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Feasibility of starting company as a crowdfunded project? Or is it a bad idea?

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salihkanber:
I've started the company and our brand Sunday Robotics and we will have a Kickstarter campaign on January 2022 with our product ProBUDDY.
Building a company on crowd funding campaign is not a good idea IMO but the other way is a good one. This is not my first attempt on building start-ups and let me tell you the first one went bad :) So, what we are doing right now is to have Robotics & AI goals for the medium-long term and for short-medium term we have the products to fund our start up, our team. Team is very important. Now we believe that ProBUDDY is a nice product (we know it because we are using it in our lab and it really helps) and for for the first commercialisation cycle Kickstarter is a good way to do it.

So what I am trying to tell you is that better to create a route first, create products that really helps, prototype them and try to sell the prototypes to the people that really needs, if it works then go create a crowdfunding campaign. But we wouldn't never ever forget that people in crowdfunding platforms are real people, valuable ones I must add, they must be satisfied by the result.

wizard69:
While not the experience you want, I took a quick course via the SBA / SCORE (forgot the specifics there) and frankly they scared me off.   This mainly because you need a significant amount of cash to get started that has nothing to do with your product.    You have lawyers, insurance agents, incorporation fees and a bunch of other stuff right out of the gate.   In the USA anyways you don't even want to think about a business until you have factored in liability / errors insurance.   Just figuring out the best way to setup your business takes a lawyer and varies highly with location.   You need some form of incorporation, and may have local and state license fees.

As for kickstarter I think it is pretty much useless for development.    There re literally thousands of attempts at doing development this way.   Now you may have success after getting established securing development funds this way, without a track record though there will be little interest.   What may happen is that kickstarter will help you pay for that initial production run.   The big IF here is having a product and the marketing that brings in enough interest.   That nasty word marketing showed up and frankly this is a huge issue all alone.   If you can't market the product well you will not succeed and that in itself will cost money and or time.

Now I'm not trying to discourage you but just make you aware.   Elon Musk is a good example of what it takes, you often have to impose brutal work schedules on yourself and be a jack of all trades.   You can have hundreds of people working for you and still struggle to get a product out the door.    So while it has been years since taking that little course, I'm still not sure I'd would want to startup a business.   I'm just not that organized.

BenonymousII:
Kickstarter is probably the worst way to start any kind of hardware product.  It looks like it will give you the capital to get the product made and shipped but without any experience, how will you set a subscriber price.  Too high and nobody will buy in, too low and you will run out of funds.  In addition to this, the subscribers will deluge you with messages and woe betide you if you miss your delivery target!  I have subscribed to only one hardware Kickstarter and that was a low-cost laser scanner.  The project was in trouble before the makers even had the prototype running.  There were issues with the app and the units I paid for arrived a good 2 years late.  When they did, they were non functional.  One was not assembled correctly and when the one that partly worked was connected to the app, it just rotated back and forth as if it was self-testing.  The old saying "hardware is hard" is very true.  Complicate hardware with a software component and you're really sticking your head in a noose.  I agree with the other posters here, if you must use Kickstarter, use it to gauge interest in your product and the price-point but don't rely on it for capital.

Serg2000:
I took a walk and found something useful. Although the information may already be outdated.
A few more questions arose.

Here's the first one.


--- Quote from: BenonymousII on January 21, 2022, 01:30:54 am ---Kickstarter is probably the worst way to start any kind of hardware product.
--- End quote ---

What methods are there and which one is the best?

Rimu:
Starting a company is quite challenging, especially with the intense competition nowadays. Crowdfunding is indeed a great way to start a company, but if you want to succeed on a crowdfunding platform, you need to invest a lot in advertising and promotion. Otherwise, people won’t even come across your project.  :box:

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