Good summary. Guess there are two ways to look at it. I hope they make it so I can buy one.

Gonna pop in here…I had to respond to this one cuz out of all the posts I see on the internet, you actually have most of it sorta right.

It’s not a numbers game like you’re thinking, I could have made the goal 1/2 that and still shipped it, the money it cost to develop it is already spent. I didn’t throw $50k at manufacturing hundreds cuz that was not the intent. Crowd Supply was mostly a tool to gauge interest, the funding goal is basically arbitrary in this case. It had quite a few subscribers before it launched so that number was just a guess.

Realistically, I just made the thing to make it…I was on a modding kick and what fun is it if you can’t be the first one to do something? People were asking about it, I already have a small business focusing on other things but I have other gaming stuff I’ve designed that only wound up in my own stuff so I figured this one might be worth putting out there. The original intent was just to hustle it in enthusiast circles like a mixtape. It wasn’t necessary for it to be a massive hit. Besides that, I’m not a big name in the modding scene and the Youtubers I reached out to ignored it. It’s doing OK considering I’m the only one who shilled it publicly.

As for CE…yeah you pretty much got it right. Anyone who “self certifies” an EMC directive for CE without like $20k in test equipment is just BS’ing it unless it’s all low speed stuff. Labs are very expensive. I was never really trying to go after the whole world with it off the jump but I get emails about CE every day, then I get comments like this on my Youtube videos:

Look how happy that guy is. Some people really want the thing. It makes me feel bad to turn people down about the CE thing so I went back and haggled the lab and it worked out, now it will be CE marked. I don’t even have to make all my money back on the lab testing, that guy’s gonna get one…hopefully he’ll say nice things about it and we’re all happy.

Down the road, maybe there’s an install service for people who just don’t want to do it themselves, maybe we’ll throw some extra RAM in there while we’re at it. The thing didn’t have to do big numbers, it just had to make sense…it already makes sense. Plus I’ve developed tools for this, my software buddy has cut his teeth on it, it opens doors to other things as long as they seem to make sense.