Why was crowdsourcing ruled to be too costly up front? AFAIK, indiegogo would run the campaign and if it was successful, they would take their 4% cut and release the money to the organizers who could then make the purchases for everything in bulk and get those balls rolling.
We get 30-60 days to collect money and target a completed product/kit 2-4 months down the road from that. It seems like the optimal model for getting as much money up front to order at higher qty. It also creates a sense of legitimacy to mitigate people's aversion to handing over a few hundo to a GH/DT user before we have everything together. This legitimacy would also be much more attractive to people outside of this community, leading to higher qty.
Once that chunk of money is available, we can start placing orders for the PCBs, electronics, and/or switches and ship them out as kits earlier while the case designs and keycaps get sorted out. So it would benefit people like me, who are card-carrying members of PCBNAO.
This is definitely more work than a simple group buy would be. But the scope of the project and the costs involved might require something more than simple group buy organization.
Few months ago when kickstarter was initially proposed. At that time the idea went nowhere and was shot down.
I'm not going to dredge it up because...well this thread is 31 pages long and the DT thread is 22. 53 pages of searching ain't worth it. Just note this issue has been discussed before, and while what happens may have changed between then and now, I won't hold my breath.
We don't know what type of quantity we are dealing with.
We still don't have a case. Dealbreaker.
Switches won't be part of the buy, neither will keycaps. This is really, really firm.
It's been stated over and over there won't be a buy before the case is done. I don't see how this is going to alleviate such concern in the short term, if we still have to wait for everyone to submit payment, only to receive their goods piecemeal. I don't like it personally, and I would rather not have my money tied up for an extra 3-4 weeks while some others get PCBs earlier because that's all they want. I understand that people really want to get their hands on these things right now, but in the best interests of everyone who wants something I firmly believe we should wait for a final case design that can be mass produced. Once we have the R&D done I'm all ears on how to streamline the ordering and distribution process.
One thing to consider is this board is already expensive. 15% on top of a $200-$300 board really isn't cheap, since that won't include caps or switches. I'm still concerned about the IP related to these designs, we don't know what license everything will be covered under.
Cheers,
P.S.
Found Dox's original post from last December:
Have you thought about broadening the audience a bit? Throw it on Kickstarter and get 100 people to pay $300. It couldn't hurt.
I thought about it but with my current job, I don't have the time to manage something like this.
P.P.S.
I have mispoke, and "costly" was incorrect of me. I will remand that, and instead would rather say that the issue was previously discussed hella long time ago (longer than I thought actually), no idea if Dox's situation has changed.