The Naked Product Launch: 30 seconds to sell a robot:
Reality is a funny thing. We had finally settled on our reward tiers, target, etc, after much chewing of the non-animal-sourced fat. Then we went to enter them in the draft campaign at the funding platform, and it seems that the platform has its own ideas about which order they get displayed. This campaign is firstly about getting the CE-stamped consumer product to normal humans, and though we do have a bunch of developer goodies in the offer, we don't want them infiltrating themselves amongst the consumer rewards and confusing everyone. Rejig time.
We killed some of the nasty bugs perplexing us last time. However, it turns out that if you don't like them we have others (sorry Groucho). I'm pleased at least that most el Reg commentards thought that test harnesses and their ilk are a GoodThing(TM).
Unlike many product campaigns we actually had working hardware and software in a number of iterations (with a bearable number of bugs). Compare and contrast with the usual wish list and a largely blank sheet of paper. But a better mousetrap is not enough.
Rather more importantly we were beginning to worry that we did not have a strong enough mailing list to get the momentum needed to carry a Kickstarter campaign.
We invested a lot of effort and time and money to get to this point. So do we go ahead or do we hit pause? Is this the moment to bet the ranch and risk egg on face, to mix my metaphors thoroughly like salad...