Now, with the aid of hindsight, it’s easy to look back at the Buccaneer and see everything that the Pirate3D team did wrong, but we shouldn’t forget that for a while the successfully funded campaign was considered a Kickstarter success story. The lesson that we should all learn from Pirate3D is an obvious one, it takes more than a successfully funded campaign, even one funded at $1.5 million, to become a successful business. Raising a lot of money is meaningless if you can’t fulfill the promises that you make while raising it, and sadly when it comes to Kickstarter there aren’t a lot of options for the 2,000 Pirate3D backers who won’t receive the 3D printer that they paid for.
Yes, the M3D team had $3.5 million to start off their business, and while that is certainly a lot of money that any startup would be happy to take, that kind of success also brings with it a whole host of challenges. For one, when the dust settled M3D had to source parts for, manufacture and ship almost 11,000 3D printers. When you have to go from a production line capable of assembling 0 3D printers to a production line capable of assembling 11,000 3D printers, all in less than a year, it really isn’t how much money you have, it’s how well you planned ahead. While M3D missed their delivery goals by a few months, they still fulfilled all of their original Kickstarter rewards and successfully released the retail version of the M3D last month.
But having a quality product should be a given when you launch a crowdfunding campaign, and if you’ll remember, the few backers who actually received their printer from Pirate3D had nothing but positive things to say about it. By all accounts the Buccaneer was a really good 3D printer well worth the price, so they had that in common with M3D. But what Pirate3D didn’t have in common with M3D is where everything went wrong for them and where everything went right for M3D.
Primarily, they did their homework before they launched the campaign. While speaking to M3D co-founder David Jones it became clear that he and fellow co-founder Michael Armani didn’t want to just create and sell a 3D printer, they wanted to create a great 3D printer that would be affordable to both manufacture and sell. The part that trips up many hopeful 3D printer manufacturers is scalability. It doesn’t matter how good your 3D printer is, if you can’t make them easy to assemble then the cost of manufacturing is going to jump dramatically, along with your price point. It is pretty obvious that many startups spend little time thinking about the cost of assembly, which isn’t a big deal if you’re only selling a couple hundred printers. But if they find themselves in the position of needing to assemble thousands that oversight is really going to trip them up.
Jones and Armani spent more than two years working on the design of the Micro, and just as much of that time was spent on designing quality 3D printing technology as it was spent on finding a way to assemble it quickly without sacrificing durability. The final design of the M3D Micro only has one screw, and the rest of the parts can be snapped together in under five minutes. That means less time spent on the assembly line, fewer parts that can be defective or break, and a much lower price point.
While it is a safe bet that most companies who want to start selling 3D printers hope to sell their products in large numbers, very few of them seem to plan out exactly how they are going to do that cost effectively. From the begining, Jones and Armani found the best parts and assembly processes available that would allow them to scale production up and actually make it cheaper to do so. This allowed them to cost effectively offer the Micro at a price far lower than the quality of the parts suggest would be possible. The smart use of injection molded parts, components sourced in bulk from overseas distributors and the use of local labor to maintain a high level of quality assembly and fabrication all translated into a smart business plan that was put in place before their Kickstarter was ever launched.
If you’re a startup looking to fund your company on Kickstarter, the fact is that you won’t have time to develop a business plan after your campaign closes, you have to already have one in place. You shouldn’t be using crowdfunding to start your business, you should be running your business from the very beginning and simply include crowdfunding as part of the process. If you haven’t considered why it is important to do so, then you’re probably not ready. M3D isn’t a Kickstarter success story because they got lucky, they are a Kickstarter success story because they took luck out of the equation and replaced it with a solid business plan.