. Even a blog on your website would be good.

-Dan

[Steve Baker]

I can certainly post it on the Renaissance Miniatures site.

I was kinda inspired by Mario Lurig (the chocolate dice guy) in his blog
entry about "Slowpreneurs":

http://mariolurig.com/tag/slowpreneur/

That's the way we'd like to grow also.

-- Steve

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[vlad]

Steve,
Congrats!! I made my Kickstarter pledge and am looking forward to becoming a member of the Fellowship of the Renaissance.  I wanted to thank you for passing on your knowledge about the laser cutter as well.  I was in the space during one of your sessions and you took time to explain to me laying out a cut, what materials to use/not use and most importantly gave me some tips on the Inkscape/Corel translation that helped me avoid some mistakes.

To your success,
Vlad

On Monday, October 8, 2012 9:03:21 AM UTC-5, SteveBaker wrote:

[Steve Baker]

Yeah!!!! We made our goal in just under five days...now we're sitting on
the edges of our seats wondering how high we'll get. We cut the budget to
the absolute bone to get the initial goal down as low as we could...but
we're really hoping it goes to at least twice what it is now to get some
actual profit into the picture.

Last night was kinda amazing. We were basically flat-lined at 61% of goal
- and we know that after a project has been up for about a week, it tends
to flat-line for the second and third week, then pick up again right at
the end. That meant that there was a serious risk of not making the
goal...or at least having a very frustrating next too weeks waiting to see
what happens.

But Renee and I hit on an idea for a bonus reward program that looks
incredibly impressive on paper - but ends up not costing us much. I
"themed" it with Dungeons & Dragons style wording and posted it as an
update at about 7pm last night. The thing took off like a scalded cat!

We were taking in over $1000 an hour until we hit goal somewhere around 3am.

Probably things will calm down now - at least for a couple of weeks. Then
we'll make another push as we hit the "last-minute-procrastinators" rush.

I'm kinda hoping I can get some time on the hackerspace laser cutter
before then to finish off some final tweaks to our "castle" series design
that we want to add as "stretch goals" for the final push...hopefully
it'll be up and running in it's temporary home before then.

-- Steve

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[Martin Bogomolni]

Matt and I are working on getting the laser cutter up and running in
Das Pflugerhaus garage. The hope is that it will be up and running
at the end of the week. I need to source a specific kind of exhaust
fan.

-M

[David Mitchell]

Bravo! I'm really enjoying your updates, thanks for sharing so many
great insights on the process too!

On Wed, Oct 10, 2012 at 8:59 AM, Steve Baker <st...@sjbaker.org> wrote:

[Steve Baker]

How will we be booking time on it when it's back up and running? I
presume we won't have 24/7 access to it at Das Pfugerhaus?

-- Steve

-- Steve

[Tim Fredlund]

Steve,

It very likely will not be 24/7, but there will be posted hours.

-T

[Martin Bogomolni]

There will be posted hours. We have two volunteers to man the laser
cutter Mon-Sat from 10am to 8pm.

-M

[Steve Baker]

Is that limited by the number of volunteers or the amount of time we're
allowed in that space?

[Martin Bogomolni]

That is limited by the two volunteers who are generously giving 10
hours of their time each day to watch over the garage space, six days
a week.

The garage is attached to a house, with many residents, who have
emptied out their garage so that we can have a temporary home until
the lease is executed and our new home up and running. They have
kindly given us a place to be, without request for compensation, and
they have jobs. We need to respect that they have a need for
privacy, and not constantly have hackerspace members at their house
interrupting their peace.

-M

[Steve Baker]

I'd be prepared to do Sundays (assuming of course I can book some laser
hours now and then to break the monotony!)

Is there web access there?

-- Steve


Martin Bogomolni wrote:

[Martin Bogomolni]

Contact Matt Mancuso to co-ordinate. The shift runs from 10am to 8pm.

-M