I'm pleased to be here with Zachary Dunham.

He is the design and technology outreach lead here at Kickstarter,

but has also created Kickstarter projects.

So I thought it would be worth talking to him.

Less than that other role and more about the project that he

created and getting some advice from him.

So, can you tell us what the project was?

Yes, sure. So it's for this thing that I'm holding here.

Which is called The Public Radio.

It's very simply a single station FM radio,

that's housed in a Mason jar.

So it's chips pre-tuned to the station that you listen to

and just has this one simple interaction.

Usually it's NPR for people but yeah it's just very straight forward.

So how did you come up with the idea?

The idea grew out of,

so I had taken this electronics class that MIT was offering.

It was the 6W2X course.

It was part of the edX thing,

and so this was like a great project to kind of continue learning about electronics

and it got to a point where a friend

thought that it had legs and he wanted to work on it with me.

And, Kickstarter ended up becoming a great place to kind of test the waters for the idea.

And so what preparation did you do before launching a campaign?

In terms of laying the groundwork for success making sure that you know what we're doing.

Yeah. I think, setting our expectations was a big thing.

So before we launched we said.

We reached out to all those people.

We asked kind of you know first off,

what they would pay for this?

And that kind of helped us gauge a general price point that made sense.

And in that, we were able to set a goal.

Which was $25,000 for us.

And I think that for us in terms of setting intentions, we decided,

if we were able to get backers to support

these and if we were able to get

500 backers to support these and that would be successful for us.

And so, just even having that baseline I'm saying,

"We're willing to do this if we can get 500 backers.

Even though that means us not making any money.

Well we'll be more than happy to do this."

That was a very big preparation for us because it kind of set our expectations.

How'd you know it would be appealing to some set of people?

Did you customize it in that or was it just because you have

friends and people who saw it and thought it was cool?

People that saw it thought it was cool.

We did a beta test run on Grand Street.

Which still exists.

It's part of Etsy now.

And so we got some early feedback that way.

We made about 60 of them.

And the original idea too part of it was that,

we thought that radio stations would really like this.

So we started reaching out to NPR,

thinking that this would be sort of an alternative for a tote bag.

So instead of getting a tote bag, you get a radio.

And did they like that?

They loved it. Radio stations are really hard to work with.

They usually do like a 10 to 12 X markup on their swag.

So getting someone to back for a $150 radio is a little bit more challenging.

Got it.

Yeah.

So when you launched the campaign,

how did you make sure it was successful when you were running it?

So friends and family was big.

At first we did the usual thing where we had a mailing list.

With about a thousand people that were on it before we launched that kind

of gain sort of initial momentum and then,

radio stations did end up picking it up.

I did an interview on

the Canadian public broadcasting sort of version of All Things Considered.

NPR did a number of interviews with us and that kind of helped get the word out.

And then, the other big thing for us was really,

this was a project for us to learn about engineering and manufacturing.

And so we were really sharing openly the process of how we were making

this and that became of interest to a lot of people as well.

Just from having that insight.

And how much did you end up raising?

We raised just under $90000 on

Kickstarter and then we did another 15,000 or so on our own website.

And so we shipped about 2,500 of these around the world.

Are you still in business making these or?

We're sold out.

We got about a dozen emails a week from people asking for more

but it's something that we're entertaining bringing it back online.

It's a lot to make that next step from a successful Kickstarter campaign

to sustaining that business and we both have full time jobs elsewhere now.

So it's tricky.

Got it.

Yeah.

So you're saying you worked on the manufacturing and that was it.

Yeah.

So how did you get this thing manufactured?

I mean how'd you ship it out?

How'd you deal with the fact you had to get radios tuned into people?

Yes. So that was a really interesting challenge.

I mean the Mason jar is partially aesthetically pleasing but for us this was

a really interesting decision because we didn't actually have

to produce tooling or get injection molding for an enclosure.

So, though this doesn't scale and price really well,

it's great for us not having to design an enclosure.

So this was an important choice.

These we bought in bulk from essentially Ball Jar.

The parts of the radio were

designed here and manufactured in southern China and in Taiwan.

And then the circuit board which sits in the bottom on the radio,

this was assembled and manufactured in Massachusetts.

The build though we actually got friends and family to come and help us.

So with 3D printed fixtures to do the assembly.

And then, we hosted these things we were calling manufacturing salons.

Which we held in Soho on weekends,

for about four weekends in a row.

Bought breakfast and lunch for people and they literally helped us assemble 2000 radios.

So you had a friends and family assembly line?

Yeah. And we did QC for days afterwards. But yeah.

And so how did you figure out who the manufacturing partners would be?

Some cold outreach.

Just looking online, there are hundreds of antenna manufacturers,

so finding a few that seem reasonable.

Getting quotes. Simple services like MFG.com and then also industry partners,

folks like Dragon Innovation.

People like that helping us cold analyst that makes sense.

Did you end up going to China to oversee anything?

We did but not until after we actually did the run.

So we finished the production run for public radio in

the summer of 2015 and later that August after we chipped everything out.

We had a little bit of money leftover in the bank and we decided to take

a trip to Shenzhen and

see some of the factories that we received the antenna and the knob from.

And our speaker supplier as well.

And just to kind of visit and see things first-hand.

We lucked out in that sense,

a lot of people have to visit a factory beforehand.

It's a good practice to do that.

And so for us it happened on the tail-end to see if we

wanted to scale with those factories later on.

And do you have documentation for that we could share with?

Yeah we do actually. I wrote a lot about that experience.

My partner Spencer wrote a lot about that experience as well.

So we'll include the links to that with this video then.

Yeah. Totally.

Is there anything else you would share with readers who are thinking of doing

a similar kind of project?

Yeah. You know as I said,

we really I think lucked out,

we built in healthy margins for the product.

We thought a lot about what this was going to cost to make and the end.

We made some errors there,

it probably cost more in the end,

what we were originally bench-marking but building in that margin.

And, I think really knowing where we were going to land.

Electronics, obviously have the benefit of scaling and you got

these price breaks as you're scaling but

knowing where you're going to land at each of these thresholds, is super important.

So for us we landed in a tricky area where we were big

enough to gain some price breaks but

not big enough to really hand this off to a full contract manufacturer.

That sort of thing we couldn't afford.

So I think, my piece of advice would be,

one, really understand what's your cost,

what's your break-even margin is.

And two, have a sense of the various scenarios of sort of over-funding and

where you would land and what your production model might look like.

That's from the manufacturing side and then

certainly having a sense of how you're going to promote the campaign after you launch.

Not just throwing it up there and crossing your fingers.

Great. Thank you so much. This is terrific.

Yeah, yeah. Totally welcome.

Really appreciate it.

Definitely.

Interview with Zach Dunham

Crowdfunding

Rencontrer les enseignants