So this is the biggest week of my career so far, today Thursday 21st November we launched the Robox project onto Kick-starter in an effort to get the backing of our end users to support the project through to completion.
A great start so far with over £25,000 in the first hours of the campaign. Thank you all already, please tell everyone you know that you have helped to fund this project so we can keep this rolling.
I’m guessing that some people will ask “why do CEL need the support of customers to finish the project?” This is simple to answer; we’ve spent the last 18 months developing the project and all the IP around it. This development has been and continues to be expensive. Until this point we’ve been able to draw on the income from CEL’s other products but this has been draining and is starting to affect the business as a whole. So it’s time to see if all our hard work has been well invested and release some product to the public. There are two more reason that kick-starter is a good idea, first is that we get the product into the hands of the people that matter, the end users and early adopters that will help us, through their feed back, to make the product the best it can be. The final reason is the simplest straight up advertising, marketing what ever you want to call it, if we don’t have a good voice to tell people about what we’ve been doing then the whole project will fall on its face.
I have no idea how successful this kick-starter campaign will be but I have great hopes. CEL has never spent a penny on marketing or PR before but this time we are going all out, through experience we know it’s not enough to design and make great products, you really need to make sure your audience know about them. We’ve only done this by attending trade shows and giving samples away for testing, don’t get me wrong it’s worked well enough till now but after so much time and money has been invested in Robox we really need to see a return on our investment so it seems it’s a case of ‘speculate to accumulate’.
If I’m honest, and this statement might leave me with egg on my face, I’m quietly confident, the guys in the office have really put their hearts and souls into the project and it shows, we’ve done endless research and we will have the most comprehensive micro manufacturing solution on the market at day of launch. So unless 3D printer fatigue has set in, the right people don’t hear about it or some one makes a better product and a multitude of other reasons, Robox will be a success.
If you reading this post I ask for your help to let us reach our goal, you may or may not be interested on supporting us on Kick-starter but the video is worth a watch, please can you send this link to your friends so they can then share it again. If the campaign reaches enough screens we will reach the percentage of those people who are as excited about 3D printing and micro manufacturing thing as we are. Thanks in advance!