4.1 Kickstarter Going Strong
Happy Wednesday Everyone!
For those of you who are new here, welcome to the weekly update! By backing a Kickstarter project you are putting a lot of faith in us to be careful stewards of your money. We think that a key part of being careful stewards is communication every step along the way.
Every Wednesday we are going to keep you informed about what we are working on, how it’s going, ask for feedback, and generally share the process of building your hardware. By the time your hardware arrives at your door we want you to know where every piece of it came from.
This week’s update is a little short because we’re only three days in, but expect deep dives on things like scheduling around the CNY holiday and Christmas, videos of our molds being machined, photos of the bulk parts arriving and being packed, etc. At every step along the way we would love your feedback. Many of you are experts in different areas and if you see something that you think we could do better, let us know! We are always trying to learn and improve.
You can see a selection of our past updates here: https://www.maslowcnc.com/weekly-update
OK, let’s jump in!
Our Kickstarter is Fully Funded!
High Five!
Go check it out if you haven't already. Here is the link
We are beyond grateful for all the support and we were absolutely blown away when we were fully funded in 20 minutes! It might be a new record for us, but that makes sense because this is a slightly smaller-scale kickstarter than we have run in the past. Nevertheless, we want to extend our heartfelt thanks to all of you for supporting us through all these years!
We are very excited to get started on these updates. Since we’re confident that we will hit our goal we’ve already placed the orders for the new molds needed for the 4.1 updates. Hopefully getting an early start on production there will help us deliver on time.
The kickstarter will continue to run through December 10th, so please continue to spread the word! On that note, we were featured in a little article by Hackster.io! Check out the article here.
If you know of any other communities that might be interested in what we’re doing please share it with them! We know it seems like we’ve raised a lot of money already, but manufacturing things and doing R&D is expensive so we can use all the help we can get!
Firmware Update:
There is a lot of exciting development going on with the firmware this week, but the big news this week is that I bungled the release last week and built it without some of the changes and improvements. Of course the wonderful people in the forums caught my mistake quickly and we released a 0.85.1 update which fixed the issue. Just wanted to let those of you who updated immediately after the release last week know that there are more improvements to be had.
We are going to use part of this update to answer a few of the frequently asked questions we've been getting in response to the Kickstarter.
What's Up with Shipping Prices?
You may have noticed that the shipping prices for the Full Kits look a little different from our last campaign. They have gone up for some people(+19 for the US) and down for others(-20 for Everyone Else). This time, we are working with one of our partner manufacturers in China to pack and ship directly from the factory. We are going to continue to fulfill our replacement part orders from here in Seattle.
Why? Well many compounding factors.
First, we lost a big chunk of change due to the tariffs on importing goods from China to the US during our last kickstarter. No really, we got our butts kicked by those tariffs. They only apply to goods over a certain value, which is well above the $525 of our individual machines, so our US customers won’t be hit with them if we ship directly from China.
Second, we received feedback from many customers that their country has higher import duties on US goods rather than imports from China. By switching to shipping directly from China, hopefully our international customers will be able to save some money too.
Third, we will get significant time savings shipping this way. If you followed our last campaign, you remember hearing about how we gathered all the parts at our freight forwarder, waited on export paperwork, watched the ship cross the ocean, waited for our container to be unloaded and scanned, waited for customs forms, waited for the truck to drop off our container, ect. You get the picture. We don't have to do that if we pack the kits at the factory.
We expect that shipping times will be faster than before to Europe, Asia and Oceania. We were also able to negotiate special rates for the US where the majority of our customers are, so it should be about the same time frame as last time.
Hopefully this helps us to keep Maslow viable in the long run.
Unloading the shipping container from last year’s Kickstarter
Can You Add Stuff to My Reward?
We have received many inquiries about adding spare parts or bundling packages together for shipping. We want to address this because it's a totally valid thing to ask! We want people to know what’s going on behind the scenes.
One common request is to include orders of spare belts and spools in the kits. Unfortunately all of our spare parts are here in Seattle, so we can’t include spares with the kits. All of the updated parts will be available a-la-carte in our spare parts shop as soon as we have them in stock after the kickstarter kits ship. So if you want to do a mix and match that will be an option later, just after we ship the big batch. One of our core tenants is that the way to keep the cost down is to keep it simple, and it’s way easier to pack and ship a whole bunch of boxes all at once if they are all the same.
Another common request is to ask if we can bundle kits together or include additional upgrade kits in the same box. Our kits are right on the edge of a weight and size category for shipping cost and if we combine two or add an additional upgrade, the shipping cost will go waaay up. And we want to avoid that.
We will keep answering Kickstarter questions as they come up, but for now ON TO THE FUN PART!
Projects This Week
@md8n is continuing to push his ocean plastic chair design forward and coming up with some pretty interesting fixes to reinforce the material. He’s cut 29 of the chair backs so far! You can read about it here.
@Jacob designed a plywood holder that is 3D printable with an option to reinforce it with threaded rod! While not strictly a project made with the Maslow, It certainly on our list of things to make
Last Week’s Project of the Week Winner is @Earl with the Black Knight Sword! Congratulations!
As always, thanks for your support!
-Bar and Anna
