- Limit: 10-15 units (10 is ideal, 15 is max capacity)
Please excuse my ignorance, but does this mean a maximum of 15 units will be produced in total? Gonna be lots of sad nerds out there if so. Probably me included haha.
Unfortunately, yes. There are two routes this can go down:
1) In-stock sale
2) Group buy
In the case of an in-stock sale, I'm only willing to front the cost of a maximum of 15 units plus various extras. In the case of a group buy, I need to set a very hard limit as to how many people will be able to participate -- this would be my first formal group buy and I refuse to overextend just so a few more people can get a board.
There's a common question that pops up in every IC thread that goes something like, "why aren't you producing as many boards as are ordered? why do you keep this game of artificial scarcity going?"
I might've touched on this in those threads where I found the opportunity, but since this is my design I'll address it immediately:
Let's say you design a keyboard that has 4 parts:
- Top
- Bottom
- Plate
- PCB
Let's say I get 20 of each part (5 extras for each to account for QC swaps) -- that's 80 separate pieces to inspect slowly and methodically. If something is
really messed up, parts will need to be sent back to the manufacturer (in China) to be reworked or redone altogether. I am not Massdrop, I am not zFrontier, I am not an established vendor. I'm one guy living in a relatively small apartment in New York City.
What I'm getting at is that I do not have the capacity to do more than 10-15 units of QC, packing, and shipping. I want to deliver on what I set out to deliver on with this interest check, and that does not involve pushing the goal posts back to constantly appease the community wants.