BeagleBoard.org community using “group buys” to enable more cape designs
Crowd funding is all the rage and with good reason. Starting up a new business venture means taking risk. If you can clearly articulate the value of what your business will create, others will be willing to share in that risk. Sometimes you share the risk with a bank in the form of a loan or a venture capitalist in the form of equity in your business. With tools like Kickstarter, you can spread the risk out far and wide by promising some of the first fruits of your venture. What if, however, you don’t want to market your idea to hundreds of thousands of consumers and stress about keeping them happy. What if, instead, you simply are a member of a community that wants to share something cool, wants to get your hands on that something cool without wasting weeks to build PCBs and hand assemble them yourselves, wants to not spend a fortune buying parts in low volume and can’t bother making another one of those d*** Kickstarter videos?
CircuitHub group buy campaigns are here to rescue the day. Upload your prototype-validated design to CircuitHub, match the BOM to the parts in their inventory or the most affordable functional equivalents, check out the pricing at various volumes and engage with them on how many people need to join the group buy to get it to a reasonable cost. You’ll need to tweak how much money you intend to collect for your effort in validating and supporting the design as well. Then, share the campaign page with your community and enable them to affordably get some of these cape designs in their hands!
Below is the post I recently made on the BeagleBoard.org blog announcing the first of what hopes to be many campaigns bringing cape designs out of the Github bit-bin and into your hands:
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