Editing The Pen Addict 129/transcript (section)

== Kickstarter Projects ==


'''Brad Dowdy:''' Now, do you have, out of the, out of your successful projects, and we're talking about the Render K, the Retract, the Bolt, the Ink, and now the Cube. Did I get that right? Yeah. Which has been, the Cube's not done yet. It's, it's funded, but it's not complete yet. Which one of those has been the biggest bear to complete the project? Have you had, like, any, like, super difficulties with any one particular thing?

'''Dan Bishop:''' Um, well, it's almost a tie. Uh, those who have backed us and those who haven't, you can go on Kickstarter, um, and read all our updates, which is something we should talk about a little bit later. Yes. The updates. Um, what happened is when we made the Retract, we made them and we, we started shipping them out and we discovered a slight issue. And when I say slight, that's extremely, you know, that, that word is not even close to being accurate. Um, uh, an issue with the pens, whereas a part of the polishing process caused the tip of the pen to deform slightly just enough to where the refill would not protrude out far enough to write. That's a problem when you have a retractable pen.

'''Dan Bishop:''' So.

'''Myke Hurley:''' I think the whole retraction thing stops working.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' I've actually forgot about this. I'm glad you brought this up. Yeah.

'''Dan Bishop:''' Yeah. I'm so glad that you forgot about it.

'''Dan Bishop:''' Like I lost my mind for about 15 minutes. Uh, and, uh, so I, I jumped, literally ran to the desk, sat down, wrote out an update and came up with an emergency system in which anybody on Kickstarter, as soon as they received their pen, because not all of them were going to be bad. Uh, because it was, it was, it was, uh, the way we polished stuff. It depends on how much force somebody put on the pen while they were doing it. Some of them were perfectly fine. So we established a kind of a recall where they would let us know. We would send out a pen with a return label and a box and they would just swap it and send it right back.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' Hmm.

'''Dan Bishop:''' And those who were our international backers, they just got a pen. Cause it was, there was no way we could afford to do the shipping to and from because shipping is insanely expensive. So we just did the recall and then people would, some people didn't even open them. They just sent them right back. And then we checked everything and we fixed them all and, uh, moved forward and implemented a procedure so that that would not happen again when we made the next batch. But yeah, that was terrifying. Um, and then the other one was the ink. Well, the ink was, was crazy because it was a brand new, um, product for us. The, the, the, the clips were different. The, you know, the construction was, you know, it's, it's similar. It's all machining, but we had just moved and it threw a huge wrench in the works because we had to interrupt any production we had and physically move an entire shop. And then try to get up and running and get everything going again. And we had a machine, uh, break on us for a brief period. We had just different pitfalls here and there. We had some issues with the design that we had to tweak. So they would, they would be machinable, but, and people, that was our, our longest delay in, in fulfilling rewards was the ink. And that's stressful because you, you want to get it in someone's hand and not have them waiting because you've had their funds. And, um, they're just basically looking to you for an update as to when the rewards are going to ship out. And so that's stressful because some people get agitated and, um, you know, get, get angry or get upset. So those two things were, we're about tied.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' Yeah. So you said, you said two things there that were very important. I think number one, with the retract, you were fast. I mean, your response, like within, you started figuring out that there's going to be some people started reporting issues. And I think, you know, you acknowledge that like really, really early on. And then I think within less than 24 hours, you had a whole system in place to resolve any of those issues. Yeah. Um, and then secondly, and I'll, I'll let you talk about both of them, both things. If you want the, um, just the communication aspect, um, just, you know, getting out there, not just the quick response, but like communicating in full detail, you're not leaving anything out new, not sugarcoating anything. Um, you know, how important were those things to, to getting, getting these projects were filled and, you know, getting the customers, you know, on your, keeping the customers on your side?

'''Dan Bishop:''' Well, it's a very important, and that's kind of how we operate at work where, you know, everybody's pretty straightforward. You know, nobody's trying to tiptoe around everything. So it's kind of how we go about our, our business. But on Kickstarter, we decided early on that, um, unless there was something that was very specific, like we wanted to have a coupon code just for our backers, you know, or something like that, we wouldn't do, uh, a backer only update. Because if somebody wants to find out about us, they, you know, someone says, hey, check out Karis Customs, and they did a couple Kickstarter projects. And so they hop on Kickstarter, and they start looking at this project, and they go to the updates to see, you know, how the project, the project progressed, and it's all hidden. And that, it just kind of seemed weird. So we try to make as much of it transparent as possible. And even our screw-ups. I mean, we're not perfect. We're just a bunch of dudes in a machine shop, you know. It's, we're kind of an odd bunch. I'm a designer. We've got some machinists and some other guys working for us, and we make pens. And that's kind of an odd thing. And so there are, you know, mistakes that are going to be made, and things that are not going to work out as planned. And if you let people know, 90% of the time, you can diffuse any possible situation. You can just say, hey, this is how it is. This is what we're doing. You know, this is how we're solving the problem. Or here's the latest progress. And people go, that's great. No problem. You know, we'll see you next time. Thanks for the update.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' Yep. I think that's hugely, hugely important. And I agree with you 100% on the backer updates being public. Unless there's, there is a case where they should be private. Like if you're having a backer-specific code or download link, right? Yes. You know, you may want to have that just for your backers. But for all, you know, warts and all needs to be out there for the public to consume. And if you handle that right, which you do, and, you know, the backers, you know, like you said, you know, 90, 99%, they understand. You know, as long as you're open and up front. And if you're telling your backers, hey, I'm putting this out to the public anyway, I'm not sending you some closed backer update that only you should read because I've screwed things up. That, you know, you know, helps them understand more that, you know, you're really trying to be open and up front with what's going on in this project. Because stuff happens. Yeah. Some of it's bad. And so, yeah, keeping all those things, you know, keeping all the people informed is hugely, hugely important.

