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Thursday, March 21, 2013

Lessons Learned, from a maker entrepreneur who made the Pianocade

I like this story, for the lessons learned. Hopefully, this will save the rest of us, some trouble...

Don

Up, not North - Pianocade post-mortem: lessons learned starting a maker business

Pianocade post-mortem: lessons learned starting a maker business

March 6th, 2013

Six months ago I launched my first commercial project: the Pianocade synthesizer. Several months behind schedule and significantly above budget, I’ve finally managed to ship all the preorders. Needless to say, things did not go as planned.

If you’d asked me a few weeks ago whether I would ever do this again, I’d have laughed (and then maybe cried a little). But as I finished off the last few units, I started thinking about how much I’d learned from the experience. I was surprised to find myself getting excited about giving it another try and seeing if I could make things run more smoothly. I’ve even, heaven help me, started designing a completely new product!

In the meantime, I hope others can also benefit from some lessons I learned while turning my hobby into a business (or at least have a laugh at my expense).

The problem is supply, not demand

Though in hindsight it seems hopelessly naïve, I thought that taking preorders was the perfect business model: it removes the need for any sort of external investment, while simultaneously demonstrating that demand exists for your product at your price point. My faith in preorders reflected a belief that selling things would be the hard part of starting a business, but in my experience that wasn’t the case: selling was easy, it was actually making things that was hard.

Murphy was right

Read More...
http://upnotnorth.net/2013/03/06/pianocade-post-mortem-lessons-learned-starting-a-maker-business/

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