Very interesting. You should give more details about your limiting factors for some of those questions though. Does it significantly increase your cost to have more colors, more pattern options?
Right now the main limiting factor is just the price of buying the whole array of chemicals needed to do this in bulk. It's around $500 to get the stripper, de-smut, de-grease, de-mist, sealant, and other random chemicals to make the highest quality parts I can. The nice thing is it isn't a super recurring cost as I can re-use a lot of the baths I make.
Also, each keyboard takes around a couple hours to anodize, plus another hour of prep, dyeing, sealing, and finally laser etching a nice small logo or custom message, and that time keeps the group-buys small. I want to be able to at least break even on the first group-buy, but I don't want to take on more orders than I can handle so I'll have to work out the price from what I think I can handle.
Adding extra colors isn't a huge deal, and for 2 gallons it's like $10-$20 for a dye. The downside is that I can easily use the same dye for 10 keyboards without needing to replenish, but if everyone wants their own color I will have to charge extra for non-standard colors that will need to be special ordered. More pattern options is just a matter of myself learning how to do new patterns. A splotchy/fade pattern isn't too difficult to produce, but more complex things require much more creativity. To get a hard edge requires masking, which in my opinion looks pretty tacky, so I probably won't do stuff like that. I'm really curious to see if a laser can fully remove an anodize layer that can be re-grown, which would enable me to do a base, laser etch away areas in complex patterns, then create a second layer that way. I'll just have to mess around.
Another issue is that I'm going to be incredibly busy until november, then busy again in december, so finding time to do the groupbuy will be difficult. Worst case is I push it back to January, but I'd like to do a run in November first.
Thanks for the interest everyone. I didn't think this would be as popular as it is, and I've already got 43 responses saying "yes"!