Dear Owners, Supporters and Secret Admirers of Bartendro,
Thank you so much for sharing your excitement about cocktail robots with us these past nine months. As you know, our Kickstarter campaign was quite successful and we’ve had a ton of fun building, learning and drink testing for you. In fact, we’d love to keep going and make more drink bots and components available for more people.
We have a lot of ideas and improvements planned, and would also like to incorporate your feedback into future Bartendro models. We've already added things like an
“I’m feeling lucky button” that makes random drinks, designed an awesome
adjustable drip tray / cup holder, and even figured out soda dispensing for bars (this doesn't work with 2-liter bottles quite yet, but that will follow).
In order for us to keep going, we need to know if there are enough of you out there that want more hardware. So, we’re going to find out by using Kickstarter’s method. We've set a goal for ourselves that we need to reach by January 1st. If we have enough pre-orders to meet our goal, we’ll be elated and will continue making drink bots for the world! If on the other-hand we don’t meet our goal, then we might just have to go back to our day jobs and let the open source community take over the project.
You might notice that our prices are higher than what we were previously asking on Kickstarter. Unfortunately, we learned the hard way what the real costs are of running a business. We broke even on Kickstarter, but now we are in the position that we need to ask for money again so that we can bulk buy components. Hopefully, by having our products properly priced this time we can sustain our business.
While just having your own personal Bartendro at home is a blast, some of our backers have been using their bots at events and earning a pretty penny. One Kickstarter backer even bought a car with the earnings he made off of operating a Bartendro for three weeks! So, do you have some entrepreneurial spirit in you? Could you put a Bartendro to use making cocktails at events? Are you interested in being a distributor or re-seller? We have distributor pricing and volume discounts available. Send us an email if you are interested in large quantities.
If you're interested in getting a Bartendro of your own, help us stay in the game and
pre-order now! If we meet our goal by January 1st we will charge a 50% deposit in the first week of January and immediately get to work buying and building parts. We’ll have new bots to you by the beginning of April. For those of you who already have a bot, you can help us by spreading the word to your friends, family, and co-workers. We'll keep you posted every few days on our progress, and no one will get charged a cent unless we reach our goal.
Thanks for your support!
Sincerely,
Pierre, Garran, Rob & Erin
So, Kickstarter is over. How did it go? What's next? Would you do it again? What did you learn? These are some of the questions our backers, family and friends have been asking us over the last few months. Hopefully, this blog post will satisfy everyone’s curiosity and give everyone more insight into our process and a glimpse into Party Robotics’ future.
Going through the Kickstarter process
We began preparing for the Kickstarter campaign about a month before we launched. In retrospect, two or three months would have been better.
We started with more traditional marketing the week before launch by putting flyers up in TechShops, maker/hacker spaces and universities.
We talked to other Kickstarters, getting a feel for what to expect. Everyone we spoke with was excited to share their experiences.
We thought it was important to launch our Kickstarter with a bang and pushed the go button the same night Bartendro appeared at BarBot in San Francisco. Over the course of the Kickstarter we brought Bartendro to several other events and trade shows.
Right after launching, we contacted bloggers that had written about similar products and introduced them to Bartendro. The most traction came after bloggers with CNET, Yahoo and Endadget wrote posts about us a couple days into the campaign.
There was a large chunk of time spent answering emails and slightly tweaking the Kickstarter rewards, especially during the first week after launching.
After we funded it took several days to receive the funds. Kickstarter took 5%, Amazon 3.5%.
Out of 479 backers, 7 were dropped because Amazon couldn't process their payment.
People discovered our project a day or two or three after the campaign was over and wanted to back us. If we did another campaign we would plan ahead for this.
Make more extras than you think you'll need!
We made about 5% extras, but are now wishing we had made more like 25% to compensate for quality issues and late backers.
Don’t forget about taxes
We will be paying sales tax for all the backers in our state. We should have made an estimate of how many would back us in California in order to include that cost in our budget.
In order to buy goods without paying tax we had to get a seller’s permit/resale certificate. We will pay ‘use tax’ for any goods that aren’t sold.
Design - Be explicit in drawings!!
The power supplies from China initially arrived with the wrong connector even though the part number was specified correctly. Be very careful when emailing foreign vendors, miscommunication can happen easily.
Several days were wasted because we forgot to specify the color 'black' on our silkscreen drawings.
We got quotes from several vendors and used mfg.com to compare.
It’s important to finish designing all the parts as early as possible. Some design changes may affect other parts. Since we were making most of the parts ourselves, we were able to catch the issues and adapt. This would have been much harder if we had contracted the parts out.
We considered using stickers for branding/model numbers etc, but silkscreening came out better and looks very professional when done correctly. Laser engraving looks even better, but costs almost three times as much.
