[luke_s]

As somebody who runs a small non-software related online business, selling products, my first question is - why in the world do you need funding?

Just start a website selling the stands and see how many orders you get! You can obviously build a few with your existing crappy tools. Rather than going through all the trouble and distraction of raising money, when you are not even sure if there is much of a market there - just start selling and find out! You will soon know if this is something worth perusing, and you can use the income generated to buy better tools and scale up the business.

In the unlikely event that you start to become flooded with orders you can either create some kind of waiting list people can add their e-mail addresses to, or just increase your prices until you have a level of demand you can deal with.

To pull some advice from the software related start-up work, If you are not embarrassed by version 1, then you have waited to long to release.

[brentmc79]

Essentially that's what I'm doing. If people make a donation, then I send them a product. I could continue to build them with my existing crappy tools, but with more appropriate tools I can be more efficient and maintain a more consistent, quality end product. It'd be different if I were asking for donations and promising nothing in return. In the end I think it all works out the same.

Just out of curiosity, what's you non-software online business?

[fragmede]

> If people make a donation, then I send them a product.

I've seen that else where, and it really peeves me. Why can't you just say you're selling your product online? What is it about calling it donation? (Other than Paypay being really picky about it.) If it's a donation, then it's a donation. If I give you money, and you give me a product, that's called buying and selling.

[Kliment]

Paypal being picky is a real issue though. This kickstarter-style compensated donation does seem to get around that, but I expect it's a loophole that will soon be closed. Then again, I don't know of any other setup for doing a pay-what-you-like model with Paypal.

[luke_s]

Well, as others have pointed out, there is a difference between 'make a donation and we will send you something' to 'we are selling laptop stands - click here to buy now!'. There is no reason you cant just go straight for the latter.

Thanks for asking about my business. I sell tools for grafting trees via http://www.grafting-tool.com/ . It’s a very small business, that I setup in my free time - the website sits there and takes orders, and every week I spend an hour or so posting tools and answering e-mails.

At the moment I'm actually kind of stuck at a local maximum, of 1 or 2 orders a week. There are a million things I could do to improve the business, but with so few customers it’s hard to know what is actually making a difference. It’s impossible to do things like A/B testing to figure out what is working and what is not. Case in point - I tried cutting my prices in half, and the number of orders actually seemed to drop! However it’s impossible to know if I was just having a bad week, or it actually made a difference.