Hard Choices and A Peek Behind the Curtain
over 9 years ago
– Mon, Aug 01, 2016 at 09:58:32 PM
Hello everyone!
It's time for a Tesh Wall Of Text, this time with some "nuts and bolts" discussion in the service of explaining where we are with the campaign and where we might go. There's a summary and a survey at the end if you want to skip ahead, but if you're interested in looking a bit deeper, there are some explanations between here and there.
Apologies in advance for being verbose. I came to Steampunk because I like seeing how things work, often in great detail, and I have a tendency to believe others may be interested in the same.
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I was heartened by the reception of all three female designs, thank you! I've noted in a couple of places that I'd really like to make all of them reality. I've also been sketching a Mad Scientist and Sky Pirate to give us male companions to the Tinkerer and Rocketeer, respectively.
I would love to make all six designs. I would also love to stretch even further to make the Fairy, Dragon and Builder meeples, as well as the Cart, Barn, Pig and Tower pieces, all of which I've already designed. Designing is the easy part, the fun part. I never lack for ideas; life's too interesting to be bored, and imagination is even more expansive.
The trouble comes with the practical considerations involved in making dreams happen.
We can only make the one female as part of this project while keeping our shipping deadlines mostly intact because after launch, someone ordered enough from our online store to make it possible for me to pay for the Dame's mold ahead of the project's end. That was a fortuitous occasion, one that I'm very grateful for.
The factory is working on the Dame right now, and just sent me a quote for the mold and a couple of samples, based on the art that I sent in after declaring her the winner. Before that, I paid for the Top Hat gentleman (Dandy?) out of proceeds from selling leftovers from our other projects on the online shop, so that we could have prototypes to show to get this thing off the ground.
Note the conditional statements up there? "as part of this project" and "while keeping our shipping deadlines mostly intact". Those are the keys. Given that we've already exceeded the base goal by an order of magnitude (thank you everyone!), it's not unreasonable to say that making six different designs is possible already. Doing this, however, would introduce the following concerns:
1. The distribution of the couples and genders might not be fairly even. When it is, things work out. When it isn't, we still need to make a minimum order to get the factory interested, and if we only have some of those going back out again, we're stuck with extras that we paid for without a clear path to making money from them. We could wind up in the hole (after shipping, taxes and fees) with leftovers nobody wants. We almost wound up that way in the Tinker Plastic Dice campaign, which, for all its glory, only netted us a few hundred dollars in profit at the end of the day. Ditto for the Tinker Gearcoin project. Sure, we have some dice and coins that we can sell now to recoup the stress and maybe make minimum wage for the time invested, but it's been slow, to the tune of another $400 or so since that project ended about a year ago.
I should note, I am actually agreeable with anything that doesn't put us in debt. It does clutter my office with leftovers we have trouble selling without a project's wave of interest (which is part of why we're doing Add Ons, to get these leftovers into good homes), which drives my family crazy, but as long as doing a project doesn't wind up being a liability for my family, it's still great to see a dream made into reality and hear from happy backers.
2. Since we'd have to pay for the other molds after the project funds, we don't get the lead time of having the molds ready to go once we sort out how many we need. It's another 2-3 weeks that wind up being added onto the project, getting those molds made after the campaign closes. In the grand scheme of things, though, that's not the big delay.
3. Fulfillment becomes a nightmare of logistics. In itself, that's actually not a Bad Thing, exactly, since it means we're earning our keep and getting goodies out to interested parties... but it's another delay. A big one.
It makes setting up surveys significantly more time consuming. It makes answering surveys at the end significantly more complex. It makes sorting out who gets what much, much more complex, and it means my office gets many more little boxes full of stuff to sort. What started out as the Dandy-only project (8 colors and one design, a modest, practical project) has already become more than twice as complex with the addition of the Dame. Now it's 16 separate source items to sort and pack with several more possible iterations given possible mixed batches. Adding in four more designs adds even more possibilities to sort, up to 48 different source items, and concurrent possible mixes.
It's far more complex, then, than just saying that we can afford to get more designs produced. We can, even if the project were to end today. The $600 base goal doesn't scale neatly, given that I paid for the molds "out of project", as it were, but the success we've seen so far is helpful. The bottom line profit might be slim again, but it's possible that we would make a bit of money with a little luck in the distribution of who picks what.
More than that, though, it means more time sorting out exactly what we need from the factory, and much, much more time getting it all straight and sent out to everyone. It's not a year-long delay or anything that awful, but easily another month or three. Some people might get them before Christmas, but we couldn't guarantee it, and the November estimate would be blown out of the water.
4. Burnout. This is not a call for sympathy, just another part of the calculus. I do this project in my spare time, which is all of 2 hours or so after the kids go to bed, maybe a couple more if I don't mind only 4-5 hours of sleep each night. I love making cool projects and getting sweet little metal goodies sent out all over the world. It's awesome, seeing people enjoy these little dreams of mine. It's a much more fulfilling hobby than, say, World of Warcraft. (A fine game, for the most part, but boy, can it be a time sink.)
