as someone who has done a (much less ambitious and smaller) project like this with a group buy I can’t imagine what a nightmare it would be for the project to be picked up and promoted by a huge tech blog in the planning stage
Here was my experience:
Post my project Like 125 posts of questions, people saying “oh that’s cool”, “that’s dumb, why didn’t you do it like this you stupid idiot”, etc Open form for interest in group buy 200ish people apply Get quote from mfr based on rate Send price out
About 20 people reply “go for it”, about 20 reply “sorry I can’t afford that”, about 10 reply “that’s fucking ridiculous you thief” (I am literally only charging them cost plus less than $10 to cover my unit to help offset prototyping costs), and 150 ghost
After waiting a week or so I have to get a new quote because now the run will be 20 units, 1/10th the volume, so we lose bulk discount. Price goes up considerably. I email/post to let everyone know what’s up, they’re basically all mad, several more drop out, I get an email telling me to kill myself and refund their money immediately (I do refund their money but I stay alive). The thread now has a person who is posting often about how I’m a cheat who is stealing everyone’s money
I finally can order and do. I send out confirmation and let everyone know units are ordered. I post in the thread and that guy says I’m lying. Manufacturing boards takes a bit of time. The guy in the thread posts that jlcpcb can manufacture a board in 24 hours but doesn’t get queues, or that they don’t stock literally every single part in the world and sometimes you have to ship them parts, we didn’t do this priority because it’s a vanity project and we’re doing it cheap, etc. my mental health is worsening and I get emails from people who have been nice that are clearly getting impatient, and I have to explain that it’s coming from china and stuff from china can take a while
It finally shows up, I test them, and I ship them out with insured tracking numbers, thankfully they all arrive, and then the tone of the thread quickly changes to how great I am. People immediately post about how cool the thing I made is, which raises my ego quite a bit. However it is dashed quickly by people asking for a second group buy because they couldn’t get in on the first. I am frustrated because I can see that some of these people are ones who absolutely did get in on the first. I decline to do another and post the plans on github, deciding that I don’t have the chutzpah to monetize it
My project was dumb niche nerd shit. I mean, this is too, but this is way more high level than what I did. And a google form posted on Tom’s hardware? My dude is gonna get hundreds, if not thousands of replies. Some of those are gonna be in different languages. I weep for them.
That is how I imagined it to be. I’m sorry you went through that nightmare
That sounds like a horrible experience. Sorry about that.
Although I am honestly not too surprised that it can play out in this way. Managing group buys for ransoms does not sound appealing.
It was a relatively minor project too, like under $75. People get angry fast over relatively low amounts of money. I get that’s not nothing and kind of a lot to a lot of people but I had spent at least 3x that prototyping it so I was not really sympathetic, given I barely any profit at all (I made a $100 profit on the group buy given how I priced it but this mainly got me my unit for free plus about $20-30 extra, which didn’t even begin to offset prototyping costs)
If I ever do it again I will do it with full transparency. I don’t know if that will work any better but I will say look, this is what I spent making this thing both in raw dollars and hours, I would appreciate some return on that, and then see what happens. I’m sure I’ll be disappointed
I love this project. you could do this with a lot of devices, which are physically totally fine but the CPU part is lacking nowadays. the “Eee PC” line comes to mind.
