DeltaMaker on Kickstarter

martinprice2004 Wrote:
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> What upsets me is how they are hijacking
> kickstarter. Both I and Johann developed our
> robots in a few months without external funding.
> The total cost must have been less than £400 in
> my case. I had no need to raise $150,000 before I
> got started.

They have already developed it, that's not what they are asking money for. Check out their Project Mission:

We will provide our backers with a 3D printer that runs faster, looks better, and is just more fun to watch. With the help of our Kickstarter supporters, we will put DeltaMakers on as many desktops, and inside as many classrooms, as we can. We will complete and deliver our Kickstarter project in a timely and transparent manner, maintaining an active dialogue with our backers throughout the process.

They are running the kickstarter to provide their backers with assembled, ready to run printers (200 or so of them in total). The design itself is almost completely finalized, according to them. So what they actually are kickstarting is their business to sell mass produced delta printers.

@ttsalo

Well at least this way no one can accuse them of asking people to take on much risk by investing in them, since the product is already baked :-P

@bobc
The point I was trying to make, which I clearly didn't convey well was as follows:-

There are 4 professional people in the organisation, who tell you they have lots of experience and a long career record. I read from this that they all have earned or are earning a decent wage.

To four people with that combined income, why are they asking for complete strangers to take all the risk in their venture.

It would be easy enough for them all to dip in their own pockets and completely fund the project for much less than they are asking for.

OK I said 150K not 107K, but the point is it seems an awful lot of money for 4 professionals to ask for, when they are giving away no equity and taking no risk for a company that anyone could start up in their own shed for much less.

I don't mind who asks for my money and who goes on kickstarter, but I will voice my opinion as you do when I think I smell a rat!

I just feel it would be nice if Kickstarter was used by people like students, or housewives who have a great original idea but insufficient funds to turn it into a reality, not professional engineers who won't put their own money up front or just want to get some cash in the bank before they place any orders. I also don't buy the "Testing the market" argument......Test it with your own money.

As stated before I can understand if they require funding for large expenses such as injection tooling etc. but as i can see there are no upfront expenses to this business, that's the beauty of rapid prototyping the parts. Even soft tooling for the limited number of parts wouldn't come to anywhere near this. They just want the cash so they can order in bulk and maximize their profits. As you can see by the price of the finished machines even fully assembled they are not passing these savings onto the customer.

If you look through Kickstarter they are by no means the only ones who are doing this.

By the way Kickstarter projects of this type need to display a working prototype....its in the Kickstarter rules.

Edited 4 time(s). Last edit at 01/31/2013 10:56AM by martinprice2004.

I believe they have found a risk free way of making money, and it makes good business sense for them to go this route. Not that I agree with it morally, but who wouldn't take this route if they had the option!

C'mon BobC, everyone's entitled to their opinion.

@martinprice2004: The real purpose of Kickstarter is less the funding of a project. The purpose is more market evaluation (how many are interested?) and more importantly, marketing/advertising. Given a Kickstarter project easily sells ten times more than an announcement here in the forum, one would be dumb to no use this opportunity.

Having all the money from start stacks on top of the above advantages.

---

Generation 7 Electronics	Teacup Firmware	RepRap DIY

waitaki Wrote:
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> C'mon BobC, everyone's entitled to their opinion.

Indeed, I was expressing mine.

martinprice2004 Wrote:
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> I just feel it would be nice if Kickstarter was
> used by people like students, or housewives who
> have a great original idea but insufficient funds
> to turn it into a reality,

I believe that Kickstarter can and does allow that. Deltamaker are not preventing anyone else raising funds, so where is the problem?

> They just want the cash so
> they can order in bulk and maximize their profits.

And what is wrong with that? In that respect they are no different to any other company. Apple Computer Inc (AAPL) springs to mind. Caveat emptor would seem to apply.

The way I see these Kickstarter projects is they are essentially group purchasing schemes. If you don't like them, don't pledge money, it's as simple as that. There is some risk attached, but then there is no 100% guarantee on delivery of any product you buy - just ask the customers of "World of Leather". I don't know what the history of KS is like with "failed" projects, and there have been some projects that have raised $millions and have yet to deliver. I know there are some projects which have decided to refund pledges becauuse they had to abandon the project. If a project disappears with $100,000s then there are going to be a lot of complaints, which might affect how KS do things, but I don't think it has happened yet.

There are some interesting technical aspects to the Deltamaker, which are worth discussing. All the other stuff about who copied who and the mechanism and morality of Kickstarter projects is really just noise.

Makerslide is nice, but a problem with these custom parts is that shipping outside country of origin can be a killer. I discovered that Makerslide is now available in Europe through [www.makerslideeurope.com]. As far as I can tell, there is nothing special about the Deltamaker that could not be reproduced in an open source design.

..

Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 02/04/2013 12:51AM by waitaki.

lincomatic Wrote:
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> Worse yet, they don't even credit Johann Rocholl
> for the design.. only his Marlin fork that
> supports it.
> Who needs a degree in software engineering to copy
> and download stuff written by others?
> Sheesh.

Johann has made a post on this subject : [groups.google.com]

Seems that he does not have a problem with the DeltaMaker.

Even though they can manifacture and sell as many parts as they want, if they used GPL content and ever distribute the files, they'd have to do it under the GPL aswel.

Not that this protects the OSHW person much. So far (the relatively few OSHW)people with/in companies just dare to trust that they wont get ripped off too much. And apparently often, well they're not so ripped off that they cant run the business. It also seems that OSHW companies have some similar things protecting plain coding open source. A lot of the value is in the community,(they may have your code but they dont know if your particular code is useful, and would need to learn it) or in services.(Github users arent going to move fast..)

But i really doubt this would work if 3dp manifacturing was really easy? For instance if there were a website that did the 3dp, for costumer and the designer got a (decent) cut of the income.(Actually there was at least one but lost the link atm) It would be trivial for a second user to re-upload the thing. It might be a pain to try get rid of all of them. I suppose maybe all the 'makers' could just subscribe especially, provably assigned to real names in order to make money from the uploaded designs. Getting banned in that case would be a pain in the ass.(But that doesnt cover the possibility of competing services)

I have been thinking about how to make such a website,(and successful) the relation to what exists now. I believe it would be useful also when home manifacturing doesnt take off. OSHW people can home manifacture/develop, and put stuff on those services. Even if it does take off, there is the matter of vitamins. Even if it does take off, it could end up at say 50% of homes, so half of the homes could still be using those 3dp services.

Obviously it is important that the successful services like that are benevolent..