So why should you care? Well, when I don't get enough sleep it has an effect on quality of life, and that affects all sorts of things. Just as I don't want to go into financial liability making these meeples happen, neither do I desire emotional or physical liabilities. Those can affect the bottom line as well. (That's why I'm not too sad about being "downsized-retired" from the video game industry I worked in for a decade. Bad schedules take a toll.) Tired people are slower, and make more mistakes. That's more delay.
5. It's hard to say how many people actually care about delays. I, for one, as a backer, don't mind if communication is maintained and the end product is worth what I paid for it (in money and patience). I'm still waiting on a few dice projects that I backed more than a year ago, and that's OK. There are those who share my view, but there are others who are quite unhappy with delays, especially if there's a lot of money involved. This causes fractures, especially if a project grows with "feature creep" and early adopters don't want in any more on what the project has become.
I haven't been able to nail down numbers on this, for a number of reasons, and it's possible that More Options is a significant enough selling point that new backers offset those lost in the shuffle. Still, I hate to let people down. I'm not of a mind that "once a backer, you're committed", and I know that there are a lot of reasons for people to back out. I just don't know if chasing "bigger, better, more awesome" is necessarily the best way to run a project.
Chasing that shiny Tinkerish brass ring, as it were, certainly has a romantic, emotional buzz, and making More Cool Stuff has its intrinsic rewards. And yet... the Tinker Gearcoin project was way more complex than it needed to be. Beside the toll it cost here at home, the factory won't answer my emails any more. I think we burned them out. We're not that crazy with this project, not yet, but sometimes it's not wise to push too hard.
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Bottom line? TLDR? It is possible to make all three female designs as part of the project. It's even possible to add in a male Mad Scientist and Sky Pirate as well. At least, if we stay above $6,000. $8,000 or $10,000 would make me far more comfortable on the margins of error.
The cost to changing that drastically midproject, from one design to six? Much more work on my part, and much more patience on your part. That's a delay that ultimately means shipping extends into January, February or even March.
I'm not sure it's worth it. I'm not sure it isn't. As always, though, I would love feedback. You made this happen, you have to be part of what we do now.
What do you think? Here's a poll to allow for anonymous answers, if you don't want to chime in via comments (or do both, of course).
To Expand or Not To Expand, that is the Question
I understand that there are a variety of arguments pro and con. I hope I've explained my position well enough to underline that I'm undecided, weighing costs and benefits. Please let me know what you expect and how these factors weigh in your calculus. I cannot commit to a direction right now, and we're almost assured that whatever direction we go, there will be friction, just as there are vocal advocates for each of the female designs. Still, we're in this together, and I'm looking forward to doing the best I can.
Thank you everyone!
Tesh
Gearpunk Beta Dice and EU Shipping
over 9 years ago
– Wed, Jul 27, 2016 at 08:08:45 PM
Hello everyone!
Just a quick update today, since most of my Big News will be about the female meeple designs... and those aren't quite done. I'm just about halfway done with the Dame, all done with the Rocketeer and haven't done any polish work on the Tinkerer yet.
In the meantime, I just arranged production of more of the Gearpunk Beta D20 dice. Or, at least, paid a bit ahead of time to get things going. Y'see, it turns out that they broke the mold that was used to make the first batch of the dice. I didn't ask if it was an accident, a business practice or some occult offering, but it doesn't matter that much. They will be remaking the mold at no charge, it just will take some time to get it right. I'm optimistic that it will be ready in time for us to get them when we get the meeples, but I'll update you all with details as I get them.
They will be available as Add Ons for $5 each, available in three colors: Antiqued Copper, Antiqued Brass and Antiqued Nickel. I'll update the main page tonight.
Also, we're narrowing down options on an effort to keep the VAT irritation down for those of you in the EU. We're always happy to send Tinker goodies anywhere the governments allow them, but sometimes there are ways to make things more efficient. To that end, we have two companies that we're deciding between that will ship locally from within the EU. This should let us pay the VAT ahead of time so you don't have to deal with it, and possibly make shipping times a little faster.
I won't go so far as to say that we're "EU Friendly" yet, since we haven't finalized arrangements, and that term is fuzzy anyway, but I wanted to let you all know that we're trying to make things smoother and less annoying. Shipping is a pain in a lot of ways, but given the popularity of Kickstarter, different companies have stepped up into the service market niche to offer shipping options, and we might be able to make use of their services.
None of this will change the numbers you're seeing on pledge tiers, it's just an effort to keep you from needing to deal with the VAT and possibly make shipping faster/smoother.
Thank you all again for backing us! Please keep spreading the word, if you can. I keep finding places to mention them, but I can only get the word out so far.
I'll try to have the female design proposals done tonight or tomorrow and then we'll get a vote going. The sooner we can get the mold made and prototypes in hand, the better.
Thank you!
Tesh
