Kickstarter successful! (and other news)

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Forum LiveThanks to everyone who helped us get the “Word” out, wordclock that is.  Our Kickstarter project exceeded all of our expectations by an order of magnitude.

In order to prepare for builder questions, David Pincus set up a forum: http://forum.wyolum.com.  Please sign up and post a question or answer one.

The ClockTHREEjr has illustrated the viability of the WyoLum model.  The following is from our original homepage.

WyoLum is a partnership of Open Source enthusiasts collaborating on cool products.

We want to take DoItYourself to the next level of efficiency by creating a collaboration platform where guerrilla engineering-and-design teams can emerge for the duration of a project, solve a problem, disband and move on to the next project with the main goal of having fun in learning and developing as many cool and interesting projects as we can.

Several people played key roles to the ClockTHREEjr success.  Brian Krontz took amazing photos that really capture the beauty of the clock.  The photos where eye catching as a thumbnail and stunning in full scale.  Margaret Shaw (a.k.a. Grandmama) send out a personal thank you note to (almost) every new backer which set a friendly tone for the interactions to come.  David Pincus kept everything moving by replying quickly to the many questions that came up.  Backers pitched in to define new languages, faceplates and one backer even performed a thorough board review.  It was amazing to see the pieces come flying together at just the right time.
Some of the WyoLum team met Saturday to discuss what went right and lessons learned from our experience.  Here are the highlights of our meeting.

Kickstarter Lessons Learned

  • Consistent Positive Interaction — When you have your heart and soul poured into a project, it is easy to be overly defensive to every comment.  The WyoLum team resisted the urge to be offended and tried to get to the core of the inquirers question or point.
  • All help accepted — We accepted any and all assistance.  We could not have done it otherwise.
  • Frequent updates — There is a fine line between spamming and informing.  We updated our backers whenever we had enough significant updates that our backers would genuinely interested.
  • Prior Success — This gave confidence that we would fulfill our commitment to our backers
  • Diverse Group — Men, women, and children, form around the world made it easy to identify with someone
  • Customization — This can be a pain to deliver, but it sets ClockTHREEjr apart from other clocks.
  • Too many backer options — The several options where confusing to several backers.  We thought photos of the rewards might make it easier for the backers.

Please comment if you agree or disagree with any of the above.

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