https://kevinlynagh.com/notes/pricing-niche-products/ - currently #1 article on HackerNews
Riot I'm curious as to your input on this article - seems to be the reason you went with a vickery, and I'm curious if this will be affecting your keyboards going forward - more expensive/exclusive/etc.
I've been friends with Kevin for quite a while and it was indeed a conversation with him that led us towards the Vickrey auction. However, Kevin's comments in the article represent an outsider's perspective on the market using us as an example -- they aren't some kind of roadmap that we intend to follow. Our goal isn't to increase expense and exclusivity, but quite the opposite. If you look at our release quantities just this year (the only year Keycult has been seriously operating as a business), you'll see that, despite what some folks like to claim, we're quickly scaling up quickly:
January - No. 1/60 & No. 1/65 - 40 kits total (20 of each)
April - No. 2 - 20 kits total
June - No. 1 Rev. 1 TKL - 80 kits total (10 sold through Vickrey)
July - No. 2 Rev. 1 TKL Preorder - 75 preorder spots, 75 additional kits made, 150 kits total (10 planned to be sold through a Vickrey auction after preorders are delivered)
Our next release is planned to be at least as large or larger than the last. We're scaling as quickly as we feel is responsible given our means. While that might piss some people off, it's allowed us to grow while maintaining quality and working out kinks one bit at a time, instead of taking on some massive preorder that we might not know how to handle.
While we're growing, however, it's clear that supply is not equaling demand. I expect that in the future Vickrey auctions will no longer make sense for us as we get closer to having enough kits to meet demand for a particular release. At that point, we'll stop running them. In the meantime, we're not going to turn away money from people who would rather support our growth directly instead of having to buy the same item on the aftermarket. We'll continue pricing our kits in a way that we think is financially sustainable for Keycult as a business, and any additional money made from Vickrey auctions will allow us to scale and grow faster than we may have planned.