'''Dan Bishop:''' Yes. And people, like I said, there's some things about Kickstarter that if you have a project that's really, really successful and you overfund, everyone just goes, man, they're rich. They should be able to, you know, get this stuff out the door super fast. And it's completely not the case.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' Yeah.

'''Dan Bishop:''' You know, it's like I equate it to, you know, like making cookies or something, you know, especially for us, you know, to make cookies, you have to, you know, make your batter, you put it in the oven at 350 for, you know, 15 minutes, any less and it's wrong. And, you know, so you can't speed up the process. So, you know, your goal is one batch of cookies. You meet that goal and you're set and your estimated delivery date is for that one, that one batch. But then if you overfund and you suddenly have to make, you know, 10 batches, you have 10 times the amount of work and the timeframe stretches out that far.

'''Dan Bishop:''' And it doesn't, you can't, it doesn't matter how much money you have. It doesn't matter how much of anything you have. You really can't speed up the process. And, you know, people often, you know, have suggestions about, oh, maybe you should hire out some other shops or whatever, but it just, it can be more complicated. Any problem that you might have, it can just amplify it if you have somebody else trying to work on it for you. So to keep control of the situation and to make things right, you kind of have to keep it in your own little bubble and push forward. And if it takes a little bit of extra time, that's kind of the price that's paid for an awesome product.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' Yeah, that's what we ran into, you know, with Nock, with, you know, all the money that we raised, you would think at some point, you know, well, just hire more help or, you know, bring in other people or add contractors or do all this. But you're just, you're almost compounding the problem instead of solving the problem by bringing that in. So, yeah, what you just do, just kind of almost have to, like, isolate and just, you know, hunker down, work hard, work as hard as you can and just try to get them out. It's not going to, the money's not going to solve the problem of getting it out faster. That's for dang sure.

'''Dan Bishop:''' Yeah, well, you had a problem that we didn't have. Now, when we make our pens, there's a lot of handwork that goes into them, but we can set up with a CNC machine and a lot of the steps are automated. You had to, I mean, you guys had to sew everything. Somebody had to physically, you know, sew each one of those items. And so that's extremely labor intensive. Yeah. And anything, anything that...

'''Myke Hurley:''' Because you could just, like, switch the machine on and leave it all night or whatever. I mean, I'm sure it's not that simple. But, like, the idea is, like, Brad could only, Brad and Jeff could only make as many as they could make in the time that they had. Like, and they couldn't, they couldn't work through the night because they're human beings. It doesn't work like that.

'''Dan Bishop:''' Yeah. And we actually, on some other projects, we started a night shift.

'''Myke Hurley:''' Sure.

'''Dan Bishop:''' And had guys coming in, you know, working till, you know, one or two in the morning. And then the next shift would come in at six o'clock in the morning and keep going. I mean, there was machines that basically didn't turn off. And it's interesting because you want to, you know, you could scale up and try to do all these different things. But then it kind of defeats the purpose of, you know, you doing Kickstarter. I mean, you do Kickstarter to get something rolling and to kind of build it into something. And if you just throw all that money and time and effort into just making sure that you get the rewards out faster, you could have some fallout afterwards and, you know, go out of business. Right. There are a lot of Kickstarter projects that are kind of one and done. Oh, for sure. I had a design friend who was interviewing another designer. And I won't mention the project, but it wasn't pen related. This guy had a project. It funded and seemed to do really well. And all of a sudden done, he ended up putting $300 or so, $300 to $500 of his own money into it just to ship them.

'''Dan Bishop:''' You've seen that time and time again with lots of projects. Yeah, and there's a lot of things to running a successful Kickstarter project because it's a business. And product development is extremely complicated. And, you know, my peers that I went to school with, it's not uncommon for a project to take three to four years to reach completion, not even manufacturing. Just, you know, from the Kickstarter stage to, you know, ready to go, it takes years. And a lot of companies, including yours and other successful companies, they condense that way, way down. And people just kind of, you know, expect that you should be able to produce things very quickly, which in some cases you can if, you know, like if you're doing a book or a comic and the bindery can make you a lot of them, you might be able to do that. But in other cases where, you know, like NotCo, you guys have to physically sew, it was like 10,000 cases or something?

'''Brad Dowdy:''' Yeah, it was like 6,000.

'''Dan Bishop:''' Oh, yeah. Let's just say 10. Yeah.

'''Dan Bishop:''' But at the same time, if you planned it correctly, I mean, you guys also planned on being able to have some extra so that once you were done, your Kickstarter wasn't just for the sake of fulfilling Kickstarter. You actually could start a business and have some stock on hand.