I was wondering if we could have a place to preview potential community creations. Or is there already an appropriate place? I’d like to produce a few things, but have no way to judge potential demand. The difference in unit cost between making 10 units and 100 units can be quite significant, but so is the total cost. I’d hate to spend $1000 on 100 units no one wants, but I’d also hate to make a popular module cost $20 because I produce them 10 at a time and end up hitting the $1000 mark after only 50 units. I view everyone’s creations as gifts to the community, not as traditional consumer products, and so it’s in everyone’s interest to lower costs, making it easier to bring new creations to the community.
tindie, with a post here to tell us you want us to buy them?
Just post about them here.
It would be an interesting experiment to see if Kickstarter would allow a module to be offered with a low ($500) target. It would be an interesting gauge to get a real feel for the size & demand of the Gadgeteer community.
I think Kickstarter could be an excellent way to make more people aware of the Gadgeteer concept. But it should be something that shows of how cool the Gadgeteer concept really is. With a video… like that one about the blood oxygen meter or something. I think a lot of people would convert to Gadgeteer once they know about it. I take myself as an example… I was not even aware of Gadgeteer until quite recently. And when I told a number of my colleagues about it… none of them knew about it either. What sold me was a number of things… C#, debugging, open source h/w and s/w, many useful modules, good documentation and an organised GHI website.
-1 for kickstarter.
This request started to try to find a way o gauge interest for a module. My feeling is that this is before I’d want a kickstarter campaign to be launched. If there’s only 100 people here who buy every module ever made (not looking at anyone, Duke 
) then your audience isn’t much larger than 100 - and while I’ve not personally looked into the overall costs involved, I think the overhead in running a $10 KS campaign vs $20 somewhere else really doesn’t give value for effort (and bucks).
Now that is NOT saying anything about using KS as a medium to get mind share. I couldn’t agree more there - they are now a great source of “innovation” knowledge so getting a project in their list would be great… I just don’t think Module X is going to be the thing that does it.
Personally I did the same as Gus said - ask here, and use that input as an indication of how interesting your idea was for a constrained audience. But something more formal like Tindie is not a bad compromise, particularly if you have a large outlay in parts and incidentals for your larger number of modules you need to make.
@ Brett - Interesting, i hadnt seen tindie before… It looks like a good place to also sell modules and boards etc.
[quote=“Brett”]
-1 for kickstarter.
This request started to try to find a way o gauge interest for a module. My feeling is that this is before I’d want a kickstarter campaign to be launched. If there’s only 100 people here who buy every module ever made (not looking at anyone, Duke ) then your audience isn’t much larger than 100 - and while I’ve not personally looked into the overall costs involved, I think the overhead in running a $10 KS campaign vs $20 somewhere else really doesn’t give value for effort (and bucks). [/quote]
That’s precisely why I suggested it would be an interesting experiment. It feels like there’s really just a small group of us that spend a substantial amount of time on the forum every day and the launch of a new community product probably gets overlooked by 95% of the total community. I’m wondering if you could actually generate more of an audience and get the benefit of pre-orders with Kickstarter.