Vendors were slower than expected. Anticipate adding at least 20% more time to any date that you are promised for goods. Unexpected delays and shipping time are rarely incorporated into their time estimates.
Most international vendors required a wire transfer in their currency. Sometimes, a check could be written to them to avoid those expensive wire transfer fees. This can take a few extra days, but may be worth it.
The manuals took more time and effort than we expected. We had users test our manual by going through the instructions. No matter how simple we thought it was, some people still had no idea what we were talking about. We found the addition of pictures and diagrams to be much better than words alone.
Manufacturing
Using an unproven powder coating was risky. We chose the color after looking at a small paint chip at the powder coating shop. While the color covered the small sample pieces just fine, larger pieces showed the material underneath. The painters had to lay heavy coats to mask the problem. The coating also sometimes got into the threads of the hardware and we had to run a tap through the clogged holes.
We purchased a ton of plastic bins of various sizes which was key to making assembly and packaging run smoothly.
Friends were bribed to help with pizza and beer. Just had to make sure that all free labor was double checked for errors.
To improve quality and reduce errors, it's was a good idea to have the next person in line check the previous person’s work.
We had to account for scrapping poor quality parts, including allowing time to return and receive new parts.
Inspecting all parts as soon as they were received was a must! Just because the parts sitting on top look good, doesn't mean the rest do. If the first time you see a bad part is when you need it, it's too late!
When shipping, try and avoid getting in and out of the box more than once. Double checking things we already packed was time consuming.
When making hundreds or thousands of something, seconds count. Optimize early on is highly encouraged.
Machining parts was time consuming and expensive. In the future we will consider more injection molding.
Large minimum order quantities were hard to reach even with Kickstarter backers.
It is going to be alright.
From start to finish, the Kickstarter took a huge amount of time. Everyone working on the project had to devote the time and resources to making it work. We also made sure to have people we could poke for extra help when we were stuck.
Having patience and keeping a cool, calm head was a lifesaver. Fortunately, all our Kickstarter backers were patient and knew that the process was time consuming. We tried our best not to promise hard dates unless we felt that we could meet them. We updated everyone as often as we could, changing dates only when it was absolutely necessary. People would prefer to wait and get a quality product than quickly receive a poorly finished or buggy product.
Shipping
International shipping from vendors was very expensive. It was often more cost effective to use sea freight and wait three weeks for delivery.
Cutting and folding cardboard pieces by hand was a pain and didn’t look great. We did that for the kits until we partnered with the packaging department at our local university. They were able to prototype things quickly and cut all the inserts we needed on their machines.
While USPS was the least expensive, it was not the best choice for international orders. We discovered that delivery cannot be guaranteed and once it leaves the US since the shipment is no longer tracked. We had to resend products because they never got to their destination after nearly 2 months. DHL cost about 50% more on average, but was preferable .
We have shipped to 23 countries so far: Argentina, Australia, Belgium, Canada, Chile, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, India, Italy, Mexico, Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Portugal, Russia, Singapore, Slovenia, South Africa, Sweden, Switzerland, United Kingdom.
Customs
Backers need to pay duties, customs and taxes depending on their country. This can sometimes up to 30% of the purchase cost. We had to include an invoice for every international shipment so that the proper fees could be assessed and customs could properly process the package. If an invoice isn’t included the package will likely be stuck in customs.
If we could do it over we would…
Give ourselves more time to properly bring up a product line instead of trying to do everything ourselves.
Get a bigger working space. Working in a small space meant we were constantly moving things around, boxing, unboxing, and doing things in several stages which made everything happen slower.
Think more about keeping the momentum going after Kickstarter rewards were delivered.
Have our website designed by a professional.
Now what?
For starters, a much needed vacation! Next week ALL of the Party Robotics staff will be ‘out of the office’ traveling internationally. While Erin and Rob go back to their day jobs afterwards, Garran and Pierre will have some other loose ends to tie up and will be back at the beginning of October. If you have any issues during the next few weeks, try posting a message on our forums or email Erin. We will do our best to respond to you as soon as we can, but it might take longer than it has in the past.
Sometime in October we will have a shopping cart on our site where you will be able to order replacement parts like tubing and other available items.
Also starting in October, we will begin experimenting and prototyping dispensing solutions for carbonated liquids.
We are opening up pre-orders for bots and hardware with a target delivery date of January 2014, possibly sooner.
We have been approached by several companies interested in partnering with us and are exploring those avenues.
We will continue to make improvements to the software and hardware, listening to the community for their feedback.
That's all for now. We will continue to keep you posted as we come up with cool new things! Thanks for joining us on this journey.
