Having been building a small business for the last couple of years including running multiple successful kickstarters and having seen a number of people hit some fairly serious production problems I wanted to take a moment to comment on the GOAT Dice kickstarter and some pretty big problems that I forsee. To be clear I have previously reviewed a similar liquid filled d20 which was very cool and I have no reason to suspect anything bad about the person running the kickstarter but I see some big problems ahead.
For those that don't know the GOAT Dice Kickstarter has raised $150,000 on its first day. These are handmade dice which the creator claims (and I have no reason to doubt) take 4 days each to produce. Obviously the creator can work on multiple dice at the same time and they very transparently say they can make 300 dice working fulltime for a month. The simple problem is that they have already sold 6000 dice which is awesome until you realize that under his published numbers he is going to be working for 20 months to produce that many dice by hand and he has 29 days to go. On top of this I fear that as this person has never run a kickstarter before they are vastly underestimating the difficulties of managing a kickstarter and a growing business. I certainly did my first time around and I'm pretty much positive most people do.
Really I think the blame here lies with kickstarter. They should be doing a lot more to provide support to first time users and encourage people to start small. I truly hope I'm wrong and the creator is able to smash their target delivery dates but in all honesty I see nothing but problems ahead.
John
0 comments