[TaylorAlexander]

In 2013 I raised $150k on kickstarter, went through development hell and extreme burnout, borrowed an extra $80k from friends, family, and banks, went through more development hell and more burnout, and still failed.

This kind of situation is burned in to my psyche. [1]

One thing I learned is how one might bootstrap hardware on the cheap properly. You can’t launch until your product is perfect and you are actually ready to scale and you have to be willing to charge the right amount on your kickstarter.

So you have to know what you are doing, but I believe a cheap bootstrapped hardware product can be built and launched pre-funding and lead to success. Of course it’s difficult but we all know hardware is hard.

There’s a lot of creative people out there who can’t afford $2000 prototype batches and I want to see what they’re building. The point is, don’t panic-launch early. That’s an excellent way to fail in a very painful way. But that’s orthogonal to how much budget you have. Even a well funded project can launch too soon.

[1] http://www.tlalexander.com